Aerin Lauder’s love of flowers is deeply personal, being passed down to her by her celebrated grandmother, Estée Lauder, as well as her mother, Jo Carole Lauder. From fresh bouquets to floral patterns on wallpaper, fabric, and tabletop pieces, in Living with Flowers Lauder shares the many ways she brings flowers into her home. Whether it’s an arrangement of daisies in the kitchen to welcome friends or family for dinner, or a single stem on her desk to brighten the workday, flowers are an essential part of her home and her lifestyle.
While touring readers through four of his own homes, Paredes shares the key elements in his creative process, giving us access to the same tools he uses in every home to decorate rooms that feel modern even as they glamorize the past, to show us how an environment has real power to transform our very state of mind. Paredes is renowned for being a master of extrapolating an entire theme from one unique item, say transforming the stripe of a crisp Oxford shirt into a unique upholstery perfect for the seaside, or finding inspiration for a couch’s decorative fringe in a well-worn piece of leather ranch gear. He is said to have “perfect visual pitch,” creating vignettes and rooms with an energy that feels undeniably masculine and sophisticated thanks to dark wood, iron railings, rustic fabrics, an overall patina, and soft furnishings in soothing earth tones.
Where does craftsmanship end and art begin? What makes something a product, a brand impervious to time and fashions? These are the questions posed while strolling between the past and the present of Baglietto, the Italian shipyard that has been building world-class yachts for 170 years.
Success is not built in an instant. Being good, looking to the future, imposing a style that lasts over time is the gamble every entrepreneur takes. There are not many who succeed, which is why those who reach the age of 170 deserve to be studied, as well as celebrated. Baglietto is now a kind of great international club, access to which serves the right mix of passion for the sea, refined taste for boats that is never over-the-top but rather soberly chic, and, of course, the right spending capacity for objects that cost.