Books

Our Holiday Roundup of Luscious Coffee-Table Books, Part 1

Interior Design
by Ted Loos

The goal of a good interior design book is not to make you want to tear apart your living room and immediately hire someone to fix it (although, admittedly, that can be a side effect). Rather, it’s to provide inspiration and an understanding of how elements of decor come together in a coherent whole. Tone is the hardest thing to master — friendly and informative is the ticket — and these four volumes have got that just right.

_dropcap_ A hotel room is properly construed as a home away from home, and that’s why Kit Kemp’s interiors have achieved such renown. Cozy without being drowsy, Kemp’s work — as design director for Firmdale Hotels — emphasizes craft, texture and artistry. In Every Room Tells a Story (Rizzoli, $49.95), written with Fiona McCarthy, she lays out her thinking for projects like New York’s Crosby Street Hotel and a slew of London properties, including the Charlotte Street Hotel.   Cover: Kit Kemp furnished the Suffolk Suite at Haymarket Hotel, in London’s theater district, with a hand-painted 1835 Scandinavian marriage cabinet and two vividly patterned sofas. Right: The same suite also features a sculptural antique breakfront under a modern artwork composed of slices of a cut sponge and a graceful bergère covered in a 19th-century needlepoint fabric. Photos by Simon Brown, courtesy of Rizzoli


Art
by Ted Loos

If an art book is doing its most basic job, it will visually dazzle us. And if it goes the extra mile to illuminate not only paintings and objects but also the people who make them, so much the better. Both aims are achieved by a spate of new releases that are devoted to artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso and Frank Sinatra (what would those two have talked about at a party?) and that tackle subjects as compelling as the representation of the body throughout history.

 

_dropcap_ Strikingly designed and weighty, Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 (Yale University Press, $75) examines a Brigadoon-like educational experiment that burned bright for almost a quarter century but couldn’t last. Authors Helen Molesworth and Ruth Erickson — curators of the exhibition of the same name currently at the ICA Boston until January 24, when it will then tour the country — have delved deeply into the history of the unconventional North Carolina art school.   Cover: Leaf Study IX, ca. 1940, by Josef Albers (© Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society/New York, photo by Tim Nighswander/Imaging 4 Art). Right: Watchmaker, 1946, by Jacob Lawrence (© The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Artists Rights Society/Seattle, courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, photo by Lee Stalsworth)


Gardens
by Jane Garmey

As we begin to plot out next summer’s gardens, looking at what the experts have done is among the best ways to get a better understanding of color, shape and texture — those essential building blocks of good garden design. (It’s really no different from designing a room, with a few exceptions — chief among them that plants cannot be moved around as easily as furniture.) Here we look at some recently published garden books, each reflecting a different point of view but all attesting to the ever-improving breadth and variety of American garden style.

 

_dropcap_ For the past 25 years, Amy Goldman has been growing heirloom fruits and vegetables on her farm in the Hudson Valley. This has been no Saturday afternoon recreational jaunt but a focused, dedicated, intensely serious endeavor to cultivate and enhance the preservation of endangered varieties. During much of this time, photographer Jerry Spagnoli has been recording her work by creating a series of exquisite daguerreotypes, more than 100 of which figure in Goldman’s Heirloom Harvest (Bloomsbury, $85.00).   Cover: Silverado Swiss Chard. Right: Tennessee Cut Short Beans. Photos by Jerry Spagnoli


Dogs
by Trent Morse

Our dogs have become almost as enmeshed in the holiday gifting frenzy as our children have. Alongside the family stockings dangling from the mantel at Christmastime, a sock for Bowser — stuffed with rawhide chews and wearable reindeer antlers, dehydrated pig ears and Santa-shaped squeaky toys — is now the norm rather than the eccentric exception. And although their paws lack the opposable thumbs necessary to twirl a dreidel, Jewish dogs get Hanukkah trinkets, too — just no chocolate gelt. In light of the growing importance of canines in our living spaces and on our credit-card statements, we’ve selected the most stylish art and design books that celebrate man’s best friend (or mama’s little monkey face) on every page.

 

_dropcap_ One day Cristina Amodeo sat on her dog in the dark, mistaking the poor thing for a piece of furniture — and the idea for a book was born. “The comfortable shape, the soft coat and the proud posture, standing erect on all four legs, were identical to the chair beside her,” she writes. That story is the only bit of narrative in Amodeo’s Dogs and Chairs: Designer Pairs (Thames and Hudson, $14.95), which is otherwise filled with spreads showing her bold graphic illustrations of iconic seating by the masters of modern and contemporary furniture design on one page and a strikingly similar-looking breed of dog on the opposite one.   Cover: A bulldog nestles in an Eero Aarnio Ball chair, 1963. Right: An Arne Jacobsen Grand Prix chair, 1957, is paired with a Welsh corgi. Images courtesy of Thames & Hudson. Illustrations © Cristina Amodeo

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