Rizzoli New York

Garden Design Master Class

September 4, 2022 by Carl Dellatore

Garden design: Margaret Brower Photo credit: Daniel Sager

Afterword

Thinking back to my earliest memory of a garden, I’m transported to the 1960’s in rural Pennsylvania, my maternal grandmother’s house in the last days of April, and Hyacinthus orientalis – the common hyacinth – in shades of purple, pink, and white.

While a novice by the standard of garden designers featured in this book, Mom-Mom had a true green thumb. Her front yard was tiny: some grass, and a strip of garden abutting the house that was the anticipated harbinger of spring, signaling the time to jettison heavy coats and snow shovels. When the hyacinths she planted broke ground and bloomed, you could smell them from the front porch of my family’s house next door; in fact, they were the signal my mother used to have the storm windows removed and replaced with summer screens.

Mom-Mom’s backyard was a small plot of land that might have been a grass covered respite to sit in a folding chair and have an iced tea. But for my grandmother, it was her pride and joy: the vegetable garden.

Farthest back some 15 feet from the house were several rows of corn and sunflowers that obscured the view of her neighbor’s garage. Moving toward the house, a dozen or so beefsteak tomato plants were planted in a chevron pattern with conical cages to support the eventual weight of their fruit. Moving toward the back door in orderly rows were red beets, string beans, cucumbers, radishes, cabbages, carrots, peas, kohlrabi, pumpkins, and bib lettuce. Several varieties of coleus plants were interspersed for color, cuttings of which would be brought indoors to ‘root’ in repurposed jelly jars on the kitchen window sill. They would eventually be replanted in yard the following spring. A real circle of life.

As the family living next door, we were the welcome recipients of Mom Mom’s summer bounty from late June though the first frost. There was rarely a meal without something from her garden.

It wasn’t until the 1990’s until I found the pleasures of gardening that my grandmother knew so well, when I purchased a modest house built in 1822 on a dozen acres in Churchtown, New York. It had originally been a poultry farm owned by one Homer Anderson (the original map of the house, with his name inscribed on it, came with the deed).

The place was in disrepair, which was part of the allure of the property: I love a project. Rotted and paint-bare, most of the clapboards needed replacing. The septic system failed. The plumbing needed professional attention. The outdated kitchen and bath desperately needed an update. Every wavy float glass window needed re-glazing; the entire house needed rewiring. You get the picture.

Outside there was evidence of a once thriving garden, but the previous homeowner explained he had paid little attention to it in the dozen years he owned the house. Hundreds of Siberian iris came up in May, but were crowded by poison ivy, wild black caps, and chickweed. Several dozen mature lilacs were leggy with few if any flowers. Hydrangeas that didn’t bloom, periwinkle mixed with dandelion, and a stone wall barely visible through the thicket.

Like most novice gardeners, I rolled up my sleeves every Saturday morning that first spring and set about what I thought was an ordered list of tasks required to bring the garden back to glory. But not having done adequate homework, I made mistakes.

That poison ivy I mentioned? I had a perennial (pun intended) case. I planted several dozen variegated Hosta in full sun; they withered to craft-paper brown by July. On the hill behind the house, I decided there should be Baltic ivy as ground cover. My partner and I spent an entire weekend clearing the brush, augmenting the soil, and planting 2000 (!) rooted cuttings purchased by mail order. Imagine our surprise when pulling up to the house the following Friday afternoon to find a deer and her fawn grazing on what turned out to be the last morsels of a week-long, all-you-can-eat buffet.

Eventually I came to the conclusion I needed a garden designer.

On the advice of a neighbor I hired Philippe, a French expat who lived a few miles away. We spent 2 hours together every Saturday morning during the spring and summer season of the second year discussing the topography, the existing plants, a ‘rescue’ plan for the parts of the garden I liked, and ideas for new plantings. We made trips to Ward’s Nursery in Great Barrington, where Philippe shared his expertise in choosing the perennials and annuals best suited to the Catskill mountains.

By the end of my 4th year, with untold hours of enjoyable sweat equity, I had my garden. In fact, with Philippe’s tutelage I’d built a formidable stone staircase, one riser and tread every weekend over the course of 2 summers, which led to the plateau where we put the pool and pool house.

Now I don’t own that house anymore, but when I think back to my naivete in planning its garden, I wonder what it might have been like to have the advice of the finest garden designers in the world to guide me. How do you integrate architecture and garden? How important are scale and proportion? What if I want my garden to have a Japanese sensibility? What are the differences between a formal and an informal garden? I love roses, but how do I choose a variety?

That’s part of the reason I decided to do this book, so that when I buy my next house, I’ll have it in one hand, and a pruning shears in the other.

That, and to remember my grandmother.

