Four decades ago, Ralph Lauren managed to amplify the very idea of what a fashion designer could be. It was an initiative that might have seemed like a diluting of the brand. Fashion designers, it had always been assumed, should stick to fashion. But, in 1983, when he launched the sprawling Ralph Lauren Home Collection, it turned out to be a clarification, a way to show that the very idea of fashion can be expanded exponentially.
Even though his career had begun in earnest nearly 16 years before, growing from men’s ties into an empire that included menswear, womenswear, and shops rolling out internationally, Lauren had already proven himself as adept at image-making and storytelling as a Hollywood director. His influences were pulled from the great American families of the past two centuries: the elegance of Vanderbilt family lawn parties overlooking the Atlantic at the Breakers in Newport; the sheer grandeur of Marjorie Merriweather Post and E.F. Hutton building a cottage they called Mar-a-Lago; and the relaxed American style of the Kennedys tossing the football around their compound in Hyannis Port.
Lauren was able to create a series of cinematic worlds that his customers could simply step into. “He is one of the most successful American designers, painstakingly creating a world of romantic fashion built upon diverse dreams many of us share,” noted the New York Times Magazine as the Home collection was launched. “It is a world that includes the American West, its cowboys and mountain men, as well as the elegantly giddy, pink-hazed 1930s of Fred Astaire and Carole Lombard movies. It is also an Ivy League world, a conservative country-club world, stylized and kaleidoscopic, a fictional world made real with repetition. What is significant, though, what sets Ralph Lauren apart from virtually all of his contemporaries, is his capacity not only to evoke the aura of these best of all possible worlds but to inhabit them himself.” By the launch of the Home collection, Ralph Lauren was already well known for several remarkable residences: a Fifth Avenue duplex with Central Park views; a mid-century house on a Montauk cliff overlooking the ocean on the eastern tip of Long Island; and a 12,000-acre ranch in southwestern Colorado, the Double RL Ranch (which now comes in at about 17,000 acres). Soon, he would expand to a country estate in Bedford in New York’s Westchester County, and a pair of houses near Montego Bay in Jamaica (five very distinctive properties that he has held on to over the years).
“Because I have different houses, and I live differently in each, I felt that what is right in one place is not necessarily right in another,” Lauren explains of his decision to move into home design. “In the city, I might want a sophisticated look, like elegant shirting stripes, but in the country, it would be nice to have a little pattern, or perhaps something like old washed-out chambray.”
From the start, the Home collection was immense. It included bed linens, blankets and comforters, bath towels, fabrics, rugs, wall coverings, flatware, table linens, glassware, and even paint. The offerings were grouped into four stylistic themes: “Log Cabin” (“Strong and rugged, inspired by the great spirit of our American heritage”), “Thoroughbred” (“The aristocratic sporting life”), “New England” (“American tradition crafted with honesty, clarity, simplicity”), and “Jamaica” (“Old-world elegance and refinement, in pure linen, delicately detailed with antique florals and embroidered lace”). The collection employed an innovative use of materials and details: bedding in menswear fabrics like chambray and Oxford cloth or mother of pearl button closures on pillowcases. Such an ambitious approach was an entirely new way of envisioning home furnishings. Now, in celebration of the 40 years of Ralph Lauren Home and to document the designer’s impressive grouping of houses around the world, comes the publication of an expansive book, Ralph Lauren: A Way of Living (Rizzoli, 2023). The 544-page tome is a lavishly illustrated look at all aspects of the Lauren lifestyle. “My homes have always offered refuge, warmth, and comfort for me and my family,” the designer says. “This book celebrates those homes and the collections they’ve inspired.”
From the beginning of Lauren’s move into home furnishings, there has been one element that might seem surprising: many of the designs felt aged. Long before vintage became such a phenomenon, Home suggested a sense of history. Everything in the Home collection was new, of course, but it had a kind of patina, the feeling of a life well lived. “Americans didn’t understand the mentality of oldness,” he says. “They wanted crisp and sharp—they didn’t know about faded.”
The overall contours of Ralph Lauren’s life are well-known. Born and raised in the Mosholu Parkway section of The Bronx, he worked during his high school and college years at the department store Alexander’s. There, he hung up returns, as he once explained, and developed “a feel for style and advertising.” In 1967, working out of a closet in the Empire State Building, he hand-made ties, which he sold to Bloomingdale’s. The buyer had asked him to take his name off the label and to narrow the ties by one inch. Lauren refused. “It’s the detail, and in a tie, an inch means a lot more than you think,” he once said. “Those ties had attitude. Breaking rules is what makes things interesting. It can be done by covering a Louis XV gilt chair in a gingham fabric, or putting that gilt chair in a country house. Everything can be mixed with everything and still work, as long as it’s done with a certain level of taste and has a natural, unstudied quality.”
