Celerie Kemble: To Your Taste: Creating Modern Rooms with a Traditional Twist

Eva Hagberg

Dark Nostalgia

As the late twentieth-century fascination with rounded shapes, organic influences, and plastics fades, interior designers are increasingly drawn to deep colors, polished woods, velvets, furs, leather, dark metals, and brick that have a nostalgic quality--materials used liberally in centuries gone by. Efforts to shape a more authentic, less austere present by creating an idealized version of the past have begun to appear in commercial and residential design throughout the country and abroad. Dark Nostalgia presents twenty-six projects that exemplify the smooth incorporation of evocative historic detail into current interiors. Public spaces, including New York's famous Royalton Hotel lobby renovation, the Clift Hotel bar in San Francisco, and Alain Ducasse's newest restaurant, Adour, as well as private residences and smaller, intimate restaurants and clubs by cutting-edge designers, including AvroKO, David Rockwell, Roman & Williams, Julian Schnabel, Philippe Starck, and Adam Tihany, demonstrate the many successful ways this trend towards a dark nostalgia has been incorporated in recent designs.

Allegra Hicks

Allegra Hicks: An Eye for Design

Allegra Hicks: An Eye for Design examines textile, interior, and the fashion designer's approach to design and luxury--retracing the genesis of her patterns over the past decades of her work. "With her delicate prints inspired by nature and her feminine but energetic hand, Allegra's interiors are as harmonious as they are excessive, imaginative and timeless." --Enric Pastor, editor in chief, Architectural Digest (Spain) Season by season, Allegra Hicks presents her original textile and pattern designs alongside beautiful photography of interiors, landscapes, and unexpected points of nature. She writes in her introduction: "When I began to work as a designer--after finishing my studies, during which time I learned a variety of techniques--I had to find my own vocabulary. And I started by looking at nature. Patterns are always an elaboration of nature, a microcosm that takes off from shapes in the macrocosm. I observed everything is part of our everyday life, searching for the essence of these things. I still work in this way. Out of observation of the world, there emerges an abstraction, a pattern, which finds its own life once I remove it from the original context." Essays on ...

Thomas O'Brien

American Modern

Designer and merchant, collector and tastemaker, Thomas O'Brien has made a career of translating cool notions of modernism into an easy and generous array of modern styles that anyone can attain. Now he introduces readers to a range of those styles--from casual to formal, vintage to urban--alongside stunning photography and charming design stories. O'Brien carefully describes the design process of his chosen projects, including a downtown New York City loft, a traditional Connecticut estate, and a converted schoolhouse in eastern Long Island. Each home explores a view on the modern design spectrum he has created, as well as the individual choices that make the design unique and its mix essentially American. He explains not only what was at work to create a given style, but how readers can import those practices to their own homes and personal design sensibilities. Important design principles such as architectural authenticity, color relationships, correctness of scale, and informed collecting are threaded through a practical narrative that reads like a master class in interior design. American Modern is an inspiring design volume that will redefine the way readers think about ...