Kips Bay Palm Beach 2026 opens February 25. For the first time in the show's nine-year history, it will span two residences on North Flagler Drive in the Northwood Shores neighborhood of West Palm Beach: a 4,500-square-foot Intracoastal house and an adjacent Palm Cottage. Twenty-three design firms. Two houses. One month on the water.
Kips Bay Palm Beach 2026 Tickets, Dates, and Address
Tickets are available online in advance or at the door. The Opening Day Preview on February 24 runs in two-hour sessions from noon through 8 p.m. Each includes cocktails, hors d'oeuvres, a gift bag, and a general admission return ticket. Specific session times are listed at kipsbaydecoratorshowhouse.org. Both properties are on the same stretch of North Flagler Drive; confirm the exact relationship between the two addresses before your visit.
The preview session is the clearest read on which rooms are generating real conversation. Designers attend in numbers on opening night, and the reactions are candid in a way they are not during the public run. If you are attending for professional reasons, the February 24 evening sessions are worth the premium.
Two Houses, Two Ways of Living
The Intracoastal House is the primary residence. Approximately 4,500 square feet, five bedrooms, five bathrooms, 150 feet of direct Intracoastal frontage, a private dock, and a 50-foot pool. Built in 1953, it belongs to the mid-century waterfront tradition that shaped this stretch of Flagler Drive: horizontal lines, generous ceiling heights, a layout that follows the water.
The Palm Cottage is something else entirely. Three bedrooms, two and a half baths, a sunroom, a fenced backyard. It is a house built for living at close range. Where the main house gives designers room to work with volume and views, the cottage asks them to demonstrate judgment in rooms where every material choice is visible.
The pairing reflects how people in this market actually live — a principal waterfront residence alongside a secondary structure serving a different kind of daily life. This decorator show house in Palm Beach is the first to explore both registers in a single exhibition.
The cottage is the harder brief. Rooms with no commanding views and no exceptional volume force designers to earn their outcomes through material judgment and proportion alone. In previous editions, the most discussed rooms were almost always the most constrained: powder rooms, hallways, compact bedrooms where nothing is incidental.
Kips Bay Palm Beach Designers 2026
The roster of Kips Bay Palm Beach designers for 2026 includes twenty-three firms, each assigned a single room or defined area within one of the two houses. The selection spans established practices with decades of residential work and studios that have drawn recent attention in the shelter press. Three firms worth understanding before you walk the rooms:
A hospitality and residential practice with work across multiple continents. BAMO brings a scale of reference that translates well to large principal rooms, treating residential projects with the same rigor applied to a major hotel commission. Their approach to material specification in rooms with significant light and view exposure is worth studying carefully.
Projects in Toronto and Palm Beach reflect a command of proportion at scale. Morris's work is most instructive in how it handles the relationship between furniture scale, ceiling height, and natural light — precisely what a mid-century Intracoastal house demands. She rarely underscales and never over-furnishes.
A curatorial approach drawing on art, antiquities, and architectural context. In a show house where most designers work forward from materials and textiles, EERDMANS tends to work backward from the objects. A fundamentally different sequence that produces fundamentally different rooms — and a useful counterpoint to the other work in the exhibition.
Additional participating firms include: Alexander Interiors, Amy Young Designs, Bell Design Inc., Colleen Rosar Design, Danielle Balanis Design, Firefinish Interiors, Justin P. Moreland Interiors, Kate Ives Design, Lisa Erdmann Interiors, Lopez Group Inc., LTA Interiors, Pappas Miron Design, River Brook, Sherrill Canet Interiors, Sire Design, Steven Walsh Design, and Tartan & Toile.
The primary suite and any room with a direct water view draw the most foot traffic. The rooms that generate the most sustained conversation among designers are usually the transitional spaces — hallways, landings, entries — where the constraints are tightest and the thinking most compressed. Plan to linger there. The Palm Cottage is likely to reward the most careful attention.
Architecture, Renovation, and the Homes That Follow
The choice of Northwood Shores is significant. The neighborhood sits along one of West Palm Beach's established waterfront stretches, where mid-century homes coexist with newer construction. It has drawn increasing attention from architects and homeowners who understand the advantages of the Intracoastal without the density of downtown or the price structure of the island.
