Sandra Nunnerly Making an Impact with Interior Design

A favored interior designer among the New York City’s cocktail party set, New Zealand-born Sandra Nunnerley has brought her distinct eye and original aesthetic to projects as varied as Park Avenue  and Hong Kong apartments, Bahamas beachfront getaways, and country homes in Maryland.

Nunnerley – who studied architecture in Sydney and art history in London and Paris, and worked at the Marlborough Gallery in New York before opening her firm in 1986 – is fascinated by the “interplay of high and low, light and dark, modern and traditional.”

Perhaps nowhere is Nunnerley’s aesthetic more in evidence than in her own home, a two-bedroom floor-through jewel in New York’s Upper East Side Carrère & Hastings townhouses.

There, friends, family, and guests are treated to a visual tour of the senses that includes regal Murano lamps and Louis XIV tables, large-scale Richard Serra paintings alongside Chinese and Japanese sculptures, and, of course, “lots of New Zealand things,” including a pair of antique Maori hand weapons.

With its “form-meets-function” approach, Nunnerley’s home also spotlights the “shadow colors” (predominantly off-beiges and pearlized grays) to which the designer is drawn for the way they shift with the changing light of the day.

While Nunnerley has eschewed a “signature look” and shied away from larger branding propositions, some of her favorite work can be found in the monograph, Interiors: Sandra Nunnerly (powerHouse Books, 2013).

Words Nunnerley lives and works by from her mentor and former Vogue fashion editor Chessy Rayner: “Stay small, stay unique and stay high-end. That is where you want to be.”

Article source: Departures Magazine (print)

Article by Wendy Goodman

Photographs by Emily Andrews