Patina Farm


Brooke Giannetti - 2016
    When Brooke and Steve Giannetti decided to leave their suburban Santa Monica home to build a new life on a farm, they looked into themselves, and traveled to Belgium and France, for inspiration. Brooke’s inviting prose combines with 200 photographs and Steve’s architectural drawings to show their inspirations, their materials selections, and the enviable result of their team effort and creativity: an idyllic farm in California’s Ojai Valley. We see every corner of the family home, guesthouse, lush gardens, and delightful animal quarters. Steve Giannetti is a renowned architect, and Brooke is an interior decorator and writer of the design blog Velvet and Linen. They also own Giannetti Home, a store that sells furniture and products for the home in their signature Patina style. The couple’s work has been featured in the Veranda, Coastal Living, Good Housekeeping, the New York Times. They are the authors of Patina Style.

Architecture Now!


Philip Jodidio - 2001
    Appropriated, chewed up, mulled over, digested, contemplated, and contorted - gathering up along the way fashion, ecology, politics, and art - architectural concepts become veritable things unto themselves in the present tense. As astoundingly diverse as contemporary architecture is, most importantly it is a reflection of what's happening right now all over the world, in people's minds and in the global collective consciousness. The many faces of world architecture today make for a mind-expanding book. Here you'll find the most recent work of over 60 architects and firms, including familiar names such as O. Gehry, Meier, Ando, Foster, and Starck, as well as a host of newcomers sure to be the architecture-celebrities of future generations. Highlights include Jakob & MacFarlane's morphological Restaurant at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Diller & Scofidio's "Blur Building" proposal for the International Expo 2001 in Switzerland (an ovular structure suspended over a lake, encapsulated by a fine mist of water, creating the look of a cloud hovering over the lake), and Herzog & de Meuron's remarkable Tate Modern. Proving that contemporary architecture is not limited to physical building design, New York firm Asymptote's Guggenheim Virtual Museum is also included, a place where visitors can take a cyber-stroll through rooms that are designed to be "compelling spatial environments." Presented alphabetically by architect or firm, Architecture Now! can be used like a reference guide, with extensive photographs and illustrations, biographical and contact information for designers, and a careful selection of today's most influential architects.

Elements of Style: Designing a Home a Life


Erin Gates - 2014
    Drawing on her ten years of experience in the interior design industry, Erin combines honest design advice and gorgeous professional photographs and illustrations with personal essays about the lessons she has learned while designing her own home and her own life—the first being: none of our homes or lives is perfect. Like a funny best friend, she reveals the disasters she confronted in her own kitchen renovation, her struggles with anorexia, her epic fight with her husband over a Lucite table, and her secrets for starting a successful blog.Organized by rooms in the house, Elements of Style invites readers into Erin’s own home as well as homes she has designed for clients. Fresh, modern, and colorful, it is brimming glamour and style as well as advice on practical matters from choosing kitchen counter materials to dressing a bed with pillows, picking a sofa, and decorating a nursery without cartoon characters. You’ll also find a charming foreword by Erin’s husband, Andrew, and an extensive Resource and Shopping Guide that provides an indispensable a roadmap for anyone embarking on their first serious home decorating adventure. With Erin’s help, you can finally make your house your home.

One Man's Folly: The Exceptional Houses of Furlow Gatewood


Julia Reed - 2014
    Antiques expert Furlow Gatewood's highly personal property in bucolic Americus, Georgia, where he has meticulously restored his family's carriage house and added intimate dwellings and outbuildings-several rescued from demolition-has evolved over decades to become a sublime expression of stylish living. The structures exemplify various architectural traditions-from mid-nineteenth-century Gothic to Palladian. He has collaborated with local craftsmen to create these follies and takes delight in designing the picturesque grounds and plantings and in devising comfortable areas for his beloved dogs and peacocks. A gifted designer and longtime associate of antiques dealer John Rosselli, Gatewood has a talent for discovering singular pieces with a poetic patina, composing custom paint finishes and subtle palettes, and knowing how to incorporate distinctive architectural elements. To accompany the book's atmospheric images, close friend Bunny Williams writes about the lessons she has learned from this master of discernment. Gatewood's seductive and hospitable Arcadian oasis, with its exquisite and timeless design, will have an enduring impact on the design community.

