Books & Nooks
my favorite interior design tomes and the spaces they inspired me to create
Growing up, I had zero appreciation for the minimalism of the Soho lofts we lived and socialized in. An aesthetic somewhere between the Solaris space station and a snobby multi-brand concept store, its central tenets were were white walls, highly considered mid-century pieces (and not many of them- a lot of floor sitting!) and raw materials fashioned into inventive shelving, meant to hide all signs of human life aside from select books (my father kept his beloved sci-fi paperback collection in the closet where he smoked dope. Show those off, freak!) Of course in hindsight I understand this was a conceptually driven response to the fussy, performative faux-country manor aesthetic and plastic slipcovers so many boomers had grown up with in the ‘burbs, but when I visited a friend whose family had a Laura Ashley sectional I felt a kind of jealousy usually reserved for girls with ponies.
My mother still loves to tell the story of the day I stormed in from a sleepover at a fifth-grade friends’ apartment, side-eyed the niche sofa they’d spent years carefully sourcing (“the dealer’s grandparents died on the Titanic” is all she currently remembers about its provenance) and announced “Mom, we don’t have to live like this. There’s a wonderful place called Jennifer Convertibles, and you can pay them in installments!”
Whether their taste always reflected my sense of what was fabulous (and let’s be honest, only The Nanny actually did that) I have come to love my parents’ approach to making a home. Their taste may not be overtly playful, but they never stop playing. Often when I call them, I can hear the scrape of a piece of furniture being hauled around as the other offers instructions, and it’s rare I come back from a long stretch away to find anything at all in the place it was before. That’s its own kind of consistency. The places change, the spaces rearrange, but most objects I can remember touching with tiny hands.
Whenever we moved as a family, we started on air mattresses with clementine crates as beside tables. And we stayed that way for awhile, as we “got a feel” for what my parents call “the moments” around the house- little nooks and crannies and what they’re good for, altars to different parts of the day. They worked in installments, based on what they could afford and what they knew they’d only have to rethink if they jumped the gun. A home can be created in the image of our inner lives, then re-created, a living monument to what safety feels like.
A lot of people think that interior design is about Pinteresting a master plan and having every element in place- including the color-coded library- by the time you turn the key. The celebrity house tour industrial complex has given us a whole other complex- even in a “maximalist” home the humanity is only evident in what enameled cappuccino maker has been chosen. We are not how we live, but what we own. That’s why, despite having some gorgeous pro pics of my house, this post is all iPhone shots replete with detritus (my lawyer was extremely confused when, in creating my will- more fun than you’d think, if you don’t think about it too much- I announced “and my tchotchkes go to Russell Brown!”)
The other day in the car, Lu and I did a count of how many places we’d each lived in our adult lives before we found our way to each other (fifteen! twinsies!) Whether it was a hotel, motel, Holiday Inn I always tried to infuse it with a sense that it was mine, like Holly Golightly stacking her trunks as tables and chucking a few pink pillows into what was then considered a city abyss (and would now be an extremely amenable one bedroom.) This could be a whole other piece about writers and their space, or chronically ill people and their space- the Venn diagram here has a lot of crossover, as it involves turning your quarters into an HQ you can bear to operate from as you mind travel. But this is a selection of interiors books I love and a look at some of the “moments”- in our homes on both sides of the pond- that they helped to inspire.
To this day, when I’m anxious, my favorite thing to do is pour over a book of interiors. I don’t even have to like the design- the collated signs of life, usually photographed minus the chaos of actual human people, calms my racing rabbit heart. Just like my favorite New York fantasy is to look into someone else’s lit windows and imagine padding around their life. Just like my favorite question to ask at a dinner party is “if the apartments were EXACTLY the same, would you rather live in the prettiest, most historic building on the block and look out at the ugliest, or vice versa?” FYI, if you say look out at the prettiest while living in the ugliest you’re a good person. But if you’d rather know you’re in the prettiest and stare out at a new-build hellscape or a hole in the ground, you’re me.
As Brittany M’s sign says, outside her little apartment in Girl, Interrupted: “If you lived here, you’d be home now.”
Laura Ashley Decorates a London House (Lorrie Mack, Lucinda Egerton, Jane Newdick, 1993) & Laura Ashley Guide to Country Decorating (Jane Clifford, 1985)
The World of Miniatures: From Simple Cabins to Ornate Palaces (Sarah Walkley, 2018)
Animal House Style (Julia Szabo, 2001) & At Home With Dogs and Their Designers: Sharing a Stylish Life (Susanna Salk, 2017)
Decorate Fearlessly: Using Whimsy, Confidence, and a Dash of Surprise to Create Deeply Personal Spaces (Susanna Salk, 2017)
Love How You Live: Adventures In Interior Design (Rodman Primack and Rudy Weissenberg, 2024)
Terence Conran’s New House Book: The Complete Guide to Interior Design (Terence Conran, 1991)
Would You Like To See The House? Unapologetic Interiors Filled With Color, Verve, Oh And There’s A Door On The Ceiling! (Lorraine Kirke, 2016)
The Laura Ashley Book of Home Decorating (Elizabeth Dickson and Margaret Colvin, 1982)
Esercizi / Exercises (Ettore Sottsass, 2001)
Like every millennial who ever logged into an image-sorting app, I’m crazy for Sottsass. But my time with the Ultrafragiola mirror was a study in who we are versus who we want to be. At the time, I was moving into my first solo spot post breakup, and not feeling particularly great about any aspect of my person, so the metaphor of wanting a pedigree mirror that emits a rosy glow could not have been more blatant.
I didn’t just want it. I needed it, like Carrie needs those Manolos. It was carefully sourced for me by the cozy and brilliant Ariel Okin, who shares my love of all things granny fabulous and whose own gorgeous book- for which I was lucky enough to write the forward- rejects the tyranny of needing to pretend you live in The Row store.
I’d never spent even an eighth of what I spent on this mirror on any other object in my house. I prided myself on locating Etsy aliens and then hitching a ride to meet their makers. I couched the expense in the language of “the lady works hard and she TREATS herself” but the flashing neon sign above the bodacious neon mirror might as well have read:
YOU CANNOT FILL THE HOLE IN YOUR SOUL WITH A SELFIE BATHED IN BERRY LIGHT.
And pretty soon I was feeling the, well, vanity of living with everyone’s favorite selfie mirror.
Let me say, many chic people have made this mirror a key and original part of their home- it’s not about the mirror, or whether it appears on the Millennial apartment bingo card.
It’s that, for me, it was aspirational, not inspirational.
I sold him- yeah, he’s a guy I think!- docking some dollars for the fuse I blew because converting euro power is for literal astrophysicists. Now. We happily live with a riff raff of smaller folksy mirrors hung at varied heights, and I’m only ever able to see my outfits in segments, exquisite corpse style, just how I like it.
Bonus: The Ultimate Inspiring Spaces
Double Bonus: The Ultimate Inspiring Pieces
Further reading
Not a cute or clever comment, but just a sincere appreciation of the time, work, and highly original thought that goes into each and every one of these delightful columns. Thank you!
That domino cover tho 😍