From around the world of design, the MILIEU INSIDER features stories, events, gift guides, and book reviews, exclusively for our online readers
Arranging Things
Illuminating the often misunderstood role of an interiors stylist, Colin King’s Arranging Things (Rizzoli) is a masterful look at the numinous, even sacred, nature of objects and an introspective musing on their dynamic placement. King writes how styling “can be a daily practice, one that empowers you to see the world differently and find new meaning in your surroundings.”
Cocktails With A Curator: The Frick Collection
Xavier Salomon, Aimee Ng, and Giulio Dalvit began to broadcast, live and unscripted from their own homes, something called Cocktails with a Curator, a series watched by some 1.8 million viewers. Now that the museum is fully open again, a new book of the same name (published by Rizzoli) features shortened versions of those web performances.
The Ultimate Bath
Barbara Sallick remembers a particular shower she took nearly four decades ago. As she recalls in her new book, The Ultimate Bath (Rizzoli), she and her husband had purposely checked into a deluxe suite at London’s Claridge House so that they could try out the bathroom—use that very room as inspiration for what was then their still-nascent company, Waterworks.
Getting Possessive
Maria Hummer-Tuttle understands the objects she owns—that they needn’t be valuable to be of value. Although she has long appreciated this perspective on the artworks, statuettes, jewelry, dishware—even the crayon drawings done by her grandchildren—in her possession, Hummer-Tuttle came to understand it in a profound way years ago while in her Los Angeles home.
House Proud
Even though Rose Tarlow, the noted furniture and interior designer, calls this book Three Houses (Vendome), it’s really about four houses. It seems her East Coast girlhood home, Windrift, which burned down in 1966, remains the idyllic dwelling through which she wanders constantly in her imagination.
Color is Home: A Brave Guide to Designing Classic Interiors
Yes, it does take courage to design a room, especially the ones in which we live. The prolific and much sought-after Melbourne-based interior designer Charlotte Coote eases our fears and shows us how to design our own spaces.
Visite Priveé: Artists & Creatives at Home
Being creative sometimes relies, in significant part, on where we live. The actual rooms in which we socialize and sleep, cook and entertain often determine our creative states of mind and our creative output.
Living by the Sea
The title alone says what most of us wish. Whether it’s a view of an ocean, a Great Lake, a pond or even a stream, something about living in a house close to the water that speaks to our collective aesthetic selves.
Woods + Dangaran: Architecture and Interiors
Architects Brett Woods and Joe Dangaran admit to a passion for midcentury Modern design—so much so that they are often commissioned to restore the best examples of the genre, including Craig Ellwood’s iconic 1965 house, known as the Moore House.
Jean-Louis Deniot: Destinations
Although it’s often long in the making, a new name in interior design does seemingly vault to the top overnight—and stay there. An example of that would be Jean-Louis Deniot a French designer who lives in Paris, but whose designs are seen around the world.
Jacques Grange: Recent Work
The world’s best-known style maker, Jacques Grange, is regularly commissioned by the most illustrious tastemakers of our time to design their interiors.
At the Table of La Fortezza: The Enchantment of Tuscan Cooking from the Lunigiana Region
The stylist and design expert Annette Joseph has never settled for the obvious. Years ago, she purchased a medieval house near the Liguria coastline in Tuscany and named her new residence La Fortezza (“The Fortress”).
American Modern Home: Jacobsen Architecture + Interiors
The late Hugh Newell Jacobson once said, “The best house is polite to her neighbors and never shouts.” That directive was clearly passed on to his son, Simon, who now heads the namesake firm.
Stephen Sills: A Vision for Design
Stephen Sills begins every project with a mood board, each a work of art in itself. These documents, of sorts, relate the inspirations, the insights, the methods he seeks to employ for his clients’ homes.
The Evolution of Home: English Interiors for a New Era
Upon reading this book, it makes sense that designer Emma Sims-Hilditch began her work in film production for Ridley Scott. When she later founded her namesake firm in 2009, she took those visual cues and translated them into residential interiors.
The Façades of Paris: Windows, Doors, and Balconies
It’s the flâneur, the wanderer, that is, who really sees Paris. Anyone visiting the capital can find their way to the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe, but it’s the casual observer of its urban life who finds the city’s other treasures.
The Medici: Portraits and Politics 1512-1570
Art is power. Such was it centuries ago and such is it, to some extent, today. When the Medici family ruled the city of Florence, art and artists became much-coveted commodities.
In Print
During these past months, we have all spent more time at home than likely ever before. As a result, we’ve come to look at our rooms with a new perspective.