Kips Bay at 50: How the showhouse has evolved and endured

Kips Bay almost didn’t make it to 50. This March, the organizers behind the New York mainstay announced that the townhouse secured for this year’s event turned out to not be so secure, and a new location was needed. The spring President’s Dinner came and went without a venue locked in, and over the summer, increasingly urgent social media posts led to some worry that Kips Bay’s big milestone would have to wait another year.

It wasn’t the first time that the showhouse had hit a bumpy patch. In 2010, Kips Bay was postponed until the fall when the original Upper West Side venue was sold out from under it. A decade later, the pandemic shuttered the New York edition from 2020 to 2022. Along the way, there have been countless setbacks: leaky plumbing, dropped mirrors, spilled merlot—and an in