Along with pioneering such notable innovations as the gift with purchase, Estée Lauder was among the first beauty-industry leaders to recognize the power of linking a respected brand with an alluring lifestyle. Her company’s product line may have been all about creams, cosmetics, and fragrances, but its advertising campaigns told a story that touched on everything from fashion to decoration—one that consumers inevitably conflated with Lauder’s own private world. So it stands to reason that when the late businesswoman’s granddaughter Aerin Lauder decided to create her own eponymous firm, called simply Aerin, stylish living would be at its heart.
Envisioned as a cosmetics, fashion, and furnishings company, Aerin made its debut last year with beauty products, scented candles, and home accessories, and expanded this spring to include footwear, sunglasses, and jewelry. A fabric and rug collection has just launched, and two more home lines—furniture and lighting—will roll out in September. Lauder is also coming out with a book, Beauty at Home, a colorful, inspiring guide to domestic elegance that will be published later this year.
“I love to decorate a room—from the furniture to the objects to the books,” says Lauder, who has held key positions within the family business for more than two decades. In fact, one of her childhood obsessions was a dollhouse, the rooms of which she’d constantly alter to accommodate a variety of scenarios. Today the statuesque executive with the Mona Lisa smile may be working on a larger scale but her creative impulse remains the same.
The entrepreneur’s celebrated family and personal life infuse her line. “I think people love having a person behind a brand who lives it,” Lauder says. “The idea of storytelling is really important.” That story, of course, includes nods to her famous grandmother, most visibly in the new collections’ multitude of accents in gold—a favorite of Estée’s—evident in everything from the burnished base of the Maylen side table to the gleaming threads shooting through the Fiske Bermuda rug.
The offerings also incorporate subtle references to fabrics and furnishings found throughout the younger Lauder’s residences—an apartment on New York City’s Upper East Side, a Greek Revival manse in the Hamptons, and a sophisticated lodge in Aspen, Colorado—all blue-chip projects on which she worked hand-in-hand with two of the decorating world’s biggest stars, Paris-based interior designer Jacques Grange and Manhattan architect-designer Daniel Romualdez, among others. And the collections acknowledge the need for flexibility in modern life. There are handsome sofas tough enough to handle active youngsters (Lauder and her husband, financier Eric Zinterhofer, have two sons) and nesting tables that would look just as great displaying precious bibelots or supporting bowls of popcorn. “I like to entertain at home, to live beautifully but comfortably,” she observes. “The question is, How do you do it?”
The easygoing elegance of the Aerin goods helps to resolve that conundrum. Thanks to manufacturing partnerships with E. J. Victor (furniture), Visual Comfort (lighting), and Lee Jofa (fabrics and carpets), the range is broad, yet the components have been designed to relate harmoniously. “The pieces match just enough to feel finished,” Lauder explains, “but not so much that the line feels overly thought out.” In her own homes, eclecticism rules the day, she says, adding, “The mix is what makes rooms feel special.”
One of Aerin’s most intriguing offerings is the Kenmare desk, which echoes a gilded mid-20th-century treasure from Lauder’s Manhattan apartment; the cleverly crafted writing table appears to hover above the floor on V-shaped legs. The Aerin adaptation—in arresting zebrawood—is no less dramatic but is a bit more down-to-earth. A spherical light fixture dubbed Heather is encrusted with hundreds of polychrome crystals that make it fantastical and fun. And from the salon of Lauder’s Grange-designed office (AD, June 2012) came inspiration for the Vestry chandelier, a brass-and-crystal design that reinterprets a vintage example at a fraction of the price while retaining the original’s sense of quality. But no tribute is more personal, it seems, than the Joseph lounge chair: Named for Joseph H. Lauder, cofounder of the family’s cosmetics empire, the comfy piece is fashioned after one that granddaughter Aerin says was his favorite. As she recalls fondly, “I remember him sitting in that chair with his scotch and a cigar.”
If the brand’s breadth makes it seem as if it’s trying to be all things to all people, that’s precisely the point. “We want to appeal to a variety of consumers, whether they want traditional, modern, or something in between,” Lauder says. As marketing strategies go, it’s one that Estée would surely admire.
