Inside the All-American Homes of Alfredo Paredes, Ralph Lauren Home’s Longtime Chief Creative Officer

Alfredo Paredes was designing worlds before he was designing houses. As the former chief creative officer of Ralph Lauren Home, Paredes started from blank spaces—an empty window, a bare retail store, or, in the case of Ralph’s in Paris, an abandoned office building—and turned them into Americana wonderlands. A log cabin in Telluride for the winter season, maybe, or a summer garden party in the Hamptons... whatever setting provided a sense of place for Lauren’s slinky silk evening gowns or patchwork skirts.

So it’s perhaps no surprise that, in his monograph with Rizzoli about his own houses, Alfredo Paredes At Home, he admits that he’s drawn to projects where one needs to start from scratch. “The unifying theme is that there were all places that nobody else was interested in, that were sort of ugly ducklings,” he says of his homes in East Village, Shelter Island, Locust Valley, and Provincetown. (The Provincetown property, for example, had been in foreclosure before Paredes bought it, whereas the Shelter Island house was marketed as a tear-down.) “Ralph Lauren really exercised my ability to imagine.”

Alfredo Paredes and his husband Brad along with their children Carolina and Sebastian.

Photo: Noe DeWitt

Fittingly, Lauren himself wrote the foreword for Alfredo Paredes At Home: “I took him under my wing because I saw not just his talent, but his passion and love for creating and storytelling. I guess I saw a little of myself in him when I first started out,” Lauren writes. “As much as he devoted himself to working, Alfredo never forgot about living, which is what this beautiful book celebrates: the very personal homes he has created and lived.”

Much of Paredes’s style will remind you of the all-American aesthetic he oversaw for three decades at Ralph Lauren Home. His Shelter Island house has a couch inspired by the crisp striped linen of a pressed Oxford shirt, while his Locust Valley home has decorative fringes that resemble ranch gear. Yet, “I like it to be somewhat eccentric and a little bit bohemian,” says Paredes, who now runs his own interior design studio.