Designer Summer Thornton Delights in Daring Choices at Her New Chicago Office
Photo: Marta Xochilt Perez. Art: © 2025 Richard Anuszkiewicz / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
The Chicago-based interior designer Summer Thornton has built her name as a virtuosic mixer of color and pattern. But at times she must reserve her most daring concepts for herself. “I’m taking the ideas my clients won’t do,” she says, reflecting on the recent renovation of her own Chicago office, an 1877 Victorian house in Lincoln Park. After renting the top floor for several years, she decided to buy and restore the entire building—taking over the ground-floor bridal shop, digging a fortified foundation, and making updates in two phases amid client commissions. “It was my last priority,” she concedes, calling the two-year process “a cobbler-with-no-shoes situation.”
Intended as both a showcase for client meetings and a home base for Thornton and her team of 15, the space couldn’t fall a millimeter short of her exacting standards. “We wanted to make it really spectacular,” she notes. Case in point: the entry, with its terrazzo floors, bold green carpeting up the stairs, and pagoda pendants. Here, walls are covered in the motif that she conceived with de Gournay and dubbed Summer’s Folly. “It’s a mismatch of inspirations, from classical to folk to fairy tale.” Her young daughter suggested including cheetahs alongside sheep, giraffes, swans, and deer—a wink to the decorator’s youth in rural Illinois. “In some ways, I never feel like a grown-up myself.”
Must-haves included the materials library, lined in oak shelving, and beyond it the conference room, which—despite its silvered ceiling treatment and Chinese Art Deco rug—is the office’s most subdued expanse, a place to spread out samples for projects like Casa Rosada, the full-service rental villa she recently completed in Sayulita, Mexico. (Her current slate of work includes homes in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cabo, and Aspen, and a private club in Manhattan.) Wrapped in a floral pattern, the adjacent front parlor is where employees can find inspiration perusing the many design books and magazines. “We wanted it all to feel elevated,” notes Thornton, who delights in details like the bespoke seamless blue-dolomite desks or the kitchen’s skirted sink. “It’s also a little nod to how organized we are—some people pick up on that.”
Returning to the question of what she might not reprise for a client’s home, she looks around her eclectic private workspace, marked by a tiger-print sofa and large-scale floral wallpaper, smiling. “It’s so funny, I was Zooming with a client once and he was like, ‘Your office is hideous,’ ” she laughs, never one to take offense. “He was sitting in this very sterile building, and I said, ‘Well, I think yours is hideous!’ ” Strong opinions, of course, are what appeal to her most. “I was like, ‘I got you—we’re good.’ ”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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