2017 Gift Guide: Design and Art Books
Author:Abigail StoneWe love books any time of year but we indulge in coffee table books in the winter. There’s something about a coffee table book that feels luxurious and indulgent. And when it’s dark and deary outside, their evocative words and glossy photographs encourage us to dream. Here are a few design-centric tomes that we feel deserve a place of honor in a living room, den or on a bookshelf whether you gift them to friends or colleagues or buy them for yourself.
Not Neutral: For Every Place, Its Story
Chronicling three decades of Rios Clementi Hale Studios’s award-winning work through exquisite photographs and detailed renderings, a series of supporting essays articulates how the Los Angeles-based architecture and design firm identifies unique qualities and memories embedded in each location — Grand Park, the Greek Theatre and ROW are just a few examples — to enable their designs to relay a story of community, culture and history. With globalization spreading across the planet, and the singular qualities marked a place’s individuality gradually disappearing, Rios Clementi Hale Studios is unique in their mission to “make the world ‘not neutral’.”
by Tim Campbell
Interior designer Tim Campbell, whose career spans an awe-inspiring twenty-five years, is the subject of this stunning book. It highlights Campbell’s remarkable ability to preserve and honor the heritage of the iconic properties — like Richard Neutra’s Singleton House — that form the nucleus of his work while simultaneously updating them with modern additions that allow them to accommodate a modern lifestyle. The book also touches on his work as a philanthropist in Africa.
Outside In: The Gardens and Houses of Tichenor & Thorp
by M. Brian Tichenor and Raun Thorp
Tichenor & Thorp design properties that integrate large-scale residences and luxurious gardens and landscapes with a singular, unified vision. Featured projects include a Spanish-inflected courtyard house and garden in Las Palmas; a Bel Air estate and grounds tinged with English and French influences; a Newport Beach hilltop hideaway that evokes a Portuguese quinta; a Provençal bastide and surrounding gardens transplanted to the côte sud that is Rancho Santa Fe; a Pasadena retreat inflected with John Soane–inspired details; a renovated Harwell Hamilton Harris house in Holmby Hills; two luxe contemporary Manhattan apartments; and a modern mountain getaway at the foot of the Tetons in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Illustrated with specially commissioned photographs by Roger Davies as well as Brian Tichenor’s own masterful watercolors, drawings, and plans, and with a foreword by Pilar Viladas, architecture and design editor, Outside In shares “Hollywood’s best-kept secret” with the world.
An Adventurous Life: Global Interiors
by Tom Stringer
Chicago-based interior designer Tom Stringer’s extensive travels are intimately braided into his mutli-layered and colorful work. With the same energy that motivates his own love of travel and collecting, Stringer incorporates his clients’ passions into their design schemes, creating a relaxed glamour that is both deeply personal and truly unique. Featuring lavish photography and stunning maps that reflect Stringer’s broad travels, this book reveals how the interior designer uses his rich experiences to create authentic, original and stunning projects. This is a delightful, personal and insightful look into one of the world’s most renowned interior designers.
Modern Retro Home: Tips and Inspiration For Creating Great Mid-Century Styles
by Jason Grant
Modern Retro Home is your key to unlocking the secrets to creating a thoroughly contemporary home that also takes inspiration from the past. Organized into chapters that coincide with each room of a home, Australia-based interior designer Jason Grant takes us inside homes that embrace aesthetics from the 60s, 70s, as well as other classic decades of design, walking the reader through the details that make each space work. Despite its adventure into the past, these rooms are anything but tired or cliche – Grant’s fresh and accessible style shines through every page.
New Bohemians: Come Home To Good Vibes
A companion to Blakeney’s previous book, New Bohemians: Cool And Collected Homes, this new volume walks reader through simple techniques for adding good vibes and beautiful style to their living spaces. Packed with hundreds of ideas for bringing positive energy to the home, the book features exercises and activities for thinking about rooms in new ways. Under Blakeney’s expert, engaging and encouraging tutelage (“you got this”) discover how to rearrange, paint, prop and plant your way to a home that is fresh and inspiring. Revel in Blakeney’s advice on using color and scent to enhance mood, productivity, and relaxation to uncover your “spirit environment”, easiy and affordably turn any dwelling into a personal sanctuary.
The Authentics: A Lush Dive Into The Substance of Style
by Dara Caponigro and Melanie Acevedo
A compilation of interviews with successful mavericks in their favorite spaces, The Authentics is a deep exploration into substance and style that seeks to unravel the tenets of taste and talent. Founding editor of domino magazine and current creative director of Schumacher, Dara Caponigro elicits the secrets behind the private worlds and gorgeous homes of creative trailblazers in art, design and fashion around the world. The accompanying images by Melanie Acevedo capture these tastemakers — including interior designer Miles Redd, actress Peggy Lipton, and Libertine designer Johnson Hartig — at their most relaxed: in their own environment. An inspiring tribute to confidence, originality, and the power of finding one’s own voice.
The House That Pinterest Built
by Diane Keaton and Lisa Romerien
Part style guide, part inspiration, part how-to, this engaging book by one of our most unique style icons walks us through her own home decorating journey. Keaton took the advice of her friend, celebrated film director Nancy Meyers, whose set design — from mouth-watering kitchens to automatic roller shades — has inspired its own cult, to look to the social media platform Pinterest for inspiration. There Keaton discovered both practical and fantastical, elements and styles that incite her new space. The book documents the evolution of her home, from idea to realization in brick, stone, and wood, defining what house and home means to her. Keaton, who’s as well-known for her love of interior design as she is for her quirky personal style, shares her thoughts on creating a home that is both restorative and inspirational.
