Designer Billy Cotton Loves Color. Here’s Why His First West Elm Collaboration Is All White.
Take a look at the homes acclaimed interior designer Billy Cotton has created for his clients, and one thing you won’t see a lot of is the color white. But ask what his own spaces have looked like, and Cotton—who’s crafted everything from colorful townhouses in New York City to vacation homes in East Hampton and Malibu—will tell you a different story.
“You know, I’ve tended to live in all-white environments, for like, my entire adult life,” Cotton told Robb Report during a recent Zoom interview. “Which people sometimes find funny, because I do work mostly in very deep, layered levels of color.”
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But knowing that, it makes sense that the pieces in his new collection for West Elm would all be rendered primarily in shades of white. The 25 elevated essentials, available from February 26, span everything from a cereal bowl to a platform bed. Prices range from $15 for tableware items to around $4,400 for the largest configuration of an L-shaped sectional.
Cotton says he started working on the project about a year after the initial stages of the Covid-19 pandemic when people—particularly Americans—started moving en masse to new homes. The moment kicked off a new obsession with interior design, and with the notion of having a blank slate.
“Even though I’m a homebody and diehard New Yorker, I love the idea of going West,” he says. “We looked at a lot of the work of Paul Rudolph, from the Sarasota school, and the kind of minimalistic fantasy that exists in a place that’s so naturally beautiful.”
The uniting idea behind each item, other than the palette, was to create things that wouldn’t compete with either a fresh start or a new environment. Each of the pieces, from the perforated metal fruit bowl to the pendant lamps, was crafted to fit seamlessly in a variety of spaces.
And while there’s a lot to like, Cotton’s favorite piece is the least expensive—the shell-shaped bowl. Even though it looks relatively simple, he says there’s a lot of intention behind it.
“We spent so much time working on that bowl, and so, to me, it feels very designed,” he says, referencing the different models it took to find just the right handle for it. What he hopes it will inspire people to do is, “let objects into your life that feel light and joyful and, and work.” Plus, he adds, “It’s like a perfect size for cereal.”
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