Mark Hampton: An American Decorator

Mira Locher

Super Potato Design: The Complete Works of Takashi Sugimoto: Japan's Leading Interior Designer

Super Potato Design is the first full-length book to present the work and conceptual ideas of the internationally renowned Japanese design firm Super Potato, founded by Takashi Sugimoto. Super Potato's compelling designs for the interiors of restaurants, shops and hotels, as well as Takashi Sugimoto's designs for tea ceremony spaces and utensils, are richly complex compositions of materials which create simple, strong spaces. Using traditional Japanese building materials such as bamboo, wood, and stone, but creating original yet timeless spaces, Super Potato's designs avoid specific stylistic characterizations and short-lived fashion. By finding contemporary expression for essential concepts present in traditional Japan and combining materials in unexpected ways to create exciting spaces, Super Potato's work has had a significant impact on interior design in Japan and throughout Asia. Super Potato Design is generously illustrated with 320 full-color photographs by the respected Japanese photographer Yoshio Shiratori, who has recorded Super Potato's projects since the firm's conception in 1973. Architect and Japan scholar Mira Locher introduces the ideas and influences of Takashi ...

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 ...

Michele Keith

Designers Here and There: Inside the City and Country Homes of America's Top Decorators

During the week, interior designers select fabulous fabrics, furniture, paint, lighting, and accessories for clients' homes. On the weekends, they can devote themselves to beautifying their own. Materials and finishes that later appear in commissioned work often appear here first, as designers use the rooms and walls of their primary and secondary residences like a blank canvas for perfecting details and techniques central to their trade. Thirty-eight private primary and vacation residences belonging to today's most renowned decorators from around the country inspire with full-color images of exquisitely appointed chic city apartments, elegant townhouses, minimalist midcentury gems, quaint cottages, historic mansions and farmhouses, cozy log cabins, and beachside retreats in locations ranging from Palm Desert to Palm Beach, Austin, Chicago, East Hampton, and Boston. Michele Keith's lively, accessible text brings each distinct personality to life, revealing how and why the designers gravitate to styles ranging from firmly traditional to coolly contemporary to Hollywood Regency, how the attributes of each location--setting, proportions, and character--influence design direction, and ...