The Mirror Wall Is In—Again

It’s one of design’s great tricks: Want to make a room feel more open and light-filled without removing a single wall? Just add a mirror wall. (Sure, a single mirror can contrive similar results, but where’s the all-out fun in that?)

It’s not exactly a new trick. Some examples that come to mind are the mirrored sunroom that reflected the verdant garden in Elsie de Wolfe’s French country home, Villa Trianon, and the dazzling mirrored salon in the Paris apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-François Daigre, which graced the cover of AD in October 1989. But lately, we’ve been noticing a particular variation on the space-expanding solution: a grid of mirrors—often antiqued, rather than super polished and reflective—that covers a large swath of one wall. It opens a room while still achieving a certain decorative neutrality. 

On first glance, you might not even notice it’s there, but “it doubles the width of the kitchen,” explains AD100 interior designer Nate Berkus of the antique mirror he and husband Jeremiah Brent used to cover a wall they could not remove (it houses flues for multiple apartments) in their New York City pad. “The kitchen is one of the things we love most about the apartment. Being able to see it regardless of which direction you’re facing makes us so happy.”

For other examples, see Sienna Miller’s English cottage, Thatch, in which a similar rendition opens things up in the cozy dining room. Or Bunny Williams’s Manhattan apartment, where a grid of custom mercury glass panels by Stephen Cavallo line the living room wall. For a wilder riff, you might recall the mirror wall lounge (complete with a stripper-slash-fireman’s pole) in Alexandre and Sofía Sanchez de Betak’s SoHo loft, which starred on the cover of AD’s February 2018 issue.