Sasha Bikoff is in her home in East Hampton, enjoying a final stretch of summer weather and a slower pace even as Labor Day has come and gone. The abode, admits the interior designer and loud-and-proud maximalist, is actually more humble than most of her designs. “It was a challenge for me because it’s probably the most minimalist [project] I’ve done to date,” says Bikoff, who is blond and tan with intense, observing eyes. Still, the white, A-frame house features, among other attributes, a sprawling bathroom mosaic of a 16th-century Dutch world map, door handles cast from megalodon shark teeth, and horseshoe crab-shaped sconces. The living room is equipped with a rainbow lighting system capable of producing a broad spectrum of precise colors, including the palette of a chosen photograph—such as, Bikoff suggests, a snapshot of a pink hydrangea from her beloved garden. “My lifestyle here is nature girl,” she says, adding that the locale is special for its history of drawing in noted artists like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. “It’s famous for its light and the way that the sun sets in the spring, so I immediately gravitated towards the area.”
It’s understandable that Bikoff would need this self-styled retreat from New York City, where the 38-year-old is in constant demand. In the 12 years since founding her namesake design firm, she has become a one-woman rejoinder to the tyranny of neutral tones and stark finishes—pejoratively dubbed millennial greige—in charting a course as a sort of maximalist tastemaker for the thinking person. Her inexhaustible visual lexicon arises in equal parts from an encyclopedic knowledge of art and design history and instincts as sharply honed as they are free-flowing. “The magic of maximalism is all about taking you on a journey. It’s the excitement of seeing fabrics, patterns, colors layered together—a space of curiosities,” she says. “In one word, it's joyfulness.”
The bathroom in Bikoff’s East Hampton home.
The entryway of Bikoff’s West Village townhouse.
A colorful living room on Central Park West, designed by Bikoff.
This month, Bikoff is releasing her first book, High Vibe Design, which, appropriately, covers a lot of ground. In it, the designer breaks down key dimensions of her wide-ranging aesthetic into 10 chapters, blending holistic advice for achieving a certain impression with more practical insight on how to personalize a space and consider its details. A chapter called The Vibes (unrelated to the title), for instance, encompasses the idea of a mood built through sumptuous jewel tones, neon or colored lighting, soft textures, and idiosyncratic touches. “It’s the one piece that takes a project to the next level,” says Bikoff. “It could be a cool lampshade or an amazing carpet.” In The Vibes, disco-era chic is an inspiration, but Bikoff’s sources are always illustrative, not prescriptive. As an example of The Vibes in action, look to Bikoff’s sultry design of the VIP lounge at Madison Square Garden, unveiled in 2024, marked by an intense red glow echoed within multiple red hues across plush surfaces. Elsewhere, a chapter titled The Culture explains how to make a room feel distinct to oneself with items collected while traveling. “The Culture creates a worldliness and intellectual quality in your home—like, I went to Morocco and got these amazing ceramic vases,” she says. “It’s adding to happy memories.”
The Benjamin Moore Boardroom VIP Lounge at Madison Square Garden.
Across Bikoff’s work, details borrowed from many times and places collide and coalesce. “There’s always a reference point—an era, a film, a fashion icon, a city,” writes Bikoff in the book. “But it’s refracted through a personal lens and then amped up to create a look that’s larger than life.” In Bikoff’s 2024 renovation of the nearly 50-year-old Upper East Side restaurant Hoexters, she approached the design like a film director, conceiving three scenes. At the front is a beguiling menagerie of animals and plants on the walls, paired with velvet stools and tiled floors. The dining room combines red plaid accents with dark green leather booths, plus an original mural depicting the spot’s first-generation regulars, including the current owner’s father and grandparents. The back room reveals storybook-esque night-sky wallpaper lit by a golden Murano-glass chandelier—conjuring an after-party for the third act, as she puts it.
The dining room of Hoexters.
The back room of Hoexters.
