INTERIOR DESIGN
S Is for Style: The Schumacher Book of Decoration (Rizzoli, 2020) takes readers on a deep dive into company’s archives, featuring iconic fabrics wielded by some of America’s best designers over the last century. Part decorating guide, part inspiration, part personality profiler, it’s proof of why this 131-year-old company remains a vanguard of good taste.
While S Is for Style celebrates a range of what great design can look like, Glamorous Living (Abrams, 2020), designer Jan Showers’s third book, illustrates the unique imprint of one person’s point of view. Jan’s particular alchemy of shine, shimmer, curves, and confidence shows that every space looks better with a little glamour.
ENTERTAINING
As a child Héloïse Brion shuttled from her American life in Florida to summers at her French grandmother’s home in the Pyrenees. Her memories of those summers are the stuff of fairy-tales—days spent in the service and rhythm of preparing meals over the wood-fired oven. After a stint in fashion, Héloïse and her husband bought an old hunting lodge in Normandy they named Miss Maggie and settled in with their young family. In Miss Maggie’s Kitchen: Relaxed French Entertaining (Flammarion, 2020), Héloïse shares the rustic cuisine of her ancestral home and the casually chic way of entertaining in the French country style.
Aerin Lauder’s Entertaining Beautifully (Rizzoli, 2020) offers a more panoramic look at putting on a party. Featuring a year’s worth of gatherings, from a Halloween children’s party to a Hamptons garden lunch, it’s clear Aerin treats entertaining as a form of creative expression.
GARDENS
Most consider the portrait and the landscape to be opposing visual expressions. In Garden Portraits: Experiences of Natural Beauty (Monacelli Press, 2020), photographer Larry Lederman turns that thinking on its head, capturing gardens with the tenderness and familiarity often reserved for a sitting subject. The book’s 16 private gardens present the garden as a space itself, in Larry’s words, “a portal to the natural world.”
Speaking of portals, landscape designer Keith William’s new book The Graphic Garden (Pointed Leaf Press, 2020) is like a one-way ticket to the tropics. His gardens, a powerful balance of linear and lush, bring the banyan trees, bougainvillea, and beach breeze to you, wherever your armchair may be.
See more books on our 2020 reading list.
By Kirk Reed Forrester
What Else We’ve Got Our Eyes on in Fall 2020
- Welcome to Utopia Goods’ Textile Jungle
- Chic Outposts: Beloved Hotels Open New Locations
- Design in Bloom: Lee Jofa + Carrier and Company
- Preserving the Art of Italian Jewelry-Making
- Feeling Rosy: Chintz to Facial Mist
- New Take on a Classic: John Derian for Stubbs & Wootton
- Jewelry for Your Home Kravet + Addison Weeks
