Sara Ruffin Costello, the former Domino magazine creative director, is a decorative chameleon—part stylist, part interior designer, part consultant, part writer, even part dressmaker. Her homes and style are rapturously covered in magazines and on social media, bound by an ethos which, according to Costello, is an undone look. “People come to me and say, ‘I don’t want it to look decorated, I don’t want everything to match.’ That suits my personality,” says the designer.
From an outsider’s eye, Costello channels an aristocratic bohemian point of view, playfully and irreverently blending high and low and forbidding any whiff of preciousness or pretense. In 2011, Costello, her husband, photographer Paul Costello, and their three children, ditched their West Village townhouse for a Gothic Italianate Revival home in New Orleans’ Garden District, which the couple assiduously restored.
Her house can be seen as the apotheosis of her aesthetic panache. The living room, rendered exclusively in shades of cream, white and black, is, however, anything but minimal. Densely layered and full of interest, it forces the eye to tumble and meander from massively scaled zig-zag upholstered wingback chairs to a Noguchi lantern hung beneath an elaborately scrolled rondel.
There is a lush insouciance to her work and, most importantly, a resistance to being hemmed-in in one direction or another. Costello and her husband recently renovated a decrepit church in the Irish Channel neighborhood of her adopted home. “It was the most unattractive building in a city where you have a hard time finding anything unattractive, but when we peeled back the layers we found the most extraordinary things,” she says of the deconsecrated chapel, which they now use as an event space and hospitality rental.
She recently started a dress line based on the “perfect linen sack—a butter-churning ladies dress,” she found at a yard sale in Montauk. It quickly “sold like hotcakes” and Costello has been riffing on it ever since, including an ikat version. The fil rouge threading through her endeavors is a strong editorial eye. “I would say to myself, ‘What would I wear in this room for a picture?’ That wrap dress makes me think of it. ‘Let’s put her in the green room in the orange ikat dress.’”
Who are your decorative muses? I discovered John Saladino early on and I can’t get some of his rooms out of my head. Reason being he is a minimalist but a maximalist minimalist. Veere Grenney is the second coming of Saladino; grand but humble. There are usually a few big exclamations points in every room but it’s not overwrought. I can’t live with too much cacophony around me.
What are your favorite house museums? I was completely inspired by The Soane in London. Sir John Soane was like a hoarder of very fine objects. I loved seeing Frida Kahlo’s house, Casa Azul, in Mexico City, and Yves Saint Laurent’s Villa Oasis in Marrakesh—places where people had a vision and style and it’s all jammed in the house; what’s better than that? And Leon Trotsky’s house, which was around the corner from his friend Frida Kahlo, was just like he left it, as though he ran out the door and got shot in the head.
Where do you shop in New Orleans? The city is a dumping ground for French antiques. If you want one great bergère, you will find it here. You can find things for a song at auction houses—they basically pay you to take it from them. And then Magazine Street is where you hoof it—Karla Katz Antiques, Malachite Home, Katie Koch Home, and The Sunday Shop.
