Houston Designer Wows at Kips Bay Show House — Nina Magon Fills a Bedroom With Sweet Dreams

Since its founding in New York in 1973, the highly regarded Kips Bay Decorator Show House has drawn interior design talents from across the country to create show-stopping rooms in remarkable mansions. So successful was the salute to the best of interior design and the fundraising for the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Clubs that the brand expanded to Palm Beach in 2017 and to Dallas last year.

The 2021 Palm Beach show house opened on Thursday with a Houston-based designer taking on one of the Mediterranean-style villa’s five bedrooms.

For the project Nina Magon, who heads her eponymous design firm, envisioned a story line embracing Milanese glamour and thus christened her room Camera da Letto Della Contessa or The Countess’ Bedroom. The designer “envisioned the young, fair-haired Italian Contessa as the image in the Horst photograph from Holden Luntz Gallery, retreating to her bedroom in her Italianate Palm Beach villa longing for her lost love.”

Magon explains that inspiration for the high-glam aesthetic were the robust ceilings and classical architectural details found in the Milanese villas designed by famed architect Gio Ponti. The Houston talent readily admits to a passion for Italian design.

“When approaching the design of the Contessa’s bedroom, I incorporated all of these classical elements and merged them into a modern and futuristic design with distinguished furniture pieces, to create the Nina Magon version of a Palm Beach Interior,” Magon notes.

Among notable design elements are the overhead light fixture, part chandelier and part sculpture; the custom designed bed frame; the pacha lounge chair; a white leather side table; and the Horst photograph that informs of the imagined contessa.

Magon’s purview includes furniture and wallpaper design, the latter of which is featured in the adjoining bathroom and on the ceiling of the Kips Bay bedroom. Her wallpaper collection is with Wall and Deco, considered one of Italy’s premier contemporary wallpaper companies.

The Kips Bay Decorator Show House , a Mediterranean style waterfront home in the South of Southern neighborhood of West Palm Beach, runs through May 9. The Kips Bay show house in Dallas is set for September and submissions are being taken from designers through May 15.