Purchase Garden Design Master Class

On Style: Inspiration and Advice from the New Generation of Interior Design

September 3, 2022 by Carl Dellatore

Introduction

When talking about design, some critics say, “We have seen everything before. There’s really nothing new being created.” On a granular level, I’m inclined to agree.

But interior design has always been defined by its moment in time, generational movements that are, in turn, shaped by culture, economics, and fashion. For example, in the 1970s industrial minimalism was au courant. In the early 1980s, many decorators were putting their own spin on British or French design. Concurrently, other designers created rooms that celebrated juxtaposition: Lucite with floral chintz; streamlined Parsons tables with eighteenth-century Irish chairs. This set the stage for the eclecticism of the high-flying 1990s.

The rise of the Internet at the turn of the twenty-first century provided a proliferation of visual information to drive the eclectic movement. Glorious Moroccan color palettes, sleek mid-century Italian silhouettes, and the patina associated with Japanese wabi-sabi are just a few of the ideas designers freely incorporated into their work. With so many concepts in the mix, interior design increasingly became reflective of a global view.

That brings me to this book.

In choosing fifty designers who represent the next generation of interior design, I began by doing research. Who has great style? Who has something visually interesting to say? Who is moving the discipline forward?

As I sifted through the finalists, I found that there was no one style of design that captured today’s moment. Instead, in what feels like a natural progression from eclecticism, there is a proliferation of aesthetic diversity. Words like contemporary or classic feel too limiting. We need a broader vocabulary to describe design today. Among the designers featured in this book, there are the New Traditionalists, who pay homage to classic design while responding to societal changes; the Modern Minimalists, who seek to create sanctuary to balance frenetic lives; the Saturated Colorists that conjure new palettes; the Casual Bohemians, who mix humble furnishings in exciting ways; and devotees of masculine restraint and urban chic.

Now, make no mistake: interior design’s function will always be to provide a personal backdrop for the business of living, and Louis Sullivan’s famous “form follows function” edict remains prescient. But there’s a new freedom in interior design. We may have seen it all before, but the variety of aesthetic lenses through which designers see interiors is expanding exponentially and in tandem with the technological advances of the twenty-first century.

As you read the profiles of the fifty designers included in this book, with their thoughts on their influences and inspiration, color and key elements, it’s my sincere hope that their answers, in concert with stylish images of their work, will inspire and delight you. Because in the end, isn’t that what great design is all about?

Purchase On Style: Inspiration & Advice from the New Generation of Interior Design

Interior Design Master Class

September 3, 2022 by Carl Dellatore

Introduction

In 1897, when the great novelist Edith Wharton and her friend, architect Ogden Codman Jr., published The Decoration of Houses, the world hovered on the brink of new movements, technologies, and modes of production that would radically transform the built world. Wharton and Codman sought to make sense of both this ferment and the past—recent and distant—for the lay reader, purporting to set forth the rational relationship between structure and surface, architecture and ornament. Wharton proclaimed, “It is with the decorator’s work alone that these pages are concerned,” and in so doing, she established her book as the springboard from which any informed knowledge of interior decoration began.

The twentieth century saw a great many interior decorators who carried Wharton’s precepts forward through their own aesthetic lens: Elsie de Wolfe, Rose Cumming, Eleanor Brown, Frances Elkins, Dorothy Draper, Sister Parish, Albert Hadley, Joe D’Urso, Angelo Donghia, Ward Bennett, Michael Taylor, Billy Baldwin, and Mark Hampton, among others. Some of these designers wrote landmark books setting forth their own conception of interior design, such as Billy Baldwin Decorates, Mark Hampton on Decorating, and de Wolfe’s The House in Good Taste.

By the late 1980s, interior design had hit its stride, bringing with it an outpouring of monographs, as the design of one’s own space had become a national, if not a global, obsession. Yet there have been few attempts to provide, in the manner of Wharton and Codman, a comprehensive account of what the industry’s finest practitioners believe works in interior design today, and why.

While I would not attempt to draw a direct comparison to The Decoration of Houses, I have always envisioned Interior Design Master Class as a modern-day answer to Wharton and Codman’s accomplishment by applying their room-by-room and element-by-element organization of the subject of decoration to its contemporary creators. In the voices of more than one hundred preeminent American designers, this is a comprehensive guide to the elements of interiors, including planes, portals, furniture, and color, to name a very few, as well as a meditation on related subjects such as archaeology, psychology, and literature.

Today, the welcome democratization of decoration that has taken place since the advent of the internet continues to expand, and more lay people than ever are interested in the design of their home. Interior Design Master Class offers a view into the world of the finest practitioners in the decorative arts, uncovering the intellectual and philosophical roots of this most ancient and necessary of arts. My hope is that it will instruct and inspire a wide audience, from the curious layperson to students of design as well as practicing professionals.

We all inhabit dwellings of some kind; the more thoughtful the attention we exert upon them, the more our infrastructure—our whole built world—is beautified.

Purchase Interior Design Master Class