BELLAS ARTES

Following her success with Nora Murphy’s Country House Style, Murphy celebrates a selection of homes and their homeowners, each exemplifying a different style. For Nora Murphy, a country house isn’t so much a place as it is a state of mind. A country house is warm, welcoming—at once down to earth, yet elegant. A country house has genuine character, tells a story, and is truly, wonderfully lived in. Here Murphy explores the tenets of country house style, as illustrated by her own “new” country house, and the many other striking homes she has curated for the book. Each one of these homeowners has embraced country house style—but each implements it in their own unique way. There is a pastoral 1732 center-chimney colonial in Connecticut nestled in spectacular gardens, a cozy cottage on the coast of Maine rich with local details, and an 1840s Greek Revival in the Hudson Valley filled with romantic Victorian ephemera. Common threads weave through the stories: the thrill of the antiques hunt, the role of history, and the priority of comfort.

Back in print for the first time in years, this classic of interior-design history showcases the masterful work of David Hicks (1929–1998), who is acknowledged as one of the most important designers of the late twentieth century, in the company of Billy Baldwin and Albert Hadley. Known for his bold use of color, eclecticism, and geometric designs in carpets and textiles, Hicks turned English decorating on its head in the 1950s and ’60s. His trademark use of electrifying color combinations, and mixing antiques, modern furniture, and abstract paintings became the “in style” for the chic of the day, including Vidal Sassoon and Helena Rubinstein. By the 1970s, David Hicks was a brand; his company was making wallpaper, fabrics, and linens and had outposts in eight countries, including the United States where he worked with the young Mark Hampton, and where his wallpaper was used in the White House. “My greatest contribution as an interior designer has been to show people how to use bold color mixtures, how to use patterned carpets, how to light rooms, and how to mix old with new,” he stated in his 1968 work, David Hicks on Living—With Taste, the last authoritative book on his work. Written by his son, Ashley Hicks, with unprecedented access to Hicks’s archives, personal photographs, journals, and scrapbooks, this book is a vibrantly illustrated celebration of a half century of stunning interiors.

Featuring innovative home offices that are inventive, accessible, and often wonderfully serene, this book is a rich source of ideas and inspirations embracing the call to work from home! Pavilions, sheds, studios, extensions—call them what you will, architects around the globe are experimenting with attached or detached workplaces and creating imaginative ateliers that strain the limits of “miniature”; one is just 100 square feet. It is a worldwide adventure in architectural experimentation and originality.

Rafe and Heide discovered their true home in a late 1800s New England farmhouse after a decade of living in Brooklyn, New York. The historic property, Ellsworth, is a showplace for their shared aesthetic and sensibility of designing for real life, and not for formality. At the core is a house of pared-down traditionalism with references to Shaker tranquility, Arts & Crafts practicality, and bohemian chic. Whimsical wallcoverings, striking colors, a mix of contemporary furniture and antiques, exciting works of art, and comfort abound—turning a workaday house from the nineteenth century into a creative laboratory of the twenty-first.

A chronicle of the pioneering and subversive brand Parachute and its influence on the evolution of fashion in the 1980s and beyond. From its beginnings inspired by New Wave subculture to its position as an international fashion sensation, the Parachute brand from Montreal was recognized for its visionary, bold apparel and innovative concept stores. Avant-garde in attitude and design, Parachute brought together high and low, the establishment and the underground. The clothing was defined by androgynous looks, oversized silhouettes, elevated essentials, and graphic references to past and future, from exaggerated trench coats to “space samurai kimonos.” Together with a considered retail presence, which combined an industrial aesthetic in the stores with exuberant photography campaigns, the brand created a vision for street fashion that is keenly relevant today.

El libro propone un recorrido del exterior al interior: comienza por el emplazamiento y su entorno, sigue por las diversas envolventes del edificio y termina con el análisis de los aspectos ambientales de la iluminación, la calefacción y los sistemas de climatización. Un recorrido donde se exploran distintos temas transversales, como el ahorro de agua o materiales, la calidad ambiental interior o el uso de energías renovables. El conjunto ofrece una exploración completa y metódica de la arquitectura ecológica exponiendo los temas clave, un marco teórico básico y estrategias concretas para proyectar bajo el paradigma de la sostenibilidad. Las ilustraciones que detallan estos principios y discusiones, realizadas por el maestro Francis D. K. Ching, conforman una magnífica guía visual para el proyecto y la construcción de edificios ecológicos, y hacen de este libro un manual único e ineludible en el ámbito de la arquitectura y la construcción sostenibles.