Former Ralph Lauren Creative Exec Alfredo Paredes Opens Hudson Interiors Shop

Alfredo Paredes spent most of his career designing furniture and interiors for other brands. For more than three decades at Ralph Lauren, he helped define the company’s interior design visual language—rising to executive vice president and chief creative officer and overseeing everything from global store design to the Ralph Lauren Home studio. 

Opening this Friday, March 27, from 10am to 6pm at 521 Warren Street in Hudson, his new shop, Alfredo Paredes Hudson, integrates vintage furnishings, and art with his own growing line of furniture. Despite his personal interior design studio’s major accomplishments, the understated Hudson store is the first to have his name on the building.

“Hudson just made sense to me on every level,” Paredes says. “I’ve always wanted a retail store—I’ve admired people like John Derian and Nicky Kehoe for years, and I spent decades building stores for Ralph Lauren, so I knew what a great one looked and felt like.” When he began running his own furniture business last year, the need for a dedicated space became clear. “I knew I needed a brick and mortar to show it properly.”

Hudson had been a part of the plan for a while. “It’s a cool town with a real creative community,” he says. “And it feels like a natural extension of the world I’ve always been drawn to: old buildings, history, beautiful things.” The building he found on Warren Street offered the right frame—something with its own sense of age and proportion.

The shop extends a design philosophy Paredes has been refining since launching Alfredo Paredes Studio in 2019, after leaving Ralph Lauren. His work—across residential, hospitality, and retail interiors—often leans on what he has described as a cinematic approach: spaces built through layering, narrative, and atmosphere. That same sensibility carries into the Hudson store, where objects are staged in relation to one another.

From the studio’s shop, the furniture is rooted in historical reference but built for contemporary use. Pieces like the Alhambra Console draw directly from 19th-century industrial forms, scaled up in oak with a stone slab top. Elsewhere, seating such as the San Miguel woven panel chair or the Margot sofa are softer, combining structured silhouettes with tactile materials like leather and upholstery. 

Paredes’s color palette is reserved. Quality of construction and material speaks for itself. “Earth tones are honest,” Paredes says. “They’re the colors of the natural world—wood, stone, soil, leather—and they have a permanence that more fashionable colors simply don’t.” It’s less a stylistic choice than a way of avoiding the short shelf life of trend-driven interiors. “The quickest way to date a space is to chase a color moment,” he adds. “These colors age well. They don’t ask too much of you.”

That approach carries through the store’s collection of art and objects. The vintage selection leans heavily on European pieces, with surfaces that show their use: worn farmhouse tables, early modernist chairs, things that never need updating. “There’s a real hunger for that kind of authenticity and craft.”

Alongside those pieces is Paredes’s own furniture, with a new collection coming soon. His designs—like his interiors—favor proportion and restraint over novelty, reflecting a balance between tradition and modernity that has defined his work.

If there’s a shared thread between the vintage inventory and the new work, it’s an attention to how spaces accumulate over time. “You listen to a space,” Paredes says. “You let it tell you what it needs, and you work with what’s already there.” 

Generations of Style

Paredes’s style reflects the trajectory of his life. A first-generation American of Cuban descent, he came up through a mix of fashion and interior work before finding a long-term home at Ralph Lauren. 

Beyond the shop, Alfredo Paredes Studio operates as a full-service design practice with projects spanning residential homes, hospitality spaces, and retail environments in New York, Miami, and beyond. The work carries forward the sensibility Paredes developed over decades—rooms built through narrative, where architecture, furniture, and objects are considered as part of a larger composition. His projects often move fluidly between restoration and reinvention, grounding contemporary living in a respect for history and material.

That approach is documented in his 2023 book, Alfredo Paredes at Home  (Rizzoli). The book traces four of his own residences—from an East Village duplex to a Provincetown cottage and a Victorian house on Shelter Island—offering a closer look at how his ideas translate into lived space. Across those homes, the throughline is consistent with his approach to the new store: a preference for rooms that evolve over time, shaped by use.