May 11, 2022

On this week’s From the Tap podcast, I am welcoming Bob Bakes, cofounder and head of design at Bakes & Kropp, a luxury kitchen design and manufacturing company with showrooms in New York City, the Hamptons, Long Island, Michigan and Palm Beach. We discussed participating in design show houses from a designer’s point of view.

Bakes is a veteran of top-tier show houses – the Hamptons Show House, Galerie House of Art + Design at Sag Harbor and most recently the 2022 Kips Bay Decorator Show House in Palm Beach to name a few – and shared his experience and insights on the complete process, beginning with the motivation for participating in a show house.

While his firm undertakes some projects to raise awareness of their design work in the community or in the press, it is the charitable aspect of the work that really speaks to him. He opens up about the personal and professional connections he has forged with Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club as a result of his involvement in their projects.

Bakes dives deep into how designers who aspire to work on a show house should begin, from cultivating relationships with select media or developers to building project portfolios to making contact with show house managers.

The designer talks extensively about his experience in this year’s Kips Bay Palm Beach project, where he designed what’s always a highlight of a show house: the kitchen. As the hub of the home, a synergy existed between Bakes’ concept and those of adjacent spaces, like the dining and breakfast rooms, which were executed by other design firms.

He speaks frankly about the scheduling demands, working with show house sponsors and vendors and the unforgiving deadlines of a show house project. He closes by sharing some hard-won wisdom about the totality of the commitment a design firm must make when undertaking a show house, emphasizing that there is no room for failure and that a firm must have the organizational capability to deliver a complete, solid and memorable room on time.

Watch the full video above or listen to the podcast on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Pandora and other outlets.