But interiors aren’t the only arena where Bikoff has a strong point of view. Growing up “religiously” watching Joan Rivers on Fashion Police and retaining a strong affinity for Y2K-era vintage, she now runs her own fashion-commentary Instagram account, Banned By Sasha, where she churns out hundreds of hot takes on celebrity red-carpet looks. During the 2026 Venice Film Festival, she decreed that Penélope Cruz’s dark, draped Ferragamo dress was “giving Jersey high-school headmaster,” while John Malkovich’s frilly Dior collar and relaxed suit was “giving Venetian court jester that has just gone through gastric bypass surgery and had little to no time to tailor before the ball.”
Though Banned By Sasha’s following is modest, it’s stacked with fashion stars and tastemakers, including Emily Ratajkowski, both Fanning sisters, Suki Waterhouse, Interview’s Mel Ottenberg, Vogue’s Chloe Malle, and W’s own Sara Moonves. Casually, Bikoff drops that Banned By Sasha—its tagline: “Your Stylist Hates You”—has even established its own board. Notably, her maximalist design ethos does not necessarily apply to her fashion opinions: “Chic is chic and cheap is cheap,” she says. “Subdued doesn’t have to be boring; with the right craftsmanship, it can be fabulous.”
What she does carry across both her creative outlets is a strong belief in personal style. “Most stylish people have a sense of identity that’s truly theirs,” she says. “They’re not following trends; they’re setting the trends. They don’t really play by the rules.” The same is true, in her mind, of the best rooms which feel inhabited by a particular person, layered over time with color, texture, and objects that amount to “a conversation” rather than a formula. It’s why she finds much of the quiet luxury look unappealing—not because restraint is inherently dull, but because ubiquity is. “If you were on the forefront of quiet luxury and you made it interesting, then I like that,” she says. “It’s the same with interiors.” And yet, interesting doesn't guarantee a spot on her best-dressed list. Like most, Bikoff was horrified by Shailene Woodley’s recent Emmys outfit: a Balenciaga couture ensemble that consisted of glitter pants, a periwinkle top, and maroon leather opera gloves. Asked to imagine an interior-design equivalent, she quips, “If West Elm did an installation at Versailles.”
Shailene Woodley at the Emmys.
While Bikoff credits her studies at George Washington University and American University in Paris for her formal arts foundation, her education in meaningful spaces began in childhood, spending time with her glamorous Persian grandmother. Bikoff vividly recalls how she would wear silk nightgowns, diamonds, and couture in her Long Island home, surrounded by European antiques, Persian rugs, and silk taffeta draperies. Later, while studying abroad, Bikoff was awestruck by Paris’s art and architectural heritage (“Everything looks more beautiful there,” she says) and began teaching herself about design periods through flea markets and books: “I would take photos of everything and save them in folders. I would figure out, I’m attracted to 1960s French Space Age, or, I love 1980s Italian furniture.” (That said, she’s since come to embrace how it’s often simply nature that informs her “passion for color—flowers in the garden, the sea, the sky.”)
The stairwell Bikoff designed of the 2018 Kips Bay Decorator Show House.
After working at Gagosian out of college—an experience she credits with her business savvy—Bikoff launched her firm in 2014. Her big break came in 2018 when she was invited to participate in the Kips Bay Decorator Show House (“In my industry, it’s like being nominated for the Oscars,” she says). One of the youngest designers ever selected, she was given the particularly challenging task of decorating the stairwell. The phantasmagoric homage to Memphis design she dreamed up went viral. That success put her on the radar of Donatella Versace, with whom she collaborated throughout 2019, first on a neon-lit, Memphis-meets-neoclassical palazzo during Salone del Mobile, and later on a South Beach-inspired display during Art Basel Miami Beach. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind—which is just how the designer likes it.
No matter where she is—the streets of Paris, her serene Hamptons getaway, her Upper East Side apartment, or virtually binge-reacting to celebrity outfits from bed—Bikoff has a mind that is constantly buzzing. I have to wonder, does she ever second-guess herself? She shakes her head. “It’s a combination of confidence in my work, in my research, and in my practice,” she says. “It also comes from how your first attempt is always the right attempt. How many times have we put on an outfit and changed 10 times and went back to the original outfit? It’s the same concept.”
