Behind the Walls

Window25’s Craftsmanship in Peter Dunham’s Kips Bay Guest Bedroom

At the 2026 Kips Bay Decorator Show House New York, Peter Dunham created a guest bedroom that feels less like a temporary show house installation and more like a room that has evolved over decades.

Located on the fifth floor of the historic townhouse at 80 West Washington Place in Greenwich Village, Dunham’s room is layered with color, art, antiques, textiles, and objects that seem collected rather than coordinated. The result is sophisticated but relaxed—very much in keeping with the designer’s signature approach.

For Window25, the project offered an opportunity to contribute to one of the room’s defining architectural elements: the fully upholstered walls.

A Room Wrapped in Fabric

Dunham enveloped the bedroom in his new Jacob’s Stripe, a multicolored linen from Peter Dunham Textiles, carrying the pattern from the upholstered walls directly into the window treatments. The continuous use of the stripe gives the room an immersive quality—the fabric is not simply decoration placed within the architecture; it becomes part of the architecture itself.

That decision also served a practical purpose.

Dunham described wanting the north-facing room to feel warm and comfortable while helping absorb sound and creating a strong background for the artwork. Upholstered walls provide precisely that combination of visual softness, tactile richness, and acoustic benefit.

The stripe establishes a rhythm around the room, but because it is executed in textile rather than conventional wallcovering, it carries a softness and dimensionality that changes with the light.

That distinction is subtle in photographs.

In person, it is unmistakable.

The Window25 Contribution

Window25 was entrusted with fabricating and installing the upholstered wall treatment.

Wall upholstery is one of those crafts in which the finished product can appear deceptively simple. The goal is ultimately for the viewer to notice the fabric and the room—not the mechanics required to put it there.

Behind that seamless appearance, however, is a highly controlled process.

For Peter Dunham’s Kips Bay room, Window25 constructed a framework around the architectural perimeter of the walls, creating the foundation needed for the upholstered installation. Padding was then introduced beneath the decorative textile to give the walls their characteristic softness and depth.

The Jacob’s Stripe linen required particularly careful handling. With a repeating vertical stripe covering multiple walls, alignment becomes critical. A small deviation at one panel can become increasingly visible as the installation continues around corners, doors, windows, artwork and other architectural interruptions.

The fabric therefore had to be carefully planned, joined, and pattern-matched before installation so that Dunham's stripe would read as a continuous architectural gesture rather than a series of individual pieces.

The perimeter was then finished with a custom double welt, cut on the bias and applied by hand, creating a refined transition between the upholstered surface and the surrounding architecture.

It is a detail most visitors will probably never consciously notice.

And that is exactly the point.

Fine upholstery work should make the construction disappear.

The Importance of Pattern Matching

A stripe as strong as Jacob’s Stripe leaves nowhere for workmanship to hide.

Unlike a loose floral or irregular print, every vertical line becomes a reference point. Corners, seams, and transitions immediately reveal whether the underlying fabrication has been properly planned.

That makes the room a strong example of the relationship between design intent and fabrication expertise.

Peter Dunham supplied the vision.

Window25's role was to translate that vision into a finished architectural textile installation.

The challenge was not simply attaching fabric to a wall. It was understanding where the pattern should begin, how it should travel through the room, where seams should occur, how padding would affect the surface, and how the perimeter finishing could remain precise without visually interrupting the stripe.

It is the kind of work where fractions of an inch matter.

A Collected Interior

Against that striped envelope, Dunham assembled an intentionally eclectic mix.

A vintage iron four-poster bed is paired with an antique English textile headboard. Ceramic lamps by Natan Moss were fitted with shades fashioned from a vintage Japanese obi. A wall-spanning green velvet sofa is finished with dramatic Samuel & Sons fringe, while the room also incorporates wicker, mid-century furniture, a Louis XVI armchair, a French black-marble cocktail table and an early Khotan carpet.

The green velvet sofa seen in the room was upholstered in a moss-toned Kravet velvet, with its unusually long fringe becoming another example of Dunham's willingness to push traditional decorative details beyond their expected scale.

Art is equally important.

Dunham described the room as his imagined Greenwich Village pied-à-terre and used it partly as a dialogue between Los Angeles and New York. Works by Southern California artists include a black-and-white self-portrait by Catherine Opie and a collage by the late David Hockney.

The combination feels personal rather than thematic.

That appears to have been intentional.

“This is my dream Village apartment. I wanted this to be my little pied-à-terre,” Dunham told 1stDibs.

Fabric as Architecture

The room also demonstrates something we believe strongly at Window25:

Fabric does not have to be an accessory to architecture. It can become architecture.

An upholstered wall changes more than color.

It changes acoustics.

It changes how light is absorbed and reflected.

It changes the way artwork sits against a surface.

It changes how a room feels when you enter it.

And, perhaps most importantly, it introduces something increasingly valuable into interiors dominated by hard materials: softness.

In Peter Dunham's guest bedroom, the textile travels across the walls and windows until the entire space feels wrapped rather than decorated.

That effect depends upon the designer's vision, certainly—but also upon fabrication and installation that allow the vision to remain uninterrupted.

Craftsmanship in Service of Design

The best workroom craftsmanship rarely calls attention to itself.

A seam falls where it should.

A stripe remains straight.

A corner feels effortless.

Padding remains consistent.

A welt follows the architecture.

The viewer sees Peter Dunham's room.

The workmanship disappears behind it.

That is the standard Window25 strives for on every project.

We were proud to contribute our upholstery craftsmanship to Peter Dunham & Associates' “The Guest Bedroom” at the 2026 Kips Bay Decorator Show House New York—and particularly proud to help transform Jacob's Stripe from a beautiful textile into one of the defining architectural elements of the room.

The 2026 Kips Bay Decorator Show House brings together 22 designers across six levels of the Greenwich Village townhouse, with proceeds supporting the programs of the Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club.

Design: Peter Dunham & Associates

Upholstered Walls: Window25

Wall Textile: Peter Dunham Textiles — Jacob’s Stripe

Kips Bay Decorator Show House New York, 2026