I am beside myself after taking this tour of Sheila Bridges Upstate NY home featured here in Elle Decor. This excerpt from the article speaks on her reason for creating space in Upstate NY.
In 2002, Sheila Bridges wrote her first book, Furnishing Forward: A Practical Guide to Furnishing for a Lifetime, with a simple dictum: If you buy only what you truly love, then the things you buy will last forever. Her new home in New York’s Hudson Valley is full of old favorites: an ode to all the things that, for her, spark joy. Take, for example, the Fornasetti chairs, which feature two African men in traditional Moroccan dress. “I think I first saw them in the early ’90s,” Bridges says. “They’re classic, and they just come with me wherever I go.”
The residence, a tar-black beauty with 30-foot ceilings, is hard to miss, located as it is on a road of traditional farmhouses. It is the first home that Bridges has ever lived in that was built from scratch. She spent her childhood in an old stone house in Philadelphia, and her other current dwellings, in Harlem and Iceland, both come with historic pedigrees. “I just always wanted to have a full-on design build,” she says. “One where I could really sort of control the entire vernacular.” Bridges started construction on the property in 2018 and moved in last year.
This tour continues to remind me why Sheila Bridges is one of my Muse and will remain a constant inspiration for a long time.