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At Home: A Style for Today with Things from the Past [ITALICS]
By Suzanne Rheinstein
Published by Rizzoli
Reviewed by Mayer Rus
In the introduction to her new book, At Home: A Style for Today with Things from the Past [ITALICS], Los Angeles decorator Suzanne Rheinstein recalls reading an interview with Joan Didion in which the acclaimed writer was asked about her predilection for using her good silver every day. Didion responded with a characteristically pithy pronouncement: “Every day is all there is.”
That sentiment neatly sums up the spirit that informs Rheinstein’s approach not only to decorating but to life as well—an approach that one might describe as elegant civility. Indeed, the pages of At Home [ITALICS] are rife with graciousness and beauty, sentimentality and connoisseurship, sophistication and savoir-faire. Decorators routinely claim an expertise in gracious living, but precious few manifest the concept with as much ease and authority as Rheinstein. She has an extraordinary ability to strike an attitude of old-fashioned Southern gentility—she is, after all, from New Orleans—that feels neither saccharine nor anachronistic.
At Home [ITALICS] focuses on six of Rheinstein’s signature projects, including her widely published Georgian Revival home in Hancock Park and her prewar Manhattan pied-a-terre on the Upper East Side, both of which she shares with her husband, Fred. The project mix also encompasses a stately Colonial Revival manse on Newport Bay, an haute-rustic mountain retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho, a sun-kissed estate in Florida and a classic Georgian Revival farmhouse at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia’s horse country.
Each of the projects is documented in extensive, loving detail, with ample space devoted to architectural details, furniture, accessories, decorative finishes, gardens, artwork and occasional entertaining vignettes. Rheinstein’s descriptive text is perfectly suited to this type of intimate presentation. Her writing is highly personal and mercifully straightforward, pitched in the happy middle ground between pedestrian DIY instruction (no hot glue guns here!) and pretentious, grandiloquent pronouncements on the nature of good taste and décor. As Architectural Digest [ITALICS] Editor-in-Chief Margaret Russell notes in her foreword, “Though she’s known for her refined, discriminating taste and graceful manner—Suzanne is not [ITALICS] a casual woman—her mind-set is surprisingly down-to-earth.”
Of course, the success of a lavish volume such as this depends largely on the strength of the photography, specifically the photographer’s ability to translate the particular ambience and subtleties of a designer’s work into dramatic, inspiring images. On this count, the book succeeds in spades. Pieter Estersohn, who contributed the lion’s share of pictures, has captured Rheinstein’s incomparable brand of restrained, soignée traditionalism in sumptuous photographs bathed in the dreamy light of some distant Shangri-La unsullied by ugliness and vulgarity. Even die-hard modernists will find it difficult to resist the decorator’s artfully composed, meticulously crafted and unapologetically romantic interiors.
Billy Baldwin, the esteemed dean of American decorating, once wrote, “I for one cannot imagine a room with a fireplace without a fire burning at every possible moment.” Suzanne Rheinstein would surely agree.
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