A Colorful and Vibrant Home
The Colorful & Collected Home of Roller Rabbit’s Founder

Lively and bold, with a globe-trotting spirit: It’s a description that could apply as well to Roberta Freymann’s fashion and textiles line, Roller Rabbit, as to the woman herself. 
Born in London, Roberta grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and has spent decades exploring far-flung locales, from Argentina to India—collecting artwork, learning languages (she speaks five), and developing a serious passion for global textiles along the way. 
She launched Roller Rabbit in 2003, and the brand’s vibrant block-printed tunics, accessories, and linens have been garnering devoted fans ever since.
A Colorful and Vibrant Home
Roberta’s current home, a high-ceilinged apartment in a grand 1900s Manhattan building, is an embodiment of this glamorous, worldly aesthetic. And she happened upon it by chance. 
As empty-nesters living in a larger unit in the building, Roberta and her husband were looking to scale down just as a young family in a neighboring apartment sought to go bigger. 
A simple swap left both parties happy, though Roberta immediately spotted a few necessary fixes. 
The most practical, a lack of closet space, was quickly remedied, but something else was also missing: color. “They were very minimalist,” says Roberta of the previous homeowners. “And you can see I definitely am not!”
A Colorful and Vibrant Home

“The entrance to me is like an art gallery,” says Roberta of her apartment’s foyer, where several large works have pride of place. “You should be able to just sit down and look at the paintings if you want to.” Rich burnished woods and a velvet-upholstered settee—backed with a vintage Indian textile—warm up the crisp white walls and mosaic-tile floor.


Bringing in richly saturated paint, yards of fabrics, and a collection of vibrant artworks, she set about infusing each room with her signature bold color. As with her line, Roberta drew inspiration from her travels and from her extensive textiles collection, which includes vintage examples from Central and South America, India, Russia, and beyond. 
But while each season of Roller Rabbit brings with it new patterns, new colors, and new designs, the major decorative moments here are complete. “My house is a reflection of my taste and of my eye,” Roberta says. As her brand’s devoted fans can attest, it’s a world that’s a delight to escape into.
A Colorful and Vibrant Home
White Venetian-plaster walls (done by Roberta’s sister, as are many of the other finishings throughout the home) give the living room an airy feel—and create a clean backdrop for artwork. “I decided that I needed something that would bring out the paintings as opposed to bury them,” Roberta says. Color comes instead from the works themselves, along with an array of brilliantly hued textiles.

“Art is very important to me. We have more paintings than walls!”

— Roberta Freymann


A Colorful and Vibrant Home
The Freymanns love to entertain, so a proper dining space was a priority. A striking Baccarat crystal chandelier (found at auction and once owned by the Mexican movie star María Félix) presides over lively dinner parties, where Roberta, an avid cook, serves up seasonal favorites—fresh fish in summer, pastas and risottos in winter.

A Colorful and Vibrant Home
Against the bright dining room walls, painted in Benjamin Moore’s Capri Seas, Roberta’s antique furnishings take on a fresh, modern flair. “I always paint my dining rooms a very fun color,” Roberta says. “When you’re entertaining, your surroundings should be entertaining.”

A Colorful and Vibrant Home
Roberta’s dinner-party essentials include “good food, great wine, hopefully fun guests, and a beautiful table.” The latter is accomplished through a lively mix of old and new: She pairs her family’s heirloom crystal, china, and silver with colorful block-printed table linens from her line. “What I’ve inherited is very serious,” Roberta notes. “It can look kind of stuffy if you don’t bring it down a notch with something whimsical.”

A Colorful and Vibrant Home
Many of the apartment’s windows are finished with a swathe of richly hued silk. Roberta spotted the sumptuous yards of fabric at a market in Bangkok, and with a loose color scheme in her head, “I started just picking out silks that sang to me. The price was so reasonable that I said, ‘What’s the worst that can happen if it doesn’t work?’”


A Colorful and Vibrant Home
If there were any doubt about Roberta’s love of color, the home’s jewel-box office would prove otherwise. Coated in a poppy-red lacquer (“I can’t remember how many coats they did, but it was quite a lot!”), the walls seem to pulse with energy—and cast a warm glow over everything (and everyone) in the space. “My attitude is that all colors go together,” Roberta says. “You can just have fun.”
A Colorful and Vibrant Home
The guest bedroom is the home’s one “totally Roller Rabbit room,” Roberta says. From the sheets to the pillows to the fabric tepee, every textile boasts the brand’s signature block prints. Even the walls get in on the pattern play, decked out in a hand-stenciled design (courtesy of Roberta’s sister) modeled after a palace Roberta visited in India.


“My attitude is that all colors go together. You can just have fun.”

— Roberta Freymann


A Colorful and Vibrant Home
With her well-earned reputation for beautiful linens, it’s no surprise that Roberta has mastered the art of making the bed. There’s a little work involved—”at least the top sheet has to get ironed because otherwise your bed will look messy”—but the payoff is major. Unsurprisingly, these twin beds are highly coveted by guests.

A Colorful and Vibrant Home
Each bed gets its own mix of Roller Rabbit textiles—Roberta keeps things fresh by switching up the linens and experimenting with layered patterns. “I don’t think that there’s problem with mixing prints as long as there’s a harmony,” she says.

A Colorful and Vibrant Home
Velvety Venetian-plaster walls give the master bedroom a sense of serenity. “You don’t want something too unharmonious in your bedroom—you don’t want something that doesn’t calm you,” Roberta says. One bold stroke: the magenta silk curtains, another part of her haul from the Bangkok market.
A Colorful and Vibrant Home

A Colorful and Vibrant Home


A Colorful and Vibrant Home

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