"It's very exciting for the designers to do it because people do come and see their work, get to know them, " said Bunny Williams, an interior designer and chairwoman of this year's Kips Bay Decorator Show House in New York City, considered one of the nation's oldest and most popular show homes.

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With seven bedrooms, seven full bathrooms and three half bathrooms on four levels, the brick Neoclassical house served as the San Francisco Decorator Showcase in 1991 and again in 2012.

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In its designs it was still guided by the art nouveau tastes of its founder, Louis Comfort Tiffany, who restyled the interior of the White House in the 1880s and became the most fashionable decorator in New York .

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"I wanted their friends to want to hang out at our house, " says Ms. Kearney, an interior decorator who enlisted Marnie Van der Burgt of California Closets to help design her daughter's room.

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Although most of the furniture was bought by Braka and Graham, the couple enlisted Robert Kime, the celebrated decorator who was appointed by the Prince of Wales to renovate Clarence House, to design the bedrooms and sitting rooms in his trademark style of fine upholstery mixed with English and Ottoman fabrics.

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