Residential Books

The Dalai Lama was staying at the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel when I was in Copenhagen, a month ago, but happily Room 606 was unoccupied and I was able to see this one surviving fragment of Arne Jacobsen's gesamtkunstwerk. Denmark's leading architect designed this hotel-terminal in 1960 as the flagship of SAS, a major patron of progressive design, when air travel was still a civilized experience for a fortunate few. Fabrics, lighting, and furniture-most famously the Egg, Swan, and Drop chairs-even the stainless steel flatware and door handles were custom designed by Jacobsen for the hotel. Everything but the one room (which rents for about $575 a night) and the spiral stair in the lobby has now been changed. Sheridan, a New York architect, employs a wealth of period photos and sketches to recreate every facet of the original and places it in the context of Jacobsen's earlier work. The result is a gem of lucid scholarship. (Michael Webb is the book reviewer for LA Architect magazine.)

How will we perceive our homes in the decade ahead? In Rooms by Design, the top architects and decorators of Europe and the United States explore a warm, referential style for our environments, blending elegance, with, romance and hospitality. It is a vision of relaxed entertaining, of easy times with family and friends, yet a vision flexible enough to accommodate the pleasures of formality and the luxury of reflective solitude.

Rooms by Design provides a multitude of design opportunities for every room in the house - whether that house is an urban one-room apartment or a vast and airy country home. The unifying concept is how dwellings manifest our private and public selves.

In this book, Gae Aulenti offers us an understated, yet aristocratic interpretation of a turn-of-the-century Milan salone. Artist Keith Haring devises a whimsical riot of color in his New York City playrooms-for-grown-ups. Andrée Putman streamlines a former Paris factory for the Art Deco-filled space she calls home. Other architects, decorators, and artists whose work appears here are Williams Cohen, Eric Jacobson, Robert Venturi, Dethleff Grüneke, and others. Together, they illustrate the design spectrum from traditional to contemporary to avant-garde. The photographers of these interiors are among the most famous in their field worldwide.

Rooms by Design is unique on the design shelf. It is an idea book that collects the most winning developments of our time and translates them into accessible, attractive options for those of us seeing to create surroundings an individual as ourselves. This volume depicts a gentle art of everyday living that reflects us, nourishes our spirit, and redefines our very notions of home.

188 photographs in full color.

This is an excellent piece of research on the all pervasive housing type; the rowhouse. It is not an historical overview; it is a series of speculative projects, some student projects, with beautifully realized works of architecture as well. They point towards certain areas of research, into new possibiities of the type; spatial and subdivision innovations, interesting responses to topography, accommodation of parking, and different levels of interaction with the street. Highly recommended.

This is a beautiful book in every way. It looks grand and the workmanship is supurb. The photography is stunning. The book does a commendable job of presenting the best of the great palaces of Spain. Spain has a rich history of palace building, from the Philip II's austere El Escorial to Phillip V's baroque Palacio Real and it is on breathtaking display in this excellent book. If you have any interest in Spanish architecture or of European architecture in general I strongly recommend you get this book. The price may be a bit daunting, but if you enjoy fine books you won't be disappointed.

Anytime you want to relax and escape to another world, then this is the book for you. Beautifully illustrated this book gave me hours of reading pleasure and lots of ideas for my own house.

Certainly one of the most overlooked works of modern architecture, the Saarinen house, which this book documents in splendid detail, is perhaps the crowning work of Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen during his years at Cranbrook. Thanks to the recent restoration of the house and garden, we can now see his vision of TOTAL design; from the flatware to the tapestries to the furniture to the door handle to the landscape...

There are about 100 pages of rich, color photographs of the restored house and garden, but this is more than a coffee table book. The authors provide good historic background and lend their authoritative commentary on this masterpiece of residential architecture and its restoration.

Photographs of the house and garden are sumptuous and capture the original splendor of the house's rich interior and its many sophisticated details. Contemporary black and white photographs documenting Saarinen's career and the history of the house are included.

Well written, excellently illustrated. This book dispells many of the myths and rumours behind residential life in Northern Ontario.

This book is exactly what I was looking for. Perfect condition and rapid delivery. Great service.

Savannah Sketchbook offers the experience of twenty-one artists who applied their impressionistic vision to watercolor paintings of Savannah, Georgia. The full-color illustrations on almost every page have a slightly sketchy feel, yet evoke a profound sense of warmth, and the text offers the rich history behind each of the locales captured on brush and paper. An amazingly unforgettable tour of a charming American town, blending talent and love for scenery into a beautiful whole.

I love this book. It doesn't show period mid-century homes, or homes decorated to achieve the period look, but concentrates on clean, contemporary Scandinavian-sympathetic architecture that emphasizes the beauty of natural materials and bringing the outside in, and how modern and period pieces can look in such a setting. In particular, the emphasis on architecture will inspire the reader.