Victoria Hagan: Interior Portraits

Stafford Cliff

The Way We Live with Color

Proceeding from the general to the specific, the book begins with different styles and forms of housing and how these are affected and influenced by color. For example, the simplicity of white clapboard New England colonials lend themselves to formal approaches, while the lighthearted pastels of the Caribbean invite informal juxtapositions of style. The book then explores how varying materials and textures--open up new areas for exploring color and mood. The concluding section of the book is a rich sequence of images depicting how color is used differently around the world. Taken together, this book is sure to be a source of inspiration for anyone interested in interiors and decorating.

William Davies King

Collections of Nothing

Nearly everyone collects something, even those who don't think of themselves as collectors. William Davies King, on the other hand, has devoted decades to collecting nothing--and a lot of it. With Collections of Nothing, he takes a hard look at this habitual hoarding to see what truths it can reveal about the impulse to accumulate.Part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition, Collections of Nothing begins with the stamp collection that King was given as a boy. In the following years, rather than rarity or pedigree, he found himself searching out the lowly and the lost, the cast-off and the undesired: objects that, merely by gathering and retaining them, he could imbue with meaning, even value. As he relates the story of his burgeoning collections, King also offers a fascinating meditation on the human urge to collect. This wry, funny, even touching appreciation and dissection of the collector's art as seen through the life of a most unusual specimen will appeal to anyone who has ever felt the unappeasable power of that acquisitive fever."What makes this book, bred of a midlife crisis, extraordinary is the way King weaves his autobiography into the account of his ...

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.