Gimme Shelters!
May is for horses (and a stable of great design books).
Jared Paul Stern
April 21, 2008
Walking into Ralph Lauren’s massive, incomparably opulent Polo flagship on Madison Avenue is like time-traveling back to the last gasp of the Gilded Age, a Gatsby-esque glimpse into how the other half died. The Rhinelander Mansion, as it’s properly called, has not been (as many suppose) preserved in aspic from the Vanderbilt Era. In fact, the place was basically gutted when Ralph bought it; interior designer Naomi Leff did the rest, articulating Lauren’s vision so magnificently that he barely blinked at the multimillion-dollar tab. That’s just one of the many projects picturesquely presented in Naomi Leff (Monacelli Press, $60) by Kimberly Williams, the first of the decorous design-oriented offerings this month.
Judging by the regal interiors she concocts for clients, it sometimes seems as though Southern belle Charlotte Moss would have been more at home at Versailles than modern-day Manhattan, though she’s doing her best to instill it with a little Sun King style, as shown in Charlotte Moss: A Flair for Living (Assouline, $65). Back in Moss’s native Virginia, meanwhile, they’re still hot to trot for all things horsey—see Kathryn Masson’s groovy Hunt Country Style (Rizzoli, $55). Tents and camp chairs have a come a long way since the Isak Dinesen days, as displayed in The New Safari: Design, Décor, Detail, edited by Robyn Alexander (Exhibitions International, $58). Ruthie Sommers shows us around the gold-plated canyons of Los Angeles in The L.A. House (Collins Design, $40). And two new titles that have great taste together celebrate the plush life inside and out: Luxury Houses: Holiday Escapes and Luxury Private Gardens (teNeues, $50 each).
In matters architectural, Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., recently opened as a museum, is revealed in all its glory in Christy MacLear and Dorothy Dunn’s The Glass House (Assouline, $19). Geoffrey Gross and Roderic H. Blackburn take us behind the doors of bluebloods and Brahmins in Great Houses of New England (Rizzoli, $55). And Maria Tuttle and Marcus Binney fling wide the portals of Barbara Hutton’s famed London manse in Winfield House (Thames & Hudson, $60).
On the fashion front, one of the dressing game’s most glorious seasons is extremely seemly in Paris, 1962: Yves Saint Laurent and Dior, The Early Collections by Jerry Schatzberg (Rizzoli, $75). And the legend behind one of the world’s most famous houses of horology is presented with panache in Panerai: The History by Simon De Burton and Giampiero Negretti (Flammarion, $125).
Also worth the price of paper this month: Leslie K. Overstreet’s beauteous Botanicals: Butterflies and Insects (Assouline, $50); the painter’s lens in Cy Twombly: Photographs 1951-2007 (Schirmer-Mosel, $99); the brilliant intersection of artforms in Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book (Abrams, $90) by Elena Foster and Rowan Watson; and the hardboiled genius of Ross Macdonald in The Blue Hammer and The Instant Enemy (Vintage Crime, $13 each). Macdonald’s Lew Archer could match drinks with Chandler’s Marlowe and Hammett’s Spade any day.
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