Madeleine Castaing Meets Manhattan: Inside Child Studio’s New York Debut.

Before Alexy Kos and Che Huang touched a single length of velvet, they were thinking about Madeleine Castaing’s midnight blue and leopard print, and Renzo Mongiardino’s tented 1960s salons. Those references now anchor The Twenty Two New York—Child Studio’s first hotel, first private members’ club, and first project on US soil, inside a nine-storey Romanesque Revival landmark on Union Square. It’s the kind of reference point that tells you how a project is going to feel before you’ve seen a single render.

Castaing, the legendary Parisian decorator famous for her poetic pairings of jewel tones and unlikely textures, and Mongiardino, the theatrical Italian designer who treated fabric as architecture—both belong more naturally to grand European salons than a Union Square address. Child Studio has found them exactly there, nine storeys up, inside the Living Room of a private members’ club.

“We were drawn to Castaing’s playful yet romantic sensibility,” say Kos and Huang. “Her ability to create interiors that feel at once cultivated and unexpected was the perfect reference point for shaping this room as a deeply comfortable and intimate members’ retreat.” One floor up, on the tented rooftop club, the reference shifts to Mongiardino and the historic tented rooms of the Napoleonic era: “Fabric becomes a defining architectural element,” the designers note, “softening the space and filtering the changing light above the city.”

Custom Details and Vintage Treasures Define This London Townhouse.

Child Studio reimagined a Georgian townhouse in London's Belgravia as a sophisticated modern home that honours its historical roots.

Regular readers will know Child Studio as the London duo behind some of our favourite small, perfectly pitched interiors—Cubitts eyewear stores, a converted 1960s post office turned Japanese restaurant, a scattering of quietly luxe London homes. This one is a different scale altogether: their first hotel, first members’ club, and first US commission, set inside the former Margaret Louisa Home.

The Twenty Two occupies the former Margaret Louisa Home, completed in 1891 at the height of the Gilded Age and founded by socialite Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard as a residence for independent single women arriving in the city. Archival photographs from the Museum of the City of New York showed Kos and Huang a building that was, in its own way, plain-spoken: Shaker and Mission-inflected furniture, modest bedrooms, wood-panelled parlours in warm, painted hues. “We were inspired by this authentic vocabulary,” the designers explain, “and sought to create an elevated reinterpretation—contemporary yet grounded in the house’s original character and history.”

That grounding is obvious from the first step through the door. The lobby is deliberately townhouse-scaled rather than grand—velvet drapery, dark mahogany, a Jacobean-era carved desk paired with a Tiffany lamp for check-in. It sets a tone the rest of the building holds onto right through the 78 rooms and 19 suites, where arched doorways, hand-painted lacquer doors and herringbone parquet repeat like a chorus, and each suite is worked up in a different register—burgundy, ink black, caramel and ivory—with canopy beds and anonymous turn-of-the-century oil paintings doing the emotional heavy lifting.

Upstairs, past the point where the members-only floors begin, that Living Room and rooftop club sit on either side of a 19th-century stone fireplace and a run of dark-wood library cabinets—the two spaces this whole project’s mood was really built around.

The furniture and lighting were custom-made with artisans in Italy’s Veneto region, the project stitched together across London, New York and Venice in equal measure. “Conversations at The Twenty Two’s Mayfair outpost helped set the tone, site visits in New York allowed the design to evolve with the building, and in Venice, we worked closely with artisans who brought our furniture and lighting to life,” say Kos and Huang. “That journey across three cities shaped every detail of the project.”

It’s a much bigger canvas than Child Studio has worked with before, and a different city, brief and client altogether—yet the instinct hasn’t changed one bit. Heritage here is handled with warmth rather than reverence, history worn lightly rather than performed. Bigger building, same soul.

Mayfair Residence by Child Studio.

Child Studio created a residence for a London-based hotelier and restaurateur, with particular attention paid to the spaces to dine, host and entertain.

[Images courtesy of Child Studio. Photography by Alixe Lay.]