In case you missed the first list, I will end this post with the list of INSPIRING DESIGN BOOKS. And I'm starting off - again - with my favorite of all time, INTERIOR ALCHEMY! Two recently published books are DOMESTIC ART - Curated Interiors and DESIGNERS AT HOME: Personal Reflections on Stylish Living, reviews and photos below. You'll love them!
First blog of 15 INSPIRING DESIGN BOOKS:
http://ethniccottage.blogspot.com/2013/02/15-inspirational-books-for-ethnic.html
Hope you enjoy this list and are inspired to take a look at these books and be more adventurous in your decorating!
These photos above are from my favorite interior design book of all time, INTERIOR ALCHEMY: SECRETS TO CREATING EXPRESSIVE AMBIENCE by Rebecca Purcell. This phenomenal book was published in 1998 and at one time was selling for up to $400.00! I have seen some lately in new condition for around $80.00 - and up. Maybe that conveys to you what I discovered in 1998 - yes, I still have my original book - Rebecca Purcell is an artist and a genius. She was once visual director for ABC Carpet and Home as well as a catalog stylist forAnthropologie. Impressive chops. In this book she instructs us mere mortals in the secrets of professional interior styling and creating the ambience you want in your own space. Her style may be too moody or cluttered for some tastes but she has a gift for taking all of that uniquestuff and creating a layered look that makes a space original - nothing matchy matchy or carbon copied here! She breaks her book down into decorative styles, including "alienated", "attic" and "expedition" and then teaches us how to achieve it. Everyone I've shown this book to loves it, whether they subscribe to Purcell's style of decorating or not.
THE LATEST OF THE GREATEST:
DOMESTIC ART: Curated Interiors
By Holly Moore, Bob Brinkley, Laurann Claridge
Domestic Art: Curated Interiors captures a mind-set, piques a curiosity to look at things anew, appreciate oddities and revel in uniqueness and personal work. It s a loopy but sublime drawing-room comedy with dandies and soulful poets and style aesthetes ... all lounging, sipping and chattering away in 18th-century chateaux inserted into downtown lofts, whitewashed shotgun houses filled with Twomblys and Rauschenbergs, and dark-as-a-hedgehog tiny Tudors.
The selected houses in this book were pulled from the pages of PaperCity. Roughly a decade of design alchemy and clinking highballs. The editors of this book foraged for both the musty and gutsy and the soaring and sensual, from a 500-square-foot bedsit to a mid-century organic architectural wonder thirty seven glorious projects, from follies to disciplined mansions, from Dominique and John de Menil s International-style house with its interior by the great couturier Charles James to artist Christian Eckart s abandoned 1940s warehouses polished to gleaming architectural wonder. Marvel at a compound of rescued, early-1900s clapboards, and an 1880s German-immigrant cottage. We ve included a 50s masterwork by the great organic architect Bruce Goff, and an industrial space that crackles with own surreal designs, while a chalet-style 1913 bungalow manifests the best bits and pieces of the past. A turn-of-the-century seaside gingerbread is a study in anthropology peppered with good art; an antiquarian aims his cerebral arrows at Louis this and Louis that, then electrifies it all with saturated color; and an 18th-century chateau and an old-world hunting lodge is installed in a downtown loft space. Meanwhile, a stylish gent sips scotch neat in his Scotch Room, watched over by two mounted deer, a pheasant and a wildebeest. Shouldn't everyone have a wildebeest ... and a Scotch Room?
Call it what you will: lavish, loopy, eccentric assemblages, moody modernism. All in all, quite a look at a genre of design we call, simply, inspired.
All book quotes on this post from Amazon.com reviews unless noted otherwise.
DESIGNERS AT HOME: Personal Reflections on Stylish Living
By Rhonda Ric Carman
Ronda Rice Carman, founder of the popular lifestyle blog All the Best, takes readers on a guided tour through the houses of renowned designers, who share their thoughts on gracious living and how they bring their professional philosophies home. Designers at Home: Personal Reflections on Stylish Living presents the personal living spaces of fifty distinctive design leaders, including Charlotte Moss, Celerie Kemble, Ashley Hicks, Barry Dixon, India Hicks, Vicente Wolf, Martyn Lawrence Bullard, Kevin Sharkey, Suzanne Rheinstein, Rose Tarlow, Jay Jeffers, Michelle Nussbaumer, Jan Showers, Alex Papachristidis, Madeline Stuart, Matthew Patrick Smyth, Colette van den Thillart, Malcolm James Kutner, Ken Fulk, Scot Meacham Wood, Bunny Williams and more. These select dwellings range from chic apartments and luxurious estates, to charming country homes.
