A merican fashion designer Tory Burch hops easily on top of a bronze octagonal Diego Giacometti table in her Southampton entryway. As she poses for her portrait, she pauses to give her husband (and CEO) Pierre-Yves Roussel a quick kiss as he heads out to play tennis. Her poodles, named Chicken and Slim, mill around, pulled to her like magnets. She shouts upstairs to one of her sons—she shares nine children and stepchildren with Roussel and ex Chris Burch—to turn down the volume on his call. The Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” booms throughout the 1925 brick mansion, Westerly. Burch, wearing jeans she designed herself, looks completely calm amid the chaos.
“I wanted a place that didn’t have anything too precious and off-limits,” she says, when I remark on how relaxed the scene is, despite the caliber of the pieces around, above and below us. “I love that table,” she says of the Giacometti, designed in the late 1970s by Alberto’s Egyptology-obsessed younger brother. “Obviously it’s a beautiful table, but I didn’t want it to be just considered a piece of art that you can’t touch.”
That sense of ease works its way through a life that is undeniably grand: In addition to Westerly, she and her family move among an apartment in The Pierre hotel in Manhattan, a belle epoque flat in Paris, a country home in Normandy and King’s Leap, the former estate of Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon in Antigua. Within each home are treasures, from Hubert de Givenchy’s 18th-century chairs to an Urs Fischer lamp to Vladimir Kanevsky’s ceramic cabbages, a wedding gift from Roussel.
“Tory collects what she loves,” says New York interior designer Daniel Romualdez, who has collaborated with Burch on many of her properties, plus her office and first store. “She has a voracious, intellectually curious eye.”
Before she was Tory Burch—the billionaire founder and creative director of one of the most successful American fashion companies ever—she was a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, tomboy, raised by two collectors with their own confident tastes. Reva and Ira Earl “Bud” Robinson were auction nuts, devouring catalogs and making pilgrimages to sales. They’d travel to Europe or Morocco for six weeks in the summer, leaving Burch and her three brothers at home (“It was a different generation,” she says), and return with textiles, pottery and art from their travels.
While Burch might not share their exact obsessions—such as her father’s suits of armor or her mother’s Coromandel screens—her parents’ approach to collecting very much shaped hers. “The biggest takeaway that I learned from them is that it was more about instinct and emotion rather than a price point or the value of something. It was more about style and how it made you feel,” she reflects today.
Over the years, Burch’s taste has grown more curated. “When I think about how I grew up, it was a bit more ‘more is more.’ It was a lot more layering, collections upon collections.” Now, she says, she tries to distill that down and exhibit “more restraint.”
Romualdez, who’s worked with Burch for over 30 years, says that when she started sending him auction listings, artwork and furniture she was considering for her Paris apartment—her first to feature stark white walls and ceilings—he teased her that their tastes had grown apart. “But what I thought of then as a challenge is now what I love most about the apartment. The surprising juxtapositions and the intriguing dialogues between the artists are really the best thing about the place,” he says. The rigorous editing of the interiors helps pieces, like a 17th-century market scene by Andries Beeckman and massive Elizabethan portraits by Robert Peake the Elder, shine.
During COVID, Burch had the time to reset. “Rather than my inspiration coming from elsewhere, I had to think internally,” she says. “I thought a lot about where I started: my home in Pennsylvania, in Valley Forge. There was a Shaker influence. The beauty in utility.” Her spring 2021 collection, inspired by the simplicity of Shaker aesthetics, was installed at Hancock Shaker Village, in Massachusetts, alongside historic baskets and brooms.
That sensibility is present in some of the paintings that line the halls of her Southampton home, such as a small Andrew Wyeth painting of baskets and a series of deceptively dainty Madeline Hewes mid-century landscapes. (In 1952, Time magazine wrote of Hewes, “she paints pleasant, easy-to-understand pictures, which people enjoy looking at and museums, as well as private collectors, like to own”—still true!)
Burch’s parents also shaped a certain eclecticism, which makes poking around her homes a very satisfying experience.
“I love the mix of so many different ideas—art mixed with ceramics or baskets,” says Burch. “It could be an Old Master painting next to a contemporary piece of pottery. There’s something I find interesting about the way things play off of each other—and the fact that they are different.”
Nowhere is that contrast so evident than her Southampton living room, with its focal piece: a 1963 abstract Helen Frankenthaler painting that simply glows with its citrus palette. Burch, who calls Frankenthaler “the most remarkable colorist,” says she’s appreciated the painter’s work since her days as an art history major at the University of Pennsylvania. A more conventional collector might not punctuate the Frankenthaler with a family photo of her sons with lacrosse sticks on the table below—but Burch does.
Framing the Frankenthaler are voluminous peach taffeta curtains, which were around long before the painting yet cannily mirror its color palette. “It wasn’t really meant to be a connection, but it was obvious after the fact,” says Burch.
“I don’t really think about art working with the interior per se, but it just sort of happened that way.”
On a nearby table is a delicate Staffordshire bowl of ceramic peas, more personal than pompous. Burch’s Southampton basement is filled with more of her extensive ceramics collection. “I definitely have an addiction to pottery and ceramics—I’ve got to get it under control,” she admits.
