Future ruins, Kips Bay decorator show house new york 2026

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view from the bath through a stone portal into the hallway

Room at the 51st Kips Bay Decorator Show House in New York.

Megan Grehl imagined a bath as it might be found thousands of years from now: a sanctuary for ritual, reflection and restoration, made from a stone whose colour and fractures were set by ancient earthquakes. We built its ceiling.

The whole concept of Future Ruins is the marriage of modern and ancient. All this classical architecture is really trying to show off the stone and how beautiful and ancient it is with these classical feature moments. It's supposed to feel like a space of true relaxation and reflection, somewhere that you just think inward and not outward.

Kips Bay NYC 2026

Since 1973, Kips Bay has given one Manhattan residence each year to a group of designers, room by room, as the flagship fundraiser for the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club. It has raised more than $35 million, and editions in Palm Beach and Dallas have followed. This year, twenty-two designers took on six levels of an 1839 Georgian townhouse in Greenwich Village, once home to the composer John Philip Sousa.

The tub and vanity, cut from Breccia Pernice marble. Overhead, the mirrored ceiling carries the stone upward
Melanie Dunea's suspended photographs line the hallway, and the room's name is cut into the stone above the door

The approach

Room 09 sits on the wellness level: Two small rooms, divided by a hallway. Megan Grehl wanted the arrival to feel like "compression and release", and she gave both rooms one language, drawn from the landscapes of Dune and the architecture of Carlo Scarpa. Eighteen slabs of Breccia Pernice from Verona, supplied by ABC Stone and fabricated and installed by Stone Dynamics Co., form the tub, the vanity, the portals and the steps. Marius Aurenti microcement softens the walls, and Kohler supplied the fixtures. Water runs from the sink into the bath.

The ceiling's task was to let the stone continue.

A custom mirrored ceiling by Bricble, in Grehl's own words, "expands light, reflection, and depth". The marble repeats overhead, and the room no longer stops at its own height.

A stone portal frames the hallway. The walls are microcement in Châtaigne
Light sculpture beside stepped niches lined in stone
The annex, once a walk-in closet. A pale sculptural chair and a plinth of flowers sit under DRIFT's Fragile Future, which the mirrored ceiling repeats overhead
The vanity, cut from the same marble: a square sunken basin, a wall-mounted tap, and a backlit stone panel set into the plaster.
The water feature: water leaves the sink and spills over stepped stone into the bath.

Credits