A consummate decorator in the old-school mold, David Kleinberg is a master of color, texture, scale, and detail. He's also a true believer in Billy Baldwin's dictum that “suitability always overrules fashion.” After training his eye at the esteemed firms Denning & Fourcade and Parish-Hadley, Kleinberg launched his own Manhattan practice in 1997. The singular rooms he creates for projects around the world adhere to the traditional virtues of elegance, beauty, practicality, comfort, and, above all, relevance to the personalities of the owners.
Kleinberg has applied his refined sensibility to a broad range of spaces, from a storied Beverly Hills estate to a superyacht being built in Europe, all unified by a sophistication and spirit attuned to the tenor of contemporary life. Kleinberg’s work for fashion designer Thom Browne and curator Andrew Bolton—the renovation of a storied townhouse on Manhattan’s East Side originally designed by architect Mott Schmidt in the 1920s for Anne Vanderbilt—graced the cover of AD’s December 2022 issue. Kleinberg’s office continues to produce projects on both sides of the Atlantic that defy easy categorization based on antiquated distinctions between modern and traditional design.
His recently completed projects include: a house on Connecticut’s Candlewood Lake, in collaboration with architect Tom Kligerman; A Park Avenue family residence, with architect Peter Pennoyer; a Georgica Pond house in the Hamptons, with architect Robert A.M. Stern; a contemporary residence, also on Georgica Pond, with architects Bates Masi; a meticulously curated home for prominent art collectors in Washington, D.C.; an Aspen vacation house, with Colorado-based architects CCY; and a host of new residential commissions from Florida to Tel Aviv. In all these projects, David Kleinberg offers a master class in understatement, confidence, and savoir vivre—a quiet rebuke to the artificial posturing and strained theatrics of interior design in the age of Instagram.
View the entire AD100 2023 list, which is featured in AD*’s AD100 issue. Never miss an issue when you subscribe to AD.*