Ceramic vegetables are one of Burch’s great loves, from the peas to her beloved Kanevsky cabbages. It’s an obsession she shares with the late, great horticulturist and grande dame Mellon, who adored trompe-l’oeil pieces like vegetable tureens and asparagus boxes. Burch’s Mellon connection is deep and well-documented, from her purchase and preservation of Mellon’s Antigua estate to her acquisition of many Mellon pieces through auction. Mellon’s aesthetics have also found their way into Burch’s work, with pieces like the Bunny Knot handbag, a tufted purse inspired by a cushion Burch found in Mellon’s home.
“I started thinking about all the collaborations that I’ve done, and most of the people were over 80,” she says. “I never realized that, but it really was funny.” In addition to channeling Mellon, who died in 2014 at age 103, Burch has designed homeware with the Palm Beach queen of lettuceware, Dodie Thayer; featured the late Walter Schels’ animal portraits in store installation and as prints; created a capsule collection with iconic jeweler Kenneth Jay Lane; referenced the archive of Paris decorator Madeleine Castaing; and named a handbag for her inspiration and friend Lee Radziwill.
Another older collaborator was the late interior designer Robert Kime. He worked with Charles, then-Prince of Wales—and with Burch and Roussel, who hired him to do their house in Normandy. After traveling in Japan together in 2019, Burch and Kime collaborated on the Nara collection, a line of textiles and wallpaper inspired by the ancient city of Nara. “The way that he thought about craft and artisans was like a miracle: He would get choked up talking about it,” says Burch. When Kime died in 2022, Burch wanted pieces that reminded her of her friend. She has a portrait of his dogs in her Hamptons guest room, and a painting that Kime once owned, of a man with a pickax, hangs in her Paris hallway.
Reflecting on her friendships with icons that have resulted in collaborations, Burch says, “I love highlighting the work of people who maybe could have gotten more recognition than they did.”
Which is not to say that Burch is stuck in the past—on the contrary. “I love looking at contemporary artists and seeing why they do what they do, and their commentary on things,” she says. She’s drawn to pieces for her collection such as Romuald Hazoumè’s masks composed of trash, a wild orange-flecked George Condo mounted not far from the Frankenthaler and a mystical Peter Doig painting of a crow that hangs in her New York apartment.
She collaborated with the artist Rashid Johnson on a look for the 2025 Met Gala around the theme of “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” They pulled in references from Johnson’s paintings and deployed beading and embroidery to mimic his style of scraping paint. Burch says Johnson was adamant that he wanted to dress a “modern-day Toni Morrison.” They landed on writer and director Janicza Bravo. “Her take on culture and what’s happening today is a cultural critique,” says Burch.
The permeability between Burch’s homes and her fashion design work is an ongoing dialogue. In Paris, she was inspired by an 18th-century men’s waistcoat to create a sumptuous embroidered canopy for the primary bedroom. Although both the waistcoat and the bed are pale pink and decidedly feminine, Roussel loves it too. “It was what men used to wear, which I think is interesting,” she says. “It’s about tension and contrast: I’ve always been interested in high/low, masculine/feminine, old/new.”
Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the founder of art consultancy and gallery Salon 94, speaks about her friend and client’s “eclectic” eye. “Tory has a fondness for small-scale paintings,” says Rohatyn. “With her love affair with a Frenchman, and making a second home there together, Tory dove deep into Parisian culture.” The onetime Parisian René Magritte became an artist of interest for Burch, and the two women found a rare 1929 painting of a flowerpot, a biomorphic form, a word and a sky dotted with clouds. “We brought it to her just-completed Paris apartment, and it slipped in perfectly—a painting in miniature, capturing her many eras and her intellect,” says Rohatyn.
“I think about longevity rather than trend,” Burch says, noting that her latest collection began with a pair of her father’s old corduroys. In a season of life when she’s launching her children into adulthood while creating fashion that appeals to even the youngest consumers, she’s as obsessed with newness as she is continuity. She says she’s constantly asking, “Why do things endure? Why do ideas keep coming up?”
In Burch’s world, following your instincts means themes come full circle. Her first piece of art, given to her in college by her parents from their folk-art collection, was a celebratory wedding scene by the self-taught painter Clementine Hunter. Born into a Creole family on a Louisiana plantation, Hunter began painting in her 50s and went on to create thousands of vibrant canvases.
Decades later, Burch was exploring her new home in Antigua, which still contained many of Mellon’s original belongings. In Mellon’s private bathroom, Burch was touched to see pillowcases in two D. Porthault prints that Burch herself already collected. They were topped with a little quilted textile heart.
And in a closet, stacked among other belongings, Burch was astonished to find a painting by none other than Clementine Hunter, in the same style as her own. Burch hadn’t been aware that Mellon, like her parents, collected Hunter’s work. “It’s so striking,” she says of these coincidences. “I was blown away.”
Hair, Michael Johnson; makeup, Berta Camal; postproduction, May.
