Welcome to the wondrous world of Roberta Freymann – designer, store owner, and lover of every color in the Crayola box.

BK: I gather you don’t buy the notion that a bedroom should be soothing and serene.

RF: Ha! No! Soothing is for hotel rooms. I like my bedroom nice and rich – the Baroque idea of rich. I surround myself with things that excite me or give me pleasure. I don’t consider it a room only to sleep in.

 

BK: Does that painting ever give you nightmares?

RF: Only in a Grimm’s Fairy Tales sort of way. I look at it and enter a fantastical world of imagination, like a Rousseau jungle.

 

BK: You named your lifestyle stores Roberta Roller Rabbit. Were you having a Beatrix Potter moment?

RF: It’s a character’s name in a whimsical fable I made up. A rabbit in roller boots who goes to the roller disco. Originally, it was a going to be a store for kids.

 

BK: Sounds like there’s a lot of kid left in you.

RF: Well, I’ve never lost my sense of fantasy. And I always liked inventing fanciful stories for my children.

 

BK: Did your mother tell you lots of bedtime stories?

RF: No, she was very English and very reserved. But my father, who was German but Latin in spirit, always told me the most enchanting stories. I am my father’s daughter.

 

BK: When I need a color fix, I go to one of your stores.

RF: I’m all about color. I started out in this apartment saying, ‘I want it to be totally neutral and very chichi,’ but somehow or other my nature always comes out – orange goes on a wall, red on curtains, gold here, lavender there.

 

BK: You really go all out.

RF: I believe color goes with everything. When people say it doesn’t match or it clashes, I say, ‘Wrong – it works!’

 

BK: Do you always wear color?

RF: Always. What’s more boring than a black dress? And I don’t go near beige.

 

BK: Do you change the look of your bed much?

RF: Constantly! This bed-cover is something new I’m doing with old suzanis. I frame them in white to make them big enough for the bed.

 

BK: Are your nighties as colorful as your bedding?

RF: I sleep in men’s kurtas from India, all white. I don’t know…something has to be white, I guess.