After a long summer, design enthusiasts can look forward to an extensive list of design tomes hitting shelves over the next few months, kicking off the fall season and inspiring readers. Here’s a look at this month’s showstoppers, which include monographs and memoirs on interior design, architecture, landscaping and entertaining.
Jeffrey Alan Marks: The Meaning of Home (Rizzoli) showcases the designer’s breezy, tailored look inspired by his Southern California outdoor lifestyle—a synthesis of a fresh informality infused with sophisticated English and European accents. The book features a series of beautifully photographed residences revealing Jeffrey Alan Marks’ skill at capturing each client’s personality, from a movie star’s London townhouse full of eccentric furnishings to a charming Nantucket cottage with nautical embellishments. Through collective imagery and intriguing collages, he shares his creative process and how he creates a sanctuary where all details are synchronized. A foreword by Suzanne Goin, as well as a list of Marks’s favorite shopping addresses for fabrics, furniture, and antiques, complete the book.
In his first book, Tom Scheerer Decorates (Vendome Press), interior designer Tom Scheerer has cultivated his own restrained brand of chic—a look he modestly describes as “cheerful” and “no nonsense.” He combines classic, old-fashioned decorating with modernist touches à la Albert Hadley and Billy Baldwin, but with a keener attention to natural materials, unpretentious vernacular crafts, and the prettiest color combinations this side of India.
With a penchant for painting and an appreciation for the well-designed home, Gary McBournie has perfected the art of creating interior spaces with an impeccable eye for color. In his new book, Living Color (Pointed Leaf Press), he features personal photographs and the inspirations behind his color choices. He established his design firm in Boston in 1993 and has since created warm, elegant, and timeless classic American homes, always with a twist on tradition. Finely attuned to his environment, McBournie develops each interior with a color palette that matches its surrounding exterior, splashing cool and restful hues for a cottage in New England, shades of lime and papaya in the tropics, and warm sunset tones for a ski house in Montana.
In 1973, Mary Ella Gabler founded the celebrated home textiles brand, Peacock Alley. She turned a chic boudoir pillow created on her home sewing machine into a multi-million dollar luxury linen business, contributing to changing how Americans view their bedrooms. Her new book, Uncommon Thread: A Woman, A Brand, A Legacy: the Founding of Peacock Alley, is the very story of that journey. The deeply personal narrative details Gabler’s sacrifices and subsequent successes over the last 40 years, as she has built this venerable brand. The book will only be sold through Peacock Alley stores, its website and at trunk shows.
Each garden featured in Contemporary Designers' Own Gardens (Garden Art Press) by Barbara Baker has been created by an innovative, influential, award-winning garden designer. The author analyzes the relationship between the garden and its setting, planting schemes, the aims of the designers and their achievements. In addition, the book examines the ways in which the designers' personalities affect their creations, and how their own gardens differ from those of their clients.
Louis Comfort Tiffany considered the Favrile glass his signature artistic achievement. Now highly collectible, the glass underscores one-of-a-kind quality—every piece blown and decorated by hand. The Art Glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany (Vendome Press) explores the full range of Tiffany Studios' remarkably diverse and innovative styles and forms.
Classical architect John Murray’s first monograph presents 15 residential urban and country projects in Classical Invention: The Architecture of John B. Murray (The Monacelli Press). Murray reveals his design approach through engaging prose and drawings. For each project, he creates the traditional Beaux-Arts drawing known as the analytique, which brings together all of the significant elements of a design in a harmonious and balanced whole. Classical Invention reproduces these exquisitely hand-drawn studies alongside stunning photographs of each home.
A collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum, the book Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home (Monacelli Press) explores art from the museum’s collection depicting life in Spanish Colonial America, divided into three areas: portraiture, luxury objects and religious pieces. This book reveals how art and luxury goods together signaled the identity and status of Spanish Americans struggling to claim their place in a fluid New World hierarchy.
Design expert Joan Osofsky of the Upstate New York store Hammertown Barn shares her knowledge on stylish modern country living with a collection of creative ideas and real-life tips for making your home warm and welcoming. Love Where you Live: At Home in the Country (Rizzoli) follows Osofsky’s liberating philosophy about cozy and comfortable living in rural settings and ideas about how to achieve a modern country look. Full of practical decorating tips and easy and casual hosting ideas, this book features a range of traditional and contemporary house styles that are truly inspiring for today’s informal country lifestyle—airy, minimalist living rooms look out onto the lush countryside; a rustic tiled floor shines through a sleek glass-topped table of a dining room; a welcoming, roaring log fire warms a great room with rough-hewn beams.
Eddie Zaratsian has released his first book, Custom Florals and Lifestyle—the “little black book” for floral arrangements. Representing sophisticated art and expanding the definition of floral design, Zaratsian’s cosmopolitan style has become influential in the field of floral aesthetics.
The inspiring memoir of interior designer Sheila Bridges, The Bald Mermaid (Pointed Leaf Press), comprises engaging and deeply personal vignettes that explore questions of identity, femininity, race, success, and what it really means to have it all. After receiving degrees from two prestigious universities, Bridges became wildly successful in her career as an interior designer, designing homes for high-profile clients and even hosting her own television show. But when she lost her hair due to alopecia, she lost it all. This is her story of coming to terms with what success and happiness mean to her, realizing the cost of freedom, and understanding what it means to stay true to herself in the face of judgment, criticism, and expectation from family, friends, lovers, and strangers.
Sandra Espinet released her debut book in mid-August entitled The Well Traveled Home (Gibbs Smith), which chronicles her journey as a lifelong gypsy and how that’s translated into her designs. Her work reflects the evolving interplay between the domestic and the international, while creating alluring family living spaces. Her extensive world travels produce “finds” of exquisitely wrought artisanal furniture, dramatic artworks and exotic accessories that are put to beautiful use in her clients’ homes. The book shows in 175 photographs a crossroads between ideas and space, wood and steel, wet and dry, al fresco and enclosure.
Interior designer and entrepreneur Barclay Butera takes his distinctive style on a journey through the seasons, showcasing a collection of picturesque retreats and scenic getaways, each unique to spring, summer, fall or winter in Barclay Butera’s Getaways and Retreats (Gibbs Smith). A day-tripper at heart, Butera draws on his own travels and experiences to create stunning sanctuaries that range from stylishly rustic log cabins to gracefully chic beach cottages, always demonstrating his philosophy that no matter how far one's love for travel takes them, a destination should always feel like a home away from home.