The Intracoastal House, built in 1953, prizes water orientation, cross-ventilation, and the integration of exterior living space. For designers, working within a mid-century structure demands respect for what already exists: the ceiling heights, the window placements, the balance of public and private rooms. These are architectural decisions that precede and outlast any decorative scheme.
For the audience that attends Kips Bay, the rooms are not abstractions. They are proposals installed in a real house, with real light and real views of the Intracoastal. Material selections, the handling of natural light, the calibration of indoor and outdoor space in a subtropical climate — these are evaluated with the eye of someone who will make similar decisions within the year.
This is also what makes the decorator show house in Palm Beach distinct from a gallery exhibition or a design fair. The work exists at residential scale, inside architecture that many in the audience already own or are actively evaluating.
Mid-century waterfront inventory in Northwood Shores has absorbed significant renovation investment over the past five years. The show house draws attention to a corridor that has been undervalued relative to the island. For buyers considering West Palm Beach waterfront, this edition of Kips Bay offers a concentrated view of what the market's most considered practitioners think these houses can become.
Palm Beach Luxury will be attending the Kips Bay Decorator Show House throughout its run. For clients and prospective buyers exploring the relationship between architecture, neighborhood, and residential life in Palm Beach County, our team is available for private conversations about specific properties, emerging corridors like Northwood Shores, or the broader question of where and how to live here.
Request a ConversationDesign as Long-Term Judgment
The decisions that shape a home's interior are capital decisions. They affect livability, maintenance, and market position over time. A renovation guided by informed judgment — one that respects the architecture and reflects an owner's long-term relationship with a property — is a form of judgment that holds its value quietly.
Kips Bay makes this visible in a way that few other events can. It places skilled work inside actual rooms, at actual scale, and asks the viewer to consider not just aesthetics but appropriateness. Does the design honor the house? Will these choices endure?
The rooms will close at the end of March. The furnishings will be removed. But the decisions Kips Bay makes visible — about materials, proportion, restraint, and the relationship between a house and the life it holds — extend well beyond the exhibition.
Bottom Line
The two-house format makes a specific argument: the same design intelligence required in a 4,500-square-foot Intracoastal house must also work in a three-bedroom cottage across the street. The Palm Cottage will be more instructive than the main house. And twenty-three practitioners have now attached their names to two properties in Northwood Shores — a corridor that has been undervalued relative to the island for years. That is a considered signal about where the market's informed practitioners think value is moving.
For buyers considering West Palm Beach waterfront: Northwood Shores is worth a serious look this month. When the market's most considered practitioners commit their reputations to a corridor, it is worth noting. View properties on North Flagler Drive while the show house is open; the context for evaluating them is unusually informative.
For anyone planning a mid-century renovation: spend your time in the constrained rooms, not the generous ones. The Intracoastal House will show what is possible with volume and view. The Palm Cottage will show what is possible with judgment alone. The second lesson is the one you will actually need.
Skip the primary suite: the rooms that generate the most sustained professional conversation at Kips Bay are powder rooms, hallways, and compact bedrooms — where nothing can be hidden and no view rescues a poor decision. Those are the rooms closest to the choices most owners actually face.
This article is an editorial guide to the 2026 Kips Bay Decorator Show House Palm Beach. It is not a market report and should not be applied to individual property underwriting without direct market analysis. No transaction data or MLS figures were used in its preparation. Descriptions of design firms reflect publicly available information about their practices and prior work.
Observations about the Northwood Shores corridor and mid-century waterfront renovation trends reflect practitioner observation by Palm Beach Luxury advisors and are directional in nature.
Event information: Kips Bay Decorator Show House official website (kipsbaydecoratorshowhouse.org). Ticket pricing and schedule confirmed as of publication; verify current details before attending.
Property details: Public records and practitioner knowledge of the North Flagler Drive corridor, West Palm Beach.
Designer information: Publicly available portfolio descriptions and shelter press coverage of participating firms.