From the homey historic English hunting lodge of Nicky Haslam and the glamorous Beverly Hills home of Hutton Wilkinson to the serene Sag Harbor retreat of Steven Gambrel, each page is filled with inspiring design, entertaining ideas, and imagery that invites readers to explore the idiosyncrasies of design while infusing their own homes with individuality and flair. The book's conversational tone and practical tips from these experts provide a referential approach to creating a highly personal place. From favorite sheets and pillows, how to create impromptu dinner parties, to the decorative details that bring a room to life, each designer's meaningful advice will inspire one to thoughtfully consider their own distinctive home.
- Includes more than 300 full color images
- Features ideas and advice on design, entertaining, decorative details, and more
- Offers a glimpse into the personal living spaces of fifty distinctive designers
CHARLOTTE MOSS: A Visual Life: Scrapbooks, Colleges, and Inspirations
The celebrated designer’s latest book, devoted to gleaning design inspiration from the personal scrapbooks and notebooks of great women of style—including her own. Interior designer Charlotte Moss has spent years collecting as well as creating scrapbooks—a pastime both meditative and instructive about her own ideas regarding design and style. In this unique book, Moss brings together her own scrapbooks along with those of notable women, both contemporary and historical, whose flair for style inspires us, including interior designer Elsie de Wolfe and society doyenne Gloria Vanderbilt—all never before published. Organized by theme—home, garden, travel, entertaining, and fashion—each chapter includes examples of Moss’s signature style mingled with excerpts from the scrapbooks of these great women. From the ambassador’s wife and bon vivant Evangeline Bruce, we learn that she preferred accessorizing tabletops with simple florets of broccoli in biscuit tins. And from the iconic Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, we see her notes and menus from the legendary White House dinners she threw. One piece (among many) of sage advice includes perfecting one extraordinary meal and serving it again and again, rather than experimenting endlessly.
BOHEMIAN STYLE
By Elizabeth Wilhide
An older book, but a great one!
What is Bohemian style? Bohemian Style is economy-minded but never dull. It’s lively, idiosyncratic, exuberant, attention-getting, and above all, intensely decorative. Bohemians know how to create style on a shoestring, improvise furnishings from cast-offs, and conjure up magic from the mundane.
Bohemian Style is packed with resplendent examples detailing the origins of this innovative style and its influence on design today. This inspirational guide covers the entire history of Bohemian style, from the cooperative endeavors of William Morris and his circle to Augustus John and members of the Bloomsbury Group to the major influences of Picasso, Modigliani, and the Beats.
Bohemian Style provides fantastic alternative paint techniques; one-of-a-kind approaches for walls and flooring; tips for utilizing “found objects” in design; examples of ways to use soft furnishings; and even advice for taking Bohemian style outdoors. Dozens of inspirational color photographs combined with clear, understandable text makes this a never-ending source of ideas for free spirits to tap into, experiment with, and create an exceptional look all their own.
Dozens of innovative, striking ways to create imaginative alternative living spaces.
HABITUALLY CHIC: Creativity at Work
By Heather Clawson
Habitually Chic is author Heather Clawson's wildly popular blog about the finer things in life—high fashion, fine art, interior design, and arresting architecture. For Habitually Chic: Creativity at Work, Ms. Clawson has narrowed her vision and using the good will generated by her blog has found her way into the workspaces of the world's foremost cultural generators. The studios, workshops, offices, and creative sanctuaries of top designers, artists, editors, architects, and more are captured and presented in detail.
Those featured include Jenna Lyons and Frank Muytjens of J.Crew; fashion designers Peter Som, Chris Benz, and Michael Bastian; jewelry designer James de Givenchy of TAFFIN; landscape designer Miranda Brooks; artist Jeremiah Goodman; John Truex and Richard Lambertson of Tiffany & Co.; antiques dealer Joel Chen; interior designer Bunny Williams; potter and designer extraordinaire Jonathan Adler, and many more. It is a chic mix of uptown, downtown, young, old, established, and up-and-coming creative elites.
