In His Own Words: Jeffrey Bilhuber

In His Own Words: Jeffrey Bilhuber


I love luxury. Who doesn't? It's part of human nature. Luxury brings us beauty and pleasure. Luxury pushes us to work, to strive continually for improvement and the many gratifications that follow.

Decorators are great cultural barometers. We express the moods and attitudes of an era and place through the materials of daily life: furnishings, fabrics, floor coverings, color palettes, lighting, objects, and art. However indulgent, austere, sublime, grand, or modest the collective consciousness and times may be, the rooms we decorate and inhabit should live and breathe as we do now, with the comforts, pleasures, conveniences, and habits of our particular cultural context. Enjoying the very best of the past, and optimistically looking toward the future.



Home is never more important than in times of uncertainty and change. When it looks good, when it's full of comforts physical, emotional, and visual, it gives us confidence, pleasure, and security. It is from here that we inevitably find hope for our future and admiration of our past.

Surprise, discovery, and delight can animate our days even when life gets tough. I have a dear friend, a former New Yorker, who misses the city terribly. When she visited last fall she gathered up a huge bundle of leaves from Central Park to bring back to Palm Beach. When she returned home, she carpeted her kitchen floor with them--and left them there until they were dust. That's indulgence, but not indulgence purely for indulgence's sake. It is luxury as a connecting force, of pleasure longed for and beauty missed. It is luxury, gratis and more joyous than almost anything we can buy. Décor's more permanent elements can tantalize similarly, reflecting an interest in a varied world of wonder, enchantment, and tales. The more we know, see, and appreciate (trials and tribulations included), the richer life becomes.

Americans are purposeful consumers. Architecture, decoration, and the fine arts are particularly seductive luxuries, as our forbears also realized. What greater example of the American capacity for growth and invention through acquisition and interpretation than Thomas Jefferson, who incorporated his experiences abroad seamlessly into his domestic life? What better exemplifies the American perspective of assimilation and inclusion than Monticello, a Palladian structure built on a Georgian form with French furniture and English decorative elements and vast cellars of imported wines?

Decorators play with history, personal and otherwise. We create rooms that marry our clients' memories to the present, and help them move forward into the future by establishing the stage and providing the framework and the foundations for family growth. Houses and their contents improve over time through doing what they are designed to do: their beauty deepens as they become useful.

For Americans, luxury begins with function. That's why we can view the development of the decorative arts as a trajectory of ever more rare or beautiful versions of useful objects, like the chandelier. During the day, the crystals capture light and transfer it around the room. In the evening, those same crystals amplify and intensify the act of illumination. Function comes first and last.



If a design element is unnecessary, irrelevant, or inappropriate, it's not worth it. That's why grace is a luxury. Grace is refinement. It comes from rigor, discipline, precision, and a special kind of economy. Think of a white room, where nuance and subtlety create serenity and intimacy. Luxury doesn't have to shout. Clean, enlightened, intelligent spaces--quiet in their variety and full of finesse--converse, softly.

The pleasure (and therefore the work) of decorating is frequently in the details. Details require invention. Specific and unique, the details that create the most delight may not be the most easily discernible--the use of hand-blown glass, say, instead of standard glazing. Details affect how you feel in a room, which is why some choices may be more important than other, more obvious indulgences.

Americans cherish our right to choose. What's democracy without it? Without the promise of options, where's the American dream? Decoration is simply choice (and the American dream) expressed at home. Luxury lies in limiting the thousands of available choices to the two or three best and most loved--with nothing wasted, nothing in excess. Perfection of its kind.

To paraphrase an old French adage: "If you have a dollar, spend fifty cents on bread and fifty cents for flowers." Yes, we must care for ourselves. Yes, we are responsible for our families. Yes, we all want more than basic necessities. How we achieve that is up to each of us, which is why choice is the greatest luxury of all. Opt for what you love most? Fill your life as full as possible? We all do that at whatever level we can afford. So spend your fifty cents on bread. But treat yourself to the fifty cents for flowers. Luxury is a necessity--the best possible choice for a life well-lived.