By Dan Fink
Dan Fink opens his new book on the grand staircase at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 5th Avenue, moving from the Greek and Roman galleries to the Dutch paintings to the period rooms of American antiques. The image says as much about his approach as anything he writes afterward.
Photo courtesy Nicole Franzen
Time & Beauty is not organized around Fink’s projects, though fifteen years of them, many previously unpublished, run through its pages. It is organized around a question he has apparently been asking himself since his first job: what makes a room come alive, and why do the same qualities surface in rooms from entirely different eras and cultures?
Photos courtesy Nicole Franzen
His answer takes the form of thirteen elemental principles, threaded through six essays that read more like meditations than a design manual. Fink traces a line from the ancient Greeks, who identified mathematical ratios that please the eye, to the everyday concerns of contemporary designers: light, color, floor plans, the feel of velvet, the memory held in a family heirloom. He is candid about having no formal training, and that candor, to my mind, gives the book its warmth. He learned to see by looking, and the book asks readers to do the same.
Photo courtesy Laura Resen
Photo courtesy Laura Resen
What comes through most is Fink’s sense that he is joining something older than himself, a continuum of people who have coaxed beauty out of finishes and furnishings. He calls the book an encouragement rather than a rulebook; it’s an invitation to look closer and make considered choices.
Time & Beauty: The Elements of Design by Dan Fink
From Abrams Books. Available for preorder from the Rizzoli Bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indie Bound.