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" DOUGLAS BRENNER: The urban jungle! What was the impulse? STEVEN SCLAROFF: You get off the elevator and you&amp;#039;re, like, trapped in this abysmal vestibule. There&amp;#039;s barely enough room to greet someone. I think it&amp;#039;s great to plaster claustrophobic, windowless spaces with pattern. I love the offbeat context and the goofy theatricality of these enormous banana leaves. The combination of the scale and the subject is hilarious. There&amp;#039;s also the whole joke of having something so about the outdoors and nature in this hopelessly interior closet of a room. It&amp;#039;s pretty entertaining to enter a contemporary loft through all that foliage\u2014just add Guns N&amp;#039; Roses playing &amp;#039;Welcome to the Jungle.&amp;#039; When people hear &amp;#039;loft&amp;#039; or &amp;#039;open plan,&amp;#039; they often think it means living in a space that&amp;#039;s not as congenial to family life as a set of true rooms. They can&amp;#039;t picture it absorbing the clutter of everyday life. You do kind of see everything. There&amp;#039;s that loft style, where you have to curate yourself down to the 10 items that look good together. In reality, I don&amp;#039;t know how livable that is. But even with a normal floor plan you want to have everything in the house relate in a comfortable way. Here, there&amp;#039;s a mixture of traditional and modern. The modern stuff isn&amp;#039;t very hard-edged, because that&amp;#039;s not necessarily comfortable for a family. Sometimes I&amp;#039;ll refer to a design solution as the &amp;#039;dumb&amp;#039; one\u2014and I mean it&amp;#039;s the good one. Sometimes &amp;#039;boring&amp;#039; is a positive adjective. Of course, in the end I hope it&amp;#039;s not actually dumb or boring, but you don&amp;#039;t want it to be a challenge. You want to immediately love it. Boring, this isn&amp;#039;t. What makes so much of the furniture here fun and exciting is the way you&amp;#039;ve taken a very familiar shape, like the Louis-ish headboard in the master bedroom, but upholstered or trimmed it in a way that gives it a different shade of identity. I like those classic French headboards. Yes, there is something corny about them, but it&amp;#039;s all how you look at it. It&amp;#039;s not meant to be, like, some serious statement about 18th-century French design. This one was picked because the shape was particularly jaunty. So even though it&amp;#039;s a bit of a caricature of a real one, it doesn&amp;#039;t matter. It really suited the space. And because king-size headboards are so big, I prefer to upholster them, and to have something going on. This pattern helps break up the scale. The whole thing with beds is that they&amp;#039;re such giant elements, you want them to be interesting. In the more informal living area, you have this giant sofa bear-hug. Yeah, it totally is. That area is based on a &amp;#039;70s photo of an amazing sunken room that was in Italian Vogue. We were going to make it sunken. A real conversation pit. Without the pit. That living area wanted to be a more comfortable zone. And no one&amp;#039;s going to ever say no to a super-long, super-deep sofa. &amp;#039;Cause if you&amp;#039;ve got space, you&amp;#039;d have them, you know? And all that upholstery\u2014along with the curtains and the rug--are great acoustically. Sound really travels in a loft, and they help absorb it. That&amp;#039;s the reason we upholstered the nursery walls\u2014it became this little padded cell. In general, though, I think you shouldn&amp;#039;t go crazy in babies&amp;#039; rooms, because you&amp;#039;re really decorating for nobody. They don&amp;#039;t care. You could just put brown paper bags on a shelf. That, they get.  All these hits of bold color everywhere could have looked jarring. There&amp;#039;s a lot of color, but the background is very neutral, and the colors bridge from space to space. Those blocks of different colors in the two seating areas help define the space, but at the same time they&amp;#039;re related. To me, the combination of colors feels very classic. They&amp;#039;re happy colors, but not aggressive. The last thing you want is color that&amp;#039;s cartoonish or loud. I would like to think that this apartment won&amp;#039;t look dated, and I think color can have a lot to do with that. What inspired the plus-size mirrored wardrobe in the master bedroom? It was an afterthought\u2014there wasn&amp;#039;t enough closet space. My client, Beth Blake, who&amp;#039;s a fashion designer, showed me an image of a mirrored armoire. And it probably wouldn&amp;#039;t have been my first inclination to go exactly that way, style-wise, but I liked it. It&amp;#039;s a welcome hit of muted traditionalism. It kind of looks like its own freestanding dressing room. We agreed it was going to be hulking, but we didn&amp;#039;t want it to look like the attack armoire. Having the mirror framed and broken up in panels lightens its weight. There&amp;#039;s something over-the-top, inherently, about all-mirrored furniture. When people go on and on about &amp;#039;30s Hollywood glamour, I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;#039;Really?&amp;#039; In our time, it feels like something you&amp;#039;d see in a Miami drug lord&amp;#039;s house. Those kitchen stools are like something you&amp;#039;d see at Trader Vic&amp;#039;s. Yeah, they&amp;#039;re tiki stools. I just stumbled over those and thought they were really funny. They came with a bar, but you never want the whole ensemble. Of course...we do have that jungle wallpaper. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.housebeautiful.com/design-inspiration/home-makeovers/interviews/a767/interview-steven-sclaroff-0412/>