Getting That Glow: The New Look of Liberty
“We just had to go for it,” Kim Konigseder says. The longtime Liberty interior designer is standing with her husband and Liberty managing partner Kurt Konigseder aboard a just-completed 2019 Elegant Lady at Liberty Coach headquarters in North Chicago. And judging from the coach’s head-to-toe, breathtakingly modern redesign – from lighting to countertops to color palette – that’s exactly what they’ve accomplished.
As the creative force behind Liberty’s award-winning interiors since 1991, Kim knows her way around RV style. When conceiving a new look for Liberty’s latest Elegant Ladies, she was more than ready. “I’ve been wanting to make this change for a long time,” she exclaims. And one look at her “New Look” tells you why.
Clean, modern, light, airy, smooth, swanky – we’ve heard it described a hundred ways, but most importantly? It feels like home.
Creating that feeling required considerable thought and design savvy, on Kim’s part as well as that of husband Kurt, who handles the design engineering part of the process. Modern is great, but it has a reputation for being cold and industrial. Both Kim and Kurt wanted to clean up the lines of the classic Liberty design, but make their “new modern” feel just as warm and cozy, if not more so.
A redesigned lighting scheme is central to this achievement. Giving the illusion of heightened ceilings that “just fade away” not only brightens the space, but quite literally elevates the coach. Kurt calls it a “glow” and that feels right on the money.
That glow is what illuminates mitre-folded countertops with sharp edging, and continuous slabs with veining that looks like real stone. It shines on the wide variety of textures, tones, and materials that Kim has chosen, giving the coach an incredible amount of dimension and detail. It’s one thing to see it in pictures. In person, it’s really something to behold.
When it comes to developing and refining her design approach, Kim isn’t that far off from the rest of us. Scrolling Instagram and combing the internet for new and interesting makers, she finds and cultivates relationships with the multiple vendors that bring each coach to life. But for Kim, it’s not so much about brand names as it is about quality. If she (or a creatively minded client) can dream it up, she can find the right person to craft it.
Is this the future of design at Liberty Coach? Well, there will always be a place for the the timeless, classic Liberty style that purists have come to know and love. But judging by the overwhelming reception to date – since the unveiling in April, it’s been virtually impossible to keep a “New Look” coach in inventory for more than a few days – the “New Look” of Liberty is here to stay.
