Before having the 17-foot-long sofa made, Brodsky asked Jeffrey Bilhuber if he thought it would be too big. “God, no, darling, that’s practically a car seat!” he replied. Bloodlines count. If you are the daughter of Suzanne Rheinstein, a renowned decorator and the proprietor of Hollyhock, a beloved resource for Los Angeles designers for three decades, it is perhaps not surprising that you might open your own design shop.
And, in fact, Kate Rheinstein Brodsky’s shop, KRB, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, is, in many ways, an update of her mother’s late, lamented emporium. It is one of the city’s last distinctive home shops, where antiques mix with vintage glassware and china, colorful lampshades, lacquer furnishings by Miles Redd and Jeffrey Bilhuber, and handmade pieces by artisans such as Marian…