In 1968, the designer began a full menswear collection and, two years later, a Polo by Ralph Lauren shop opened in Bloomingdale’s, the first time the legendary retailer had an in-store boutique devoted to a single designer. He debuted his first women’s collection in 1972. In 1974, Ralph Lauren clothes were used for the film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, one of the great American references that had always been close to the designer’s aesthetic, and he personally designed a pink suit for Robert Redford. By 1976, Lauren won a Coty Award for womenswear and menswear, and, the following year, contributed to Diane Keaton’s groundbreaking style for 1977’s Annie Hall. Building an empire requires more than just good clothes, and in those years, when designers were first becoming as well-known as their work, Lauren led the way. “His is an image-soaked, heady existence, one that reflects the public’s recognition of him as one of a new American breed—designer as pop hero,” noted the New York Times Magazine in 1983. “It is a reputation Lauren feeds by appearing from time to time as a model in his own advertisements dressed in faded Levi’s, or when telling Woody Allen that wearing sneakers with dinner clothes is OK.”
In the spring of 1986, Lauren made his skill at world-building more concrete than ever, when he opened a flagship boutique in the Rhinelander Mansion at 72nd and Madison Avenue in New York. An elaborate 19th-century limestone structure offering 20,000 square feet of floor space, it underwent two years of meticulous renovation, including a complete rebuilding of the interior and a restoration of the historic façade. In this ambitious new setting, Lauren made clear his fascination with the American rich: this was Gilded Age glamour brought boldly into the present. “It is part American palazzo, part exclusive men’s club, part elegant women’s salon,” noted Suzanne Slesin in the New York Times. “All the trappings of what one imagines to be the high-class and well-heeled ways of the very, very rich are here—from the baronial hand-carved staircase lined with family portraits to the plush sitting rooms focused on working fireplaces.”
The store opened with menswear on the first two floors, womenswear on the third, and home design on the fourth floor. “The attention to detail is relentless,” continued Slesin. “Polished floors, fine and slightly worn Persian rugs, leather chairs that look as if they had been sat in by generations, enough fresh flowers to fill a greenhouse from marguerites to orchids, twittering birds in antique cages, fish trophies, model boats, straw hats, vintage flowered hat boxes, antique monogrammed luggage and old photographs all add to the ambience of a great country house.”
It was the designer’s most comprehensive statement about how he saw his world, and it raised the standard for all of the other shops. “What I wanted to have is a way to illustrate what I’m about in its entire environment,” Lauren explained. “The style is what I believe in—a clubbiness with a sort of Continental feeling. I tried to put together all the worlds that I liked in one place—the Connaught Hotel in London and Hermès in Paris, among millions of others. It looks nothing like them but they inspired me for quality.”
The Home collection, on the top floor, had pride of place. “It must be one of the most romantic apartments in the city,” noted the design writer Slesin. “It is arranged as a series of cozy vignettes, accessorized down to the stamps on a small desk overlooking planted terraces and a view of Central Park.”
The designer admitted to having spent more than $14 million on the store (some $39.2 million today). And he had a wry take on the result: “When I finally thought about the whole huge effort, I thought that maybe I should live there. And if it doesn’t work out I might do that after all.”
There was, of course, no need to move into the shop. But the interiors that Ralph Lauren has created over the decades have been essential to his image and his career.
In the late 1970s, Ricky and Ralph Lauren found their New York dream house, a two-story apartment on Fifth Avenue looking out over the Central Park Reservoir, the storied park, and a great swath of the Manhattan skyline. One of their first decisions was to punch picture windows through the walls. “An unlikely choice for a Fifth Avenue residence in the 1970s,” the designer says. “We wanted the apartment to feel like a downtown loft, so we gutted everything and started from scratch.”
After interviewing many of the top interior designers of the day, they brought in Angelo Donghia, the great decorator and furniture designer known for a luxe minimalism. “I wasn’t looking for glamour or making an impression, it was just the simple, almost primitive desire to have a kind of freedom—room for our three children to race around in, room to take stock of ourselves and to discover who we really were and what we wanted,” Lauren explained of the design objective of their New York apartment.
The result was a remarkably spare space with white walls, herringbone oak floors, white upholstered furniture, and electric basswood shades covering the large windows. “I was pushed by Ralph, I think, further than I have ever been before,” Donghia says. “I went further down the road to a totally minimalist viewpoint than I ever imagined. And this was directly due to his commitment to perfection. Ralph would do a detail again and again, until it was perfect.” Lauren was thrilled with the spareness of what they had created (although the initial design has been updated, the style is still very clean). “It was such a relief to come back to after a long day of looking at endless swatches, patterns, and colors,” Lauren said when the apartment was first finished. “Part of that peacefulness came from the view of the sky, the Central Park Reservoir, and watching the lights coming on all over Manhattan at the end of the day.”
As he built their business, Lauren and his family began to spend holidays in the Hamptons. They first rented a faded red barn in a meadow in Southampton. In subsequent summers, they were in Amagansett, and then in a shingled saltbox in East Hampton near the ocean. By 1977, the couple and their three young children—Andrew, David, and Dylan—found a permanent summer place in Montauk. The house, built in 1940 by an architect who had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright, sits on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. “It seemed to be part of the dramatic landscape,” Lauren says of the appeal.
