Decorative Art 1950s

More than any other piece of furniture, the chair has been subjected to the wildest dreams of the designer. The particular curve of a backrest, or the twist of a leg, the angle of a seat or the color of the entire artifact; each element reflects the stylistic consciousness of an era. From Gerrit Rietveld and Alvar Aalto to Verner Panton and Eva Zeisel, from Art Nouveau to International Style, from Pop Art to Postmodernism, the history of the chair is so complex that it requires a comprehensive encyclopedic work to do it full justice. They are all here: Thonet’s bentwood chairs and Hoffmann’s sitting-machines, Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair and Ron Arad’s avant-garde armchairs. Early designers and pioneers of the modern chair are presented alongside the most recent innovations in seating. This dedicated compendium displays each chair as pure form, along with biographical and historical information about the pieces and their designers. An illuminating tome for design aficionados and an essential reference for collectors!

A compact sourcebook of ideas for innovative furnishing, interior environments and small-scale architectural interventions.

As the definition of ‘designer’ expands and architects today create everything from jewelry to urban masterplans, a new wave of objects is transforming our interior spaces. They include bookshelves that can dynamically divide and reshape a room, chairs that create intimate room-like enclosures, home-office spaces-within-spaces, and self-contained kitchen cubes that can be expanded to reveal every conceivable cooking and eating function.

Furnitecture presents some 200 examples of this new design typology. From Danish studio KiBiSi’s design for a reconfigurable bookshelf system and Japanese architect Shigeru Ban’s moving boxes within rooms, to Dutch designers Makkink & Bey’s conversational Ear Chairs and the French atelier 37.2’s series of self-standing cubes, there is an interior world of innovation in these pages. And a personal space just for you.

House of Joy explores the best and brightest in playful interior design. Colors jump from furniture to kaleidoscopic walls. Lines become sinuous and bold. The palette is warm and full, and unafraid of extravagance. The spaces in this book showcase a range of historic influences, imaginatively updated to the present. A squiggly line connects bold post-war color schemes to the exuberant work of Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Group. The vibrancy and eclecticism of 1990s decor is echoed in recent movements injecting rainbow hues into urban greige. Get inspired by the designers who’ve had enough of the drab and somber. House of Joy is the perfect antidote for those who are starved of color and patterns, and who want their rooms to be bursting with life.

The kitchen is where we prepare meals, share food, and create memories with friends and family. But beyond just its functional role, the kitchen is also a space that reflects our personal style, taste, and values.

Kitchen Interiors takes readers on a journey through the evolution of kitchen design and its impact on our lives. From the early days of the hearth to the modern, open-concept kitchens of today, this book will explore the history, trends, and innovations that have shaped kitchen design.

Making interior design choices can be daunting in a world flooded with trend-setting Instagram posts and Pinterest boards. Russell and Jordan specialize in designing homes for clients who know what they love but struggle to know where to start. Their fresh approach is nothing short of a design revolution, enabling readers to free their homes by creating interiors that express their personality and address their needs.

This essential companion will equip readers with new ways to see their interiors and give them the confidence to create a home that helps them to live better. In eight chapters, Russell and Jordan cover everything from how to handle original features, use colour, pattern and texture, choose materials and curate objects. Focusing on people and how we use our spaces, this book also covers finding one’s style, cohabiting and design compromises, exploring one’s creativity and rediscovering the fun in interior design. Box-outs and tips throughout offer practical guidance on where to start, as well as a range of examples from the designers’ own work and that of key designers around the world.

This simply structured and highly original book analyses the palettes that have been used by designers in the creation of furnishing fabrics and wallpapers from the 15th century to the present. The colours used in each pattern are presented in a simple proportional grid, giving a clear understanding of hues that have been expertly combined at different periods to create the designs we continue to admire and emulate.

Spectrum opens with a brief introduction by interior design expert Ros Byam Shaw, exploring the history of colour as used in interiors. The fabrics and wallpapers that follow are arranged chronologically. Each is reproduced on its own double-page spread, and is accompanied by a brief narrative-style caption that provides information about each fabric or wallpaper and its significance in the context of interior design. Unique in such a book are the colour grids shown beside each pattern, in which the colours in the original piece are shown in proportion to their use, and with their CMYK references to enable designers to replicate these colours in their own work.