The Mind-Bending Art of Decorating With Mirrors

“I’ll be your mirror,” the German chanteuse Nico vowed in The Velvet Underground’s song of the same name. And while not everything the troubled singer said is worthy of emulation, those in the know in the art and design world have been picking up her pledge lately. With one just look, the appeal of harnessing the power of reflection is easy to see.

This spring, the David Lewis Gallery, in Tribeca, presented a range of the late John Boskovich’s works in etched mirror. Made in the mid ’90s, his looking-glass creations cast their users into various scenarios: In one, a viewer sports a crown of thorns; another sets them into a staring contest with Medusa. Consider them mirrors for discomfiting rooms.

Elsewhere in New York, colorful mirror-canvases made by Carlito Carvalhosa are on view at Nara Roesler, while at Bitforms, artist-technologist Daniel Rozin pushes the limits of what mirrors even are, imagining them in motorized, responsive formats.

Whether your tastes are avant-garde or more restrained, this could be the moment to embrace the mind- and space-expanding potential of mirrors for yourself. To start, when decorating with mirrors, reconsider the idea that they exist only to amp up the impact of daylight in the home.

You could do worse than follow the example of interior designer David Netto, who uses the storied surfacing to push the boundaries of architecture itself. In a ground-floor maisonette near Kensington Palace, Netto installed a mirror, complete with faux casing, where local landmark regulations wouldn’t allow a door. Another mirror seems to cause an Egyptian-esque fireplace to hover in space. “Mirrors behave strangely,” Netto says. “You don’t necessarily know what you’re going to be looking at when you install it. You just know that something glamorous will happen.”

Clients sometimes fear too much glamour will happen, as their minds turn to Halston’s over-the-top hall-of-mirrors showroom in the Olympic Tower. Netto reminds them Dorothy Draper deployed them with ease, with ornate frames that hinted of molding while upholding the symmetry of a classic Georgian interior, or atop Hollywood Regency dressing tables to offer just a touch of star power to a boudoir. The Modernists out there might turn their minds to Richard Neutra, who installed one across the full wall of the top floor of his famed VDL House. “You think of these modernist architects as being extremely rational and strict, not about decadence in any way,” Netto muses, “but Neutra saw the opportunity of doubling the view of the lake. Plus, it’s a house of glass. What is mirror but another form of glass?”

Try making a mirror a window, like Katherine Thewlis of Hausmatter Interiors. For the renovation of her own home, in Tennessee, Thewlis placed an arched mirror over the sink of her purple kitchen to frame a view—back into the room, that is. Or you could go for a kitschy moment, planting palm tree mirrors à la this LA vacation rental.

Whatever you do, use the mirror to guide moments of concealing and revelation. In a previous apartment of his own, Netto hid a clumsy plumbing riser inside a reflective column. “It can make something undesirable go away,” he says, “and create a dazzling, distracting presence.”

Netto offers a final, more challenging option, too—because sometimes a mirror’s absence, rather than presence, is noteworthy. An example he points to is a bathroom in an Upper East Side townhouse designed by Lorenzo Mongiardino. “There is a full-height collection of Greek plates on the wall, but no mirror. And I think it was some kind of anti-statement, like: ‘You think there are rules? I’ll show you.’ I think it is mischief.”

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