The Montauk house has low ceilings, stone walls, and large windows and sliding doors that let in the views of nature that surrounds them. The interiors are filled with plants, trees, and flowers. A guest cottage has a roof covered with ivy and wisteria. “In our main house, a low, wood-paneled ceiling gives the living room intimacy, as well as a glowing reflection of the sunlight that pours in through the windows and doors looking out to the ocean,” Lauren says. “Many pieces are built in, which gives the feeling of living inside a beautiful boat. I love the peacefulness created by natural colors of stone, wood, and leather.”
In those first years in Montauk, the couple began their mornings with strolls along the beach, wearing khaki shorts, denim shirts, and mirrored aviators. There were afternoons around a large, free-form pool, which he says feels like their own personal lagoon, and relaxing moments in the dunes that surround the house, with the smell of the fresh ocean air and the sound of the crashing waves. For sunsets, a manicured lawn overlooks the ocean with weathered wooden lounge chairs topped by cushions in crisp white cotton.
The first time Lauren visited a very different kind of landscape, a corner of southwestern Colorado that is not far from Telluride, it was love at first sight. In 1982, he bought a 12,000-acre ranch, with views of the San Juan Mountains, and named it Double RL (for Ricky and Ralph). “This was always a working cattle ranch, and still is,” he says. “I wanted to keep that spirit of the West alive. This is a living, working environment, with real cowboys, real animals, and real families building a life for themselves.”
The main house, and guest houses, are built using century-old hand-hewn logs, have woven twig rocking chairs covered with vintage woven blankets, and massive chandeliers made of naturally shed elk antlers. A home theater features well-worn leather armchairs softened with vintage trade blankets and pillows. Double RL has been the setting for iconic images of Lauren, such as a portrait by his longtime collaborator, the photographer Bruce Weber. He looks movie-star handsome, wearing cowboy boots, faded jeans, white T-shirt, and a pale straw cowboy hat.
One of the most impressive aspects of Double RL has to be the sense of space. There are two other similar-size ranches in the same part of Colorado and, at each, you look out, and virtually as far as the eye can see, is the property.
“It’s bigger than Manhattan,” Lauren said this summer of his ranch, with a smile. The mood could not be more different at the property in leafy Bedford, New York. It is a Norman-style manor house built in 1919, with stone walls and a pitched roof of wooden shingles, where the family has lived since the early 1990s. “It’s a combination ‘hunting lodge’ and stately home,” is the designer’s description.
The interiors of Bedford are luscious, with dark walls, polished mahogany paneling, historic paintings in gilded frames, 19th-century crystal chandeliers, and dense, formal arrangements of white hydrangeas and imperial lilies. There are Louis XV wing chairs covered with zebra, and leather club chairs with tartan throws. In the master bedroom, where the walls are covered with deep blue baize, an 18th-century painting of peacocks and peafowl is paired with a pair of black and white photographs of calla lilies by Robert Mapplethorpe. “What is important here is that only this designer, with his particular style radar, the man who gave us the oxford-cloth button-down pillowcase and the wingtip brogue wing chair, could take the symbols of a civilized life and arrange them into so potent an interior,” suggested Architectural Digest. “The atmosphere in this house is intense, like breathing pure oxygen. It goes to your head.”
The Laurens purchased their first house in Jamaica in the mid-1980s. Set on the highest point of the Round Hill resort, and now known as High Rock, it was built in the early 1950s (the architect, F. Burrall Hoffman, Jr. also designed Miami’s Italianate Villa Vizcaya). The interior, with white walls and dark floors, feels exotic, with rattan furniture, antique blue-and-white porcelain ginger jars, and chinoiserie mirrors. The master bedroom has banana-leaf matting, black hurricane shutters, and a four-poster bed draped with mosquito netting. “I lead a very hectic life, and I’m busy all the time,” Lauren has explained. “In Jamaica, I have no obligations. It’s very serene, a different world, far away from everything.”
As their children were growing up, the Laurens decided they needed more space in Jamaica and, in 1997, they purchased a second house, this one right on the water. The property was originally built by Babe and Bill Paley, those great paragons of 20th-century American style, and it is no coincidence that Slim Aarons photographed Babe here, lounging elegantly around the pool. The house—White Orchid, as the Laurens call it—is pristine white concrete, a main pavilion with a soaring pagoda roof, and expansive terraces that look directly at the ocean. “While High Rock has a classic feel, White Orchid is clean with a barefoot kind of luxuriousness,” Lauren says.
What might be most fascinating about this astonishing collection of interiors, aside from the fact that they are all the vision of one man, is how they continue to inform his work. They are like a far-flung network of laboratories for the Ralph Lauren aesthetic. Elements, ideas, and moods make their way into the shops and the Home collection.
And the sky, it would seem, is the limit. “Other designers do clothes,” Lauren has said simply, “I do life.”