Interior Designer in New Canaan, CT

New Canaan interior design starts with the house you already own

Our New Canaan clients own a house they chose for its architecture or its setting and want the inside to work for the household living there today. Dozens of those houses are modern. The same National Register form describes the town's mid-century houses through "characteristically Modern glazed walls" and "an emphasis on open interior and outdoor space."

Households here are family-sized. The town has 7,153 households averaging 2.91 persons each, based on Census estimates for 2020 to 2024. A plan drawn for a 1950s family seldom has room for two home offices, teenagers, and weekend guests at once.

Can an interior designer work on a mid-century modern house?

Yes. A good mid-century renovation keeps the glass, the long sight lines, and the link to the outdoors, then fixes what the original plan lacks, such as storage, a working kitchen, or quiet rooms. Cityzen Designs has renovated a 1960s chalet in White Lake, NY, keeping its character, and late-modernist houses on Long Island.

Modernist house renovation at the Orient Point Summer Residence

The Summer Residence in Orient Point, NY is our clearest example of renovating a modern house while respecting its architecture. The project covered 4,000 sq ft of interior and exterior work on a late-modernist summer home. Over the years, mismatched additions had buried the original design.

Plenty of owners assume additions like these have to come off, yet at Orient Point I-Beam Design developed an architectural approach that brought every addition into one architectural language and opened a formerly inward-looking house to its gardens and pool.

The details carry the idea. Ipe and mahogany decks, stained cedar trellises, and angled white walls refer to Long Island's wooden boats. Aluminum panels and cantilevered canopies give shade, and a hornbeam tree grows straight through the entry canopy.

Inside, custom details, collected objects, and bold color reflect the client's Haitian heritage and interest in art and fashion. The project received an IDA International Design Award Honorable Mention.

Closer to New Canaan, Freedman House in Greenwich shows the same thinking inside a family home of about 4,000 sq ft. A wall came down between the sunken living room, dining room, and home office. A continuous walnut platform works as a step, then a built-in corner sofa, backed by a low bookcase that doubles as a serving surface. New walnut furnishings sit beside the family's mid-century pieces. The house won Silver in the Interior Design category of the 2024 New York Architecture Design Awards, listed on our awards page. "Everyone who walks in, all love what we have done," M. Freedman told us.

What if the additions on my house don't match the original?

Mismatched additions can be brought into line with the original house. At Orient Point, I-Beam Design reworked them into one architectural language with shared materials, trellises, and canopies, while the interiors gained custom details and color. Exterior and structural changes need an architect, and Cityzen coordinates the interior design with that work.

Have a house where the additions and the original never quite agreed? Walk us through it.

Talk through your modern house renovation

A Cityzen interior design project runs on context first

Every Cityzen project begins with context: how you live, what you value, and the character of the house and town. Our design approach rests on three ideas. Context comes ahead of style. Rooms and built-in pieces should serve more than one purpose and adapt as a family changes. And clients are encouraged to aim past convention.

In practice, a project opens with a confidential consultation and a visit to the house. From there the design takes shape around the plan, the built-ins, and the materials, and we coordinate drawings with your architect, engineer, and contractor. Past clients describe the results in their own words on our testimonials page. G.L. says the renovation finished on time and on budget and that "I-Beam over-delivered on every aspect of the project." T.P. describes a renovation that grew larger and longer than planned and was handled with diligence.

Here is an illustrative case. A 1960s New Canaan house has a glass-walled living room and a dark 1980s family room tacked onto the back. The design might carry the original ceiling line and floor material into the addition, then fit built-in shelving along its blind wall. Think of the original house as the grammar, with every later room written to follow its rules.

Recommended: Gather the original drawings, any addition plans, and photos of the furniture and art you plan to keep. Those three things shorten the first meeting.

Will the new design follow my house's architecture?

Yes, that is the starting point. Cityzen's published approach puts the character of the place ahead of style trends, and Orient Point shows it at full scale. Original features such as glazed walls, long sight lines, and the connection to the grounds get studied first, so new built-ins, finishes, and color work with them.

Azin Valy leads the design work at Cityzen

Azin Valy, who founded Cityzen Designs, trained as an architect at The Cooper Union School of Architecture and co-founded the award-winning New York firm I-Beam Design. Her more than two decades of work range from 250,000 sf of international headquarters to 250 sf of refugee housing. Schools including Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University have invited her as a guest critic.

Architectural training matters on a modern house, where walls, glass, and built-ins carry the design. Connecticut reserves the title "registered interior designer" for people registered with the state, and Cityzen Designs does not claim it. Projects from Azin's studio and from her years with I-Beam have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, and Dwell, collected on our press page.

Is the designer trained in architecture?

Yes. Azin Valy is a graduate of The Cooper Union School of Architecture and co-founded I-Beam Design, an architecture firm in New York. She brings that background to interior renovation, which helps on houses where structure and space define the style. Permit drawings still come from a registered architect or licensed engineer on each project.

Commercial and hospitality interior design for New Canaan

Cityzen Designs designs offices, showrooms, and restaurants as well as homes, and New Canaan businesses can hire the studio for those spaces.

Our commercial interior design projects include a 9,000 sq ft bridal showroom and offices on Fifth Avenue for designer Reem Acra, completed with I-Beam Design. The plan leads clients through the collections, then into smaller rooms for consultations and fittings.

Our hospitality design includes the Macao Trading Co. restaurant in Tribeca, a 4,000 sq ft I-Beam Design project with an 82-seat dining room under a mezzanine. Salvaged teak lattice screens divide the room into smaller zones, and custom light fixtures reuse antique bicycles, boats, and rickshaws.

Clear plans, honest materials, and light carry over from the modern house work into each commercial space.

Key Takeaways

• New Canaan holds more than 90 mid-twentieth-century Modern houses, per a 2010 National Register form.

• Cityzen's scope covers layout changes, custom built-ins, materials and color, and coordination with your architect and builder.

• The Orient Point Summer Residence unified mismatched additions on a 4,000 sq ft late-modernist house.

• Freedman House in Greenwich won a 2024 New York Architecture Design Awards Silver for its interior.

• Permit drawings come from a registered architect or engineer.

Ready to see what your house could hold for the people living in it now?

Request a consultation for your New Canaan house