The world of Muriel Brandolini—self-made interior designer for the fabulously tasteful—has the lush smell of orange flower. She’s planned it that way, just as she’s planned every detail of The World of Muriel Brandolini, an exhibition at the Phillips de Pury auction house in Midtown Manhattan. The exhibition is the preamble to a forthcoming auction and pairs with both a book by Rizzoli, of the same name, and a limited-edition collection of beaded pillows for Barneys.  
    The auction will be the first time Brandolini’s ever sold objects from her personal collection (she usually prefers shopping trips to Europe with clients), and she’s arranged it all—a Venetian-glass chandelier with a neon Peter Halley painting, a pair of Victorian sofas with a trio of Max Snow photos—into her signature mix-and-match style. She considers the show, which she pitched to Simon de Pury herself, as, “Muriel Brandolini: onstage.”
    As Flaunt photographer Christophe Kutner snaps her photo, Brandolini—wearing a leopard print dress with giant coral and gold baubles, designed by her friend James de Givenchy—leans back on a Napoleon III-style settee upholstered in tufted emerald green velvet (estimated to fetch between $15,000 and $20,000) and emits an air of determination and flair. She seems incapable of ceasing work for even a moment; while she poses, she issues eloquent instructions to her team in French and English, honed by a life spent in the locales of her upbringing—Vietnam, Martinique, and Paris.
    By the time she sits down for the interview, her face has been stripped of any make-up, revealing immaculate skin. The leopard dress has been replaced by a skirt and cardigan in a palette of rust and orange. Her hair is tied back in a ponytail. She’s been doing a lot of interviews lately, and while she’s clearly enjoying her moment, it’s easy to see she’s eager to get back to work.
    At first, she was hesitant to even do the book, the centerpiece of all these recent projects. “To stop, look back, and analyze my work—it’s not something I do,” she says in her makeshift dressing room overlooking the auction house floor and her collection below. “I just do it and I love it and on. Go.”
    Brandolini began decorating in the early 1990s as a way to personalize her young family’s sublet apartment. Taking cues from her days as a linen retail worker (Brandolini, while searching for her first New York gig, began her life in fabric upon responding to a hand-written “Help Wanted” sign, justifying her sales skills on her time spent hawking sunblock from a motorscooter to tourists as a teenager in Martinique), and later as a fashion stylist for Vogue Italia under Franca Sozzani. Her foundation became Manhattan’s garment district and she swathed the small apartment in a patchwork of colorful fabric. The results soon shocked the upper crust and electrified the design community.
    Of her notable switch to the less ephemeral world of décor, Brandolini shares, “Fashion is really: you dress and you get undressed; you create a picture and the picture is for the moment and then the fashion changes. I trained myself to go to the extreme of what my eyes like. And I was trained by the best.”
    And much like fashion, even the most perfect space is constantly evolving. “You change, and that makes such a great life, when you allow yourself to change and keep moving,” she says. For Brandolini, that means stepping away from the bright reds and hot pinks that made her famous for a more subtle palette with luxe details, such as fabric walls encrusted with beaded words from her favorite books and songs.
    Through decoration—her true passion—Brandolini is able to create new worlds, to make the imagination physical. While her relationship with clients is like a marriage and she sometimes feels like a shrink, her ultimate job “is to paint their universe."
    “It’s not superficial,” she assures. “It’s the first thing that cocoons you. You come home from a long day of work; it is your place. It should be a place where you are nurtured, where you are re-comforted, where you find your peace, where you find something protective. It’s not about you the moment you step out of your door to the world and the street, so at least there it’s what you choose and select.”
    With so much on her plate, it’s difficult to pause and look ahead. In addition to a well-deserved rest, Brandolini wants to share what she’s learned with the next generation of designers. Her advice? “To be an observer, to listen, to feel free. Just go for it; try it once.”