The premier issue of the new Design magazine, just out from the New York Metro Chapter of ASID, features both the cover and a grouping of pages from Interior Design Master Class.
A word of thanks to the new chapter president (and my friend) Glenn Gissler for the coverage in this exciting new shelter publication. Glenn has worked tirelessly in elevating ASID to a new stature; follow the organization on Facebook and check the calendar of events on their website to stay abreast of the changes.
I was thrilled to be able to be in Houston on October 11th when #IDMC was released. The Houston Design Center hosted a marvelous event, organized by Alton LaDay. Thank you to everyone who came out to see me.
The October issue of PaperCity covered the event, and shared a lovely write-up for the book. Thank you!
Writer Louis Hart singled out 10 of her favorite essays in the book and the lesson’s within them, including Brad Ford’s piece on ‘Craft’; Stephen Shadley’s piece on ‘Film’ (which features a photo of Diane Keaton’s home); Victoria Hagan’s poetic piece on ‘Light’; and Tom Scheerer’s piece on ‘Luxury’ — along with 6 more highlights.
When the banking industry collapsed in 2008, it unfortunately took my textile company with it. But here’s the thing: I hesitate to use the adjective ‘unfortunately’ because those events led me to producing and editing Interior Design Master Class, one of the most exciting and personally fulfilling experiences of my life.
Join me and Bunny Williams, Matthew Patrick Smyth, and Glenn Gissler for a glass of Prosecco in celebration of the publication of Interior Design Master Class from Rizzoli New York at Privet House in New Preston Connecticut!
There will be copies of the book available for purchase, and we’ll all have sharpies to inscribe them. Promises to be a wonderful fete!
In 1897, when the great novelist Edith Wharton and her friend, architect Ogden Codman Jr., published The Decoration of Houses, the world hovered on the brink of new movements, technologies, and modes of production that would radically transform the built world. Wharton and Codman sought to make sense of both this ferment and the past—recent and distant—for the lay reader, purporting to set forth the rational relationship between structure and surface, architecture and ornament. Wharton proclaimed, “It is with the decorator’s work alone that these pages are concerned,” and in so doing, she established her book as the springboard from which any informed knowledge of interior decoration began.
The twentieth century saw a great many interior decorators who carried Wharton’s precepts forward through their own aesthetic lens: Elsie de Wolfe, Rose Cumming, Eleanor Brown, Frances Elkins, Dorothy Draper, Sister Parish, Albert Hadley, Joe D’Urso, Angelo Donghia, Ward Bennett, Michael Taylor, Billy Baldwin, and Mark Hampton, among others. Some of these designers wrote landmark books setting forth their own conception of interior design, such as Billy Baldwin Decorates, Mark Hampton on Decorating, and de Wolfe’s The House in Good Taste.
By the late 1980s, interior design had hit its stride, bringing with it an outpouring of monographs, as the design of one’s own space had become a national, if not a global, obsession. Yet there have been few attempts to provide, in the manner of Wharton and Codman, a comprehensive account of what the industry’s finest practitioners believe works in interior design today, and why. While I would not attempt to draw a direct comparison to The Decoration of Houses, I have always envisioned Interior Design Master Class as a modern-day answer to Wharton and Codman’s accomplishment by applying their room-by-room and element-by-element organization of the subject of decoration to its contemporary creators. In the voices of more than one hundred preeminent American designers, this is a comprehensive guide to the elements of interiors, including planes, portals, furniture, and color, to name a very few, as well as a meditation on related subjects such as archaeology, psychology, and literature.
Today, the welcome democratization of decoration that has taken place since the advent of the internet continues to expand, and more people than ever are interested in the design of their home. Interior Design Master Class offers a view into the world of the finest practitioners in the decorative arts, uncovering the intellectual and philosophic roots of this most ancient and necessary of arts. My hope is that it will instruct and inspire a wide audience, from the curious layperson to students of design as well as practicing professionals.
We all inhabit dwellings of some kind; the more thoughtful the attention we exert upon them, the more our infrastructure—our whole built world—is beautified.