Inside Aerin Lauder’s Romantic Palm Beach Paradise
AD100 designer Stephen Sills collaborated with the Estée Lauder scion to make her Louis XVI–style house a home
Two separate interviews, two different days, a single word repeated: magical. That’s the term that Aerin Lauder, the designer, uses to describe her new getaway in Palm Beach, which she just moved into a couple of months ago. It’s also the word that the AD100 interior designer Stephen Sills, a longtime friend who handled the decors in collaboration with Lauder, uses to describe the project in general. “It’s an intelligent house,” he explains. “A pretty house with a beautiful layout, a romantic history, and lovely gardens, like an enchanting French pavilion.”
Lauder, whose parents live across the street—“close, but not too close,” she jokes—had been captivated by the place since she was a child, ultimately dreaming of the life that she and her husband, financier Eric Zinterhofer, could create there. Until then, though, the couple raised their two sons, Will and Jack, in Manhattan, spending time, among other residences, at her family’s Palm Beach mansion, which had belonged to her cosmetics-queen grandmother Estée Lauder.
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But a couple of years ago, Lauder’s dream house, designed in 1930 by architect Howard Major in the Louis XVI style and faced with picturesquely pitted Cuban limestone, came on the market, and she snapped it up. “I’ve never had my own home in Palm Beach,” she says.
Not much had been altered since it had been built, and it had only changed hands twice since then. The paneling in the living room was still washed with its original paint. The marble floors were intact. Ditto the doorknobs, the smoky mirror accents in the dining room, and the sleeping porch, a traditional hot-weather feature that Major often incorporated into his projects, as Lauder discovered when her husband purchased a copy of the architect’s 1926 book about domestic American buildings. She also found an old photo album in a closet that showed period images of the early decor, an echt Palm Beach blend of neoclassicism and rattan and bamboo that was also very much up Lauder’s aesthetic alley.
“I am inspired by the past, so embracing the history of the house was important to me. In order to understand the future, you have to understand what came before,” explains Lauder, who launched Aerin, her luxury lifestyle firm, in 2012, after a successful career at her family’s iconic cosmetics company. “So I wanted to preserve as much of the house as possible.” That being said, the property required sensitive but crucial updating, such as adding hurricane windows, rethinking the kitchen, and creating new bathrooms that would nonetheless have a 1930s feeling. Says Lauder, “I wanted them to look old.” New insulation was also part of the program, given that the walls were stuffed with decades-old copies of The New York Times, and the sleeping porch was screened to keep insects at bay.
Sills felt the same way and supported Lauder’s desire to largely keep the structure as it was; so did architect Jeffery Smith, who handled the renovations.
“It’s not one of those huge houses that ramble,” the interior designer says. “The proportions are perfect and the finishes have a beautiful patina. We just brought it up to date, but with a Palm Beach spirit.” Specifically, Palm Beach through Lauder’s personal lens: primarily tones of white relieved with pale turquoise—the color was her grandmother’s signature—and a scattering of floral patterns that reference the surrounding gardens, which had been created by the previous owners and were enriched for Lauder by landscape designer Mario Nievera.
“I love nature,” she avers, adding, “My brand is very much inspired by birds, flowers, and shells.”
The biggest floral accent is the hand-painted silk fabric that lines the dining room. Lauder had long admired her friend Deeda Blair’s Manhattan bedroom, which is hung with vintage flowered fabric, and the biomedical-research entrepreneur allowed Lauder and Sills to borrow one of the curtain panels and have it copied by artist Jay C. Lohmann and Podge Bune. Blair’s affection for blanched French furniture has influenced Lauder’s Palm Beach decor as well, echoed in everything from Louis XV side chairs dressed in ivory damask to stout antique marble pedestals used to support hearty blue-and-white ceramic jars, most of which Sills found on shopping expeditions to Paris.
Blasts from the past aside, though Lauder’s residence has traditional bones and venerable furnishings—including a chic black lacquered bureau plat—it is no museum. Instead, it is what she calls “tradition with a twist.” Meaning a restrained use of objects, in contrast to classic French treasure-trove interiors. Enlivening, too, are dashes of postwar art, such as an Ellsworth Kelly work, a Jeff Koons dog vase, and 20th-century classics like the Parsons-style cocktail table in the living room, which Sills calls “a great American touch,” noting how it makes a sharp contrast to the curvaceous French antiques and the 18th-century Venetian mirror over the pale marble chimneypiece. “It’s a very minimalist look with just a few spectacularly beautiful things,” the designer says of the rooms, which Lauder and Sills installed just days before the AD crew arrived to photograph. To her delight, many items that she had in storage finally had a home, among them four flowered porcelain candlesticks that once belonged to her grandmother and which stand on an octagonal draped table in the living room, where their elegant forms, freed from holding tapers, are admired as sculptures. “They finally have a home,” says Lauder. And so does she.
This story appears in AD’s July/August 2023 issue. To see Lauder’s Palm Beach home in print, subscribe to AD.