The never-before-seen images taken by Ms. Clawson will be complimented by the inspiring stories of these talented individuals. Those featured delve into how they got where they are and what keeps them going as they navigate each day at their dream job. Habitually Chic: Creativity at Work is an indispensible and intimate approach to deciphering what it takes to dictate the style that propels the world.
CABINET OF NATURAL CURIOSITIES by Albertus Seba
CABINETS OF WONDER by Christine Davenne
CABINETS OF CURIOSITIES by Patick Mauries
Fascinating, odd, cool, jaw-dropping books!
Albertus Seba's "Cabinet of Curiosities" is one of the 18th century's greatest natural history achievements and remains one of the most prized natural history books of all time. Though it was common for men of his profession to collect natural specimens for research purposes, Amsterdam-based pharmacist Albertus Seba had a passion that led him far beyond the call of duty. His amazing, unprecedented collection of animals, plants and insects from all around the world gained international fame during his lifetime. After decades of collecting, Seba commissioned illustrations of each specimen and arranged the publication of a four-volume catalog detailing his entire collection. This superb, complete reproduction is taken from a rare, hand-colored original.
Skulls, butterflies, hunting trophies, ancient Egyptian artifacts, the alleged skeletons of mythological creatures, and many other mysterious oddities fill cabinets of wonder. A centuries-old tradition developed in Europe during the Renaissance, cabinets of wonder (also known as curiosity cabinets) are once again in fashion. Shops, restaurants, and private residences echo these cabinets in their interior design, by making use of the eclectic vintage objects commonly featured in such collections. Cabinets of Wonder showcases exceptional collections in homes and museums, with more than 180 photographs, while also explaining the history behind the tradition, the best-known collections, and the types of objects typically displayed. Offering both a historical overview and a look into contemporary interior design, this extravagantly illustrated book celebrates the wonderfully odd world of cabinets of wonder.
"Bound to entertain anyone who is intellectually curious, and serve as a source of inspiration for interior decorators and contemporary artists."—Antiques and the Arts
Unicorns’ horns, mermaids’ skeletons, stuffed and preserved animals and plants, work in precious metals, clocks, scientific instruments, celestial globes . . . all knowledge, the whole cosmos arranged on shelves. Such were the cabinets of curiosities of the seventeenth century, the last period of history when man could aspire to know everything.
Who were the collectors? They were archdukes and kings—the Emperor Rudolf II was the prince of all collectors—rich merchants and scholars, and their collections ranged from a single crowded room to whole palatial suites. Patrick Mauriès traces the amazing history of these “rooms of wonders” in this ingeniously erudite survey. Not many of the rooms survive, though there are pictorial records, but their contents still exist and are among the treasures of museums all over the world.
Here's the list so far...until next time, enjoy!
INTERIOR ALCHEMY: SECRETS TO CREATING EXPRESSIVE AMBIENCE by Rebecca Purcell
A LIVING SPACE by Kit Kemp
CREATIVE WALLS by Geraldine James
LIVE, LOVE, AND DECORATE by Martyn Lawrence Bullard
ETCETERA: CREATING BEAUTIFUL INTERIORS WITH THE THINGS YOU LOVE by Sibella Court
TRACY PORTER'S HOME STYLE ~ Creative and Livable Decorating Ideas for Everyone
INTERIORS by Min Hogg
BOWERBIRD: CREATING BEAUTIFUL INTERIORS WITH THE THINGS YOU COLLECT by Sibella Court
A BIT OF VELVET & A DASH OF LACE by Robin Brown
DOMESTIC ART: Curated Interiors by Holly Moore, Bob Brinkley, Laurann Claridge
DESIGNERS AT HOME: Personal Reflections on Stylish Living by Rhonda Ric Carman
HABITUALLY CHIC: CREATIVITY AT WORK by Heather Clawson
CABINET OF NATURAL CURIOSITIES by Albertus Seba
BOHEMIAN STYLE by Elizabeth Wilhide
QUIET LIVING: UNIQUE COUNTRY INTERIORS by Piet Swimberghe
CHARLOTTE MOSS: A Visual Life: Scrapbooks, Collages, and Inspirations
NOMAD: BRINGING YOUR TRAVELS HOME by Sibella Court
RUSTIC ELEGANCE by Ralph Kylloe
FUSION INTERIORS The International Designs of Andrew Martin
COMTEMPORARY WESTERN DESIGNS by Thea Marx
CABINETS OF CURIOSITIES by Patick Mauries
