By Tara Bernerd
London-based architectural designer Tara Bernerd has spent more than two decades creating interiors that feel rooted in their locations — hotels, residences, spas, and restaurants across Osaka, New York, Miami, Milan, and beyond. Her second Rizzoli monograph, A Design Journey, is a companion to her first book, Place (2017), and tracks the evolution of her studio, Tara Bernerd & Partners, through eleven projects of growing ambition and scale.
Where Place established the DNA of her practice, A Design Journey reveals what has changed: the complexity, the reach, and the confidence. Bernerd’s starting point is always travel — a lifetime of it — and the book makes that case through spaces that feel simultaneously sophisticated and deeply lived-in. A sun-drenched summer house in Ibiza. A resort in the Riviera Maya that weds vernacular architecture to modern amenity. Each project reflects what Bernerd calls a profound understanding of luxury: not surface, but atmosphere.
Her introduction is worth reading carefully. She writes about intuition as a driver — knowing what a place should be before the pencil hits the page — and about the power of collective creativity, of talent brought together in service of a shared idea. Her spaces are warm and inviting, anchored in location, charged with unexpected material gestures and custom-designed furniture.
A Design Journey is contemporary modernism at its most considered — and a worthy addition to any design library.
TARA BERNERD: A DESIGN JOURNEY from Rizzoli New York, $65.
Available from the Rizzoli Bookstore, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble and IndieBound.