Interior design — New York
Home is a
composition.
Still Life is a New York interior design studio for people who believe a room should hold you. Full-home projects, composed like paintings.
Book a consultationThe manifesto
Most rooms are decorated. Ours are composed.
We work the way the old masters worked — studies before strokes, light before color, restraint before ornament. Every project begins with how you actually live: the morning coffee, the Sunday papers, the dog asleep by the fire. Then we compose around it.
A still life is never an accident. Neither is a home.
Selectivity
Six homes a year. Never more.
A home takes a year of our attention, and we give it — the drawings, the sourcing, the arguments about grout. Six families at a time. If yours can’t be one of the six, we’ll tell you kindly, and tell you who to call instead.
Scarcity isn’t a tactic. It’s how the work stays good.
Selected work
Three homes, three compositions.
The process
From first walk-through
to final styling.
Four movements, like a painting built in layers. You always know what happens next, what it costs, and when it ends.
Start with a visit-
01
The Visit
We walk your rooms, watch the light move through them, and listen to how you live. Ninety minutes, at your home, no obligation.
-
02
The Composition
Concept boards, palette, floor plans, and a fixed fee proposal. You see the whole painting before we lift a brush.
-
03
The Build
Our trades, our procurement, our problem. Weekly photo updates while the work happens; you never chase a contractor again.
-
04
The Reveal
Installation day, then styling — the books, the art, the objects that make it yours. We photograph it. You live in it.
Client voices
They live in the work.
“Elena saw the house we were trying to describe before we could describe it. Fourteen months later, our mornings happen in rooms we used to rush through.”
“The loft was a beautiful shell and an impossible space. Now every corner earns its keep. Our contractor friends ask who did it.”
“Worth every penny and every week of waiting. Guests assume we hired a stager for a magazine. We just live here.”
The studio
Elena Marsh, founder & principal.
Trained as a painter, apprenticed in a Milanese atelier, designing homes for fourteen years. Elena still draws every room by hand before a single order is placed — because a plan you can’t sketch is a plan you don’t understand.
The studio is small on purpose: Elena, two designers, and a circle of craftspeople we’ve worked with for a decade. No account managers. You always talk to the person drawing your home.
14
years composing homes
6
projects accepted yearly
41
homes completed
Begin
Tell us about
your home.
Write a few lines about the project. If it can be one of the six, you’ll hear from Elena herself within two business days.
(212) 555-0147hello@still-life-studio.example
128 Greene Street, Suite 4B
New York, NY 10012
Visits Mon–Fri, by appointment