Home


Ellen DeGeneres - 2015
    She believes, "You don't have to have money to have good taste," and she is eager to share what she has learned over the years. DeGeneres offers a personal look at every room in each of her homes. Included are seven of her homes past and present, from the famous "Brody House" up to her current homes, and she offers tips and advice on what each house taught her. An added bonus is a look at the homes of her friends and collaborators-some of the finest designers in the country. They share their advice on home design, furnishings, as well as a glimpse at their awe-inspiring rooms.Full of beautiful photographs, this book is a treasure trove of amazing California architecture, unique home furnishings, breathtaking art, and hundreds of ideas on putting together the home you've always dreamed of.

Domino: The Book of Decorating: A Room-by-Room Guide to Creating a Home That Makes You Happy


Deborah Needleman - 2008
    The editors take readers room by room, tapping the best ideas from domino magazine and culling insights from their own experiences. With an eye to making design accessible and exciting, this book demystifies the decorating process and provides the tools for making spaces that are personal, functional and fabulous.

The Interior Design Handbook: Furnish, Decorate, and Style Your Space


Frida Ramstedt - 2019
    Frida Ramstedt believes in thinking about how we decorate, rather than focusing on what we decorate with. We know more today than ever before about design trends, furniture, and knickknacks, and now Frida familiarizes readers with the basic principles behind interior and styling--what looks good and, most of all, why it looks good.The Interior Design Handbook teaches you general rules of thumb--like what the golden ratio and the golden spiral are, the proper size for a coffee table in relation to your sofa, the optimal height to hang lighting fixtures, and the best ways to use a mood board--complete with helpful illustrations. Use The Interior Design Handbook to achieve a balanced, beautiful home no matter where you live or what your style is.

Journey to the East


Le Corbusier - 1966
    It is very much a story of awakening and a voyage of discoveries, recording a seven-month journey that took Le Corbusier from Berlin through Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, Istanbul, Athos, Athens, Naples, and Rome, among other places. Le Corbusier considered this journey the most significant of his life; the compulsion he felt to record images and impressions established a practice he would continue for the rest of his career. For the next five decades, he would fill notebooks with ideas and sketches; he never stopped deriving inspiration from the memories of his first contact with the East, making this volume as much a historical document as a personal confession and diary. Ivan Zaknic's highly regarded translation was first published by The MIT Press in 1987 but has been unavailable for many years.

Living in a Nutshell: Posh and Portable Decorating Ideas for Small Spaces


Janet Lee - 2012
    The design maven behind livinginanutshell.com and Oprah Winfrey’s interior style producer for a decade, Lee has personally handpicked a battery of clever projects for enhancing every area of a tiny living space—all are simple to do, require no craft skills, are emphatically affordable, readily portable, and big on style, so you can make these design dreams become your reality.

Mid-Century Modern: Interiors, Furniture, Design Details


Bradley Quinn - 2006
    Never had homes been so thoroughly contemporary, with antiques and period styles entirely banished. Mid-Century Modern explores the interior decor of this seminal decade, concentrating on all aspects of a home's decoration-walls, flooring, surfaces, lighting, and, of course, furniture.Case studies examine beautiful present-day homes that exhibit mid-century style in an exemplary way, and suggest ideas for taking the 1950's look-complete with collector's pieces-and mixing and matching it with elements from other eras.

Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright


Brendan Gill - 1987
    His works—among them Taliesin North, Taliesin West, Fallingwater, the Johnson Wax buildings, the Guggenheim Museum—earned him a good measure of his fame, but his flamboyant personal life earned him the rest. Here Brendan Gill, a personal friend of Wright and his family, gives us not only the fullest, fairest, and most entertaining account of Wright to date, but also strips away the many masks the architect tirelessly constructed to fascinate his admirers and mislead his detractors. Enriched by hitherto unpublished letters and 300 photographs and drawings, this definitive biography makes Wright, in all his creativity, crankiness, and zest, fairly leap from its pages.

Three Birds Renovations


Erin Cayless - 2019
    Today, with many incredible house transformations under their toolbelt, they're a power trio turning neighbourhood ugly ducklings into swans.If you lust over images of beautiful homes but feel stuck when it comes to your own space, these 'birds' have your back. The book is packed with gorgeous details from their projects, friendly words of encouragement and more than 400 reno tips to help you avoid budget blow-outs, manage trades and timelines, and style without stress. Whether you're starting small or going all-in with a whole-home reno, this is destined to become one of the most useful books you own.Turn your reno dreams into reality!

Bohemian Modern: Imaginative and Affordable Ideas for a Creative and Beautiful Home


Emily Henson - 2015
    The Bohemian Modern home is a place where creativity, individuality, and a wild mix of color and pattern meet in a modern environment. Whitewashed walls and polished concrete floors are brought to life by vibrant Moroccan rugs and wall hangings, wicker chairs draped with tactile throws, and a veritable jungle of house plants—clustered in pots, hanging from the ceiling, and even growing on the walls. The style certainly gives a nod to ’70s chic, with its use of shagpile rugs, Swiss cheese plants, and macramé, but it stands firmly in the present day by boldly contrasting those elements with sleek modern art on the walls and bold pops of color. Emily Henson starts by taking a look at the different facets of the look: pattern and color, textiles, handmade pieces, living with houseplants, and collections and display. She also offers up styling tricks to use at home and ideas for recycling and reuse. Next, a series of case studies take a closer look at Bohemian Modern homes and the people who live in them. From a restored barn on the breezy Moroccan coast to a former parking garage in the Netherlands that's been converted into a flexible family live/work space, Emily shows that any home can have Bohemian Modern style.

Siteless: 1001 Building Forms


François Blanciak - 2008
    Others may think of it as the last architectural treatise, for it provides a discursive container for ideas that would otherwise be lost. Whatever genre it belongs to, SITELESS is a new kind of architecture book that seems to have come out of nowhere. Its author, a young French architect practicing in Tokyo, admits he "didn't do this out of reverence toward architecture, but rather out of a profound boredom with the discipline, as a sort of compulsive reaction." What would happen if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program, and budget? he asks. The result is a book that is saturated with forms, and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published.The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain link towers, ball bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing--and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from. The forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) but from a constant viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series. After setting down 1001 forms in siteless conditions and embryonic stages, Blanciak takes one of the forms and performs a "scale test," showing what happens when one of these fantastic ideas is subjected to the actual constraints of a site in central Tokyo. The book ends by illustrating the potential of these shapes to morph into actual building proportions.

Happy Home: Everyday Magic for a Colorful Life


Charlotte Hedeman Guéniau - 2013
    Happy Home brims with useful ideas for transforming a ho-hum home with relaxed contemporary style featuring bright colors, cheerful patterns, and varying textures and scale inspired by designer Charlotte Hedeman Gueniau and her home furnishings company Rice, which are well-known among design fans for innovative home furnishings and houseware collections featuring ethically sourced and produced products. The book shows how the basics of everyday life can be enlivened by bringing color and a sense of fun to daily living, whether by using brightly colored accessories or by introducing fabrics with patterns, textures, and hints of humor throughout the home. Included are practical suggestions that add informal charm to any room, as well as do-it-yourself projects ranging from brightly colored throws and cushions, storage ideas to hide clutter, hand-painted furniture, and decorative motifs for walls and other surfaces.