ABOUT STUDIO KESTREL
Residential interior design built around how a home feels — not just how it photographs.
Studio Kestrel is a luxury residential interior design practice working across New York City, the Hamptons, and Miami. Founded by Paul De Andrade in 2019, the studio designs homes for warmth, comfort, and a sense of belonging — within the place they are built, and within the lives of the people who live there.
A lot of luxury interior design is built for the camera. Built to photograph beautifully in tight vignettes, designed to feel striking in a single frame. So much of it is showy, ostentatious — and so often, walking into those rooms doesn't feel anything like the way they look in pictures.
Studio Kestrel exists for the opposite. The studio designs homes that feel warm and inviting before they look striking. Real comfort combined with beauty. Gentle color. Layered materials. Natural light. Nature brought inside. Spaces that carry a sense of belonging — to the place where the home is built, and to the particular life of the person who lives there.
The work draws on organic modern principles, feng shui-informed spatial planning, and a wellness-led view of what a home should actually do for the people in it. The result is homes that work as well in everyday life as they look in photographs — spaces that welcome you in at the end of a long day, hold up to the demands of family life, and stay beautiful for years to come. Built to be lived in, not just admired.
Designed to be lived in.
WHY STUDIO KESTREL
ABOUT PAUL
Founder & principal designer Paul de Andrade.
Paul De Andrade is the founder and principal designer of Studio Kestrel. He has been designing interiors since 2014 and founded the studio in 2019.
His path into interior design is unusual. Before founding Studio Kestrel, Paul earned an engineering degree and a master's in journalism, and trained for years in painting, sculpture, and printmaking at the Art Students League of New York. He has designed and renovated several of his own homes across Manhattan, Long Island, and Miami. Earlier in his career, he completed more than 30 residential design and staging projects with a previous firm; since founding Studio Kestrel, he has completed more than 20 full-service residential projects across New York City, the Hamptons, and Miami.
That mix — engineer's systems thinking, journalist's listening, artist's eye — is the foundation of how the studio works. Floor plans are tested for how light moves through them at different times of day. Materials are specified for how they age over time, not just how they photograph on day one. Early client conversations dig deeper than typical design intakes, focused on how the household actually lives day-to-day — so the final design fits the people, not just the space.
OUR APPROACH
Three principles, one practice.
The work consistently returns to three frames. Each one shows up in how rooms are planned, how materials are selected, and how a home is finally lived in.
01 - ORGANIC MODERN
Curved forms. Warm natural materials.
Honed limestone, white oak, hand-troweled plaster, layered linen and wool. Curves where modernism would have stayed straight. Forms drawn from nature, surfaces that invite touch.
02 - FENG SHUI INFORMED
Flow, sightlines, light.
How a person moves through a home. Where the eye lands first. How rooms open into rooms. The spatial logic that makes a home feel right before anyone can name why.
03 - WELLNESS LED
Daily livability, by design.
Air, acoustics, comfortable furniture, warm lighting, layered bedding. Homes designed for sleep, focus, recovery, and ease — not just for the photograph.
FEATURED PROJECTS
Two projects that show what the practice does.
UPPER WEST SIDE · PENTHOUSE · FULL RENOVATION
West End Avenue Penthouse
A Lincoln Square penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows over the Hudson, designed for a bicoastal media couple who arrived asking for white-on-white. The work became a study in how to layer texture, depth, and luxurious material moments without losing the light or openness of the original vision.
SOUTHAMPTON · FULL-HOME RENOVATION · FAMILY RESIDENCE
Southampton Family Retreat
A Hamptons full-home renovation for a family with three young children — a spec build reworked from top to bottom. Rooms sized to how the family actually uses them: a dining room set for twelve, a media room built for Friday movies, a playroom for tumbling, reading, and crafting. Layered wood, natural fibers, and a saturated color palette instead of the all-white the house started with.
OUTSIDE THE STUDIO
Lived, not staged.
Paul keeps a daily yoga practice. He bikes almost everywhere — finding more interesting routes than highways, and choosing fresh air over a car whenever the weather makes it possible.
He spends as much of the summer as he can in the garden at his Brookhaven home on Long Island, where the hydrangeas, berries, and seasonal plantings ask for real attention. He rarely closes the windows of his own home; if the weather permits a breeze, that is what the home is going to have.
It is the same set of priorities — fresh air, daily movement, nature close by, comfort that doesn't perform — that the studio brings into the work for clients.
PRESS & PUBLICATIONS
Featured in.
SEPTEMBER 2024
MAY 2024
MAY 2026
Hamptons Magazine
JULY 2026
MAY 2024
JANUARY 2024
MAY 2024
NOVEMBER 2024
FALL 2022
MAY 2024
START A PROJECT
Ready to start a project? Let's talk.
Every project at Studio Kestrel begins with a 2-hour design consultation. A working session, not a sales call. We sit down with your project, discuss the home and how you want to live in it, and define the vision, scope, and direction for what comes next.