BELLAS ARTES

Everyone wants a stylish home, but with so much information available, how does one begin to put it all together? EnterInterior Design Master Class: 100 Rooms. The designers who’ve created the remarkable spaces in this volume individually explain in their own words the framework for the success of each room. The spaces featured in the book are broken down by type of room, including Gathering (media and family rooms), Transitional (porches and entryways), Respite (bedrooms and sitting rooms), Entertaining (dining rooms and bars), and Utility (kitchens, baths, and mudrooms). In each category, the multiple examples by designers well known from their appearances in Architectural Digest, Elle Decor, and Southern Living explore a variety of topics. Katie Ridder uses her vibrant living room to write about establishing a successful palette. Suzanne Kasler writes about the importance of light in bedrooms. Frances Merrill of Reath Design shares her thoughts about kitchens. Mark Sikes contributes an essay on tables. Steven Gambrel writes about the color blue. Josh Greene expounds on the bath. Also featuring Bunny Williams, Robert Couturier, Heidi Caillier, Miles Redd and David Kaihoi, Nicole Hollis, and Corey Damen Jenkins, the book is an elegant guide to twenty-first-century living, room by room.

Architect Adams has long had a passion for design. His appreciation for how things are made had its genesis in his childhood experiences on a farm in Asheville, North Carolina. As a boy, Adams always had a pencil in hand, sketching for hours. Today, it is his understanding of craft and response to place that sets him apart. Informed by Adams’s deep knowledge of historic precedents, proportions, and details, the homes featured in this book are imbued with soul, whether it’s a charming house in the woods on the lake, a refined contemporary beachside retreat, or a traditional manor house in town. While the homes featured range in scale and style— Tudor, Arts and Crafts, French country, Southern farmhouse—Adams imbues each with natural materials such as bespoke architectural details in millwork and molding, arched doorways, and oversized windows. He brilliantly weaves wood, stone, copper, and other natural substances through the interiors to create an effect that casts a spell inside and out. These are houses that are grounded in the past, designed for the present, and intended to remain beautiful and functional over the long term.

Spanning the extraordinary breadth of the studio’s most recent work—projects in townhouses, historic country manors, and seaside villas—the interiors in this book reflect the design philosophy of founder Emma Sims-Hilditch: Every house needs to work on a functional level before one even considers the decoration. Spaces, from sumptuous entrance halls and sitting rooms to hardworking kitchens and boot rooms, are organized for efficiency and practicality before the design team introduces an abundance of floral and damask textiles, striking colors, both refined and comfortable furnishings, and decorative trims. This book not only explores the fruits of complex and rewarding collaborations that artfully breathe new life into old buildings but also offers an insight into an exciting new chapter in the fascinating story of classic English country houses. New materials and technologies, paired with traditional decorative devices, reinvigorate a Victorian house in the city, an eighteenth-century country house, a Jacobean manor, an apartment in London’s Old War Office, and many other quintessentially British residences.

Preserving and enhancing a property rich in narrative and natural beauty has been a twenty-year obsession for this property’s owner. Mavec has called upon a host of well-known garden luminaries to help preserve what began as a farm with a solitary stone house originally owned by the publisher of the Nancy Drew mysteries while making it functional, productive, and beautiful for the twenty-first century. Today, a series of individual gardens rest within a natural hollow surrounded by native woodland, including a broad gathering space defined by whimsical cloud-pruned boxwood hedges, groves of lilacs, and dogwoods and hellebores that entice visitors into early-season walks with delicate color each spring, a stone-walled vegetable and flower garden whose geometry is inspired by medieval monasteries, winding perennial-lined paths, orchards that produce over five hundred pounds of apples each fall, a natural pond brimming with aquatic plants, and an elliptical hillside meadow farmed for hay. All lead intuitively back to the “town square,” an open area tucked among the dwelling spaces featuring a broad ground-level fountain that clearly identifies it as the true heart of the farm.

Passionate about designing buildings and neighborhoods that quietly transform the urban environment, Torti Gallas is committed to improving cities, towns, and distressed communities throughout the United States and around the world. This fully illustrated book shows how they have combined the disciplines of architecture, planning, and urban design into a single practice, creating housing and mixed-use buildings that bring catalytic change to urban neighborhoods: the mixed-use apartment buildings, rowhouses, and single-family homes that comprise the fabric of a city. Their work hearkens back to a tradition that, before World War II, created some of the country’s finest neighborhoods, including Forest Hill Gardens in Queens, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, and Russian Hill in San Francisco. Featuring 60 built projects, this book shows how Torti Gallas is dedicated to raising the level of this architecture to a new high.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright were neither competitors nor direct collaborators. Yet these romantic heroes of twentieth-century art and architecture largely operated in parallel. In this seminal book, Rovang weaves together their compelling life stories, examining newly discovered links between them and, in the process, offering a fresh perspective on their work, their intermittent yet poignant friendship, and their closeness to the desert.  Starting in 1933, O’Keeffe and Wright exchanged roughly two dozen letters in which they expressed admiration for one another but also their passion for the places that informed them—many of which they had in common. Both were born in rural Wisconsin and built their careers in Chicago and New York. However, both sought inspiration and fulfillment in places farther afield, including in Japan and the desert landscape of the American Southwest. Juxtaposing images highlighting shared aspects of their individual biographies and work, this unique take on American creative expression explores the nature of artistic friendship and the idea of “home.” Rovang’s text gives rich context to the allure and romance of her visual subject, offering readers new ways to appreciate O’Keeffe’s and Wright’s monumental contributions to American culture.