From acclaimed French interior designer and decorative arts historian Florence de Dampierre comes an inspiring collection of the best decorative wall treatments. Throughout history, there has been a desire to express the esprit of a period by decorating the walls of our homes. From Italianate murals in Renaissance villas and the whimsical painted panels of the Musee Carnavalet, to English Arts and Crafts wallpaper and Frederic Church's stenciled homestead Olana, noted connoisseur de Dampierre shows how decorating walls can transform an interior space to dramatic effect that harmoniously creates a rich, sophisticated look.Walls covers a sampling of premier decorative wall designs from around the world that have evolved over the centuries, including fresco, wood paneling, stenciling, and wallpaper. De Dampierre has chosen the best examples that have proven to be the most inspirational and relevant for today's home interior design. Sidebars will cover such topics as lacquering; chair moldings, pediments, and cornices; borders and friezes; hand-painted linen and cotton hangings; tooled leather, and toile. Each chapter will end with such practical advice as mixing pigments, application tips, maintenance, and restoration. Beautifully photographed, the book offers innumerable wall treatment ideas that can be seamlessly integrated with furnishings of modern interiors to create an original ambience.

These exceptional houses — distinguished by their classical style and artistic integrity — represent the highest level of design and craftsmanship, fashioned for historic taste. A return to classicism and traditional styles has been widely observed in the world of architecture and design, and the houses in this volume represent the finest examples of new design based on historical precedents. These stunning residences are graced with regional character, impeccable craftsmanship, and classic beauty. Collaborating with leading landscape designers, decorators, and artisans, architects Mark Ferguson and Oscar Shamamian have produced homes that — whether country estates, suburban houses, or city apartments — are exquisite examples of timeless design for those who are inspired by historic styles. With lush photography capturing the allure of these of exteriors, interiors, and details — as well as original drawings and plans — the book will appeal to architects, interior designers, and homeowners with an eye for fine design and anyone wishing to be inspired by the poetry of history. Recognized by Architectural Digest in 2010 as being among the most important and influential architecture firms at work today, this beautifully illustrated volume presents Ferguson & Shamamian's finest work, including new houses, apartments, alterations and additions, and unbuilt design plans. Each of the nineteen homes featured in the book will be presented in detail, with full color photography and project descriptions written by the architects themselves. Eleven unbuilt projects will be represented by drawings, and eleven alterations and additions will be included in an appendix.

An irreverent survey of surprisingly enduring icons of Soviet design. This knowing survey presents some of the more populist but nonetheless enduring work in graphic and industrial design that was a product of the Soviet era — a period that remains politically sensitive and underexplored, yet whose influence on the objects and aesthetics of Russian daily life has been profound. Made in Russia celebrates fifty such masterpieces, ranging from pioneers of Soviet technology such as the Lada car, the Sputnik rocket, and the Lomo camera, to icons of quotidian culture such as the fishnet shopping bag, the beveled twelve-sided glass, a Cold War-inspired arcade game, and Misha the Olympic bear. After an introduction from editor Michael Idov and an essay on the place of design in Soviet culture by Gary Shteyngart, the objects are presented with a short accompanying essay from one of today's best-known Russian writers giving a brief history of its creation, and each is illustrated with black-and-white archival images. Three color sections throughout the book include additional images of a selection of the objects. Designed by the creator of The Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia series, the book is as much an intelligent reading book on forgotten aspects of Soviet culture as a tongue-in-cheek illustrated survey of an under-acknowledged but prolific period in Russian design and creativity.

Preston Bailey, one of the world’s preeminent floral and event designers, presents dozens of his most memorable arrangements. From one of the most renowned floral couturiers and event planners working today comes a rich presentation on the art of flower arranging perfect for home decoration and inspiration and of interest to professionals. In his first single-topic book, Preston Bailey shares his philosophy about flower design, walking the reader through the creation of his highly original floral centerpieces and other arrangements with advice on how to achieve the same results. For each arrangement, Bailey discusses his inspiration and describes the type of flowers used, providing great detail on those he selects for the tables, both for the centerpieces and the place settings. He explains how the flowers influence the mood of each event, and illuminates the role that flowers play in the selection of lighting, table linens, and overall room decor. The arrangements vary from smaller groupings easily replicated at home, to the more elaborate works of art for which Bailey is renowned. Appealing to both the amateur and the professional, Preston Bailey Flowers is an essential and unforgettable addition to the flower-design canon.

Presents a pictorial look at and commentary on the history of the wedding dress, with emphasis on the works and reminiscences of Oleg Cassini, along with other notable designers.

Green is the new white for today's environmentally conscious couples — this timely yet stylish book is an inspirational guide to making that special day perfect. Louise Moon, a leading wedding planner, shows how to green the most important day in any couple's life. From one or two thoughtful features, like using organic, locally grown food for the reception, to more imaginative solutions for making the entire event as low impact as possible, The Natural Wedding has everything couples need to make their special event naturally romantic, conscientious, and sustainable. The book shows that green weddings can be even more stylish than a traditional wedding and covers green options for all aspects of the big day: menus, the location, invitations, bridal party attire, flowers, the ceremony, the reception, gifts, the honeymoon, and beyond (since living green doesn't stop at I do).

Meet the four-legged friends who frolic, walk, and romp in New York City's biggest playground. Move over Westminster! There's a live canine show happening in Central Park seven days a week, 365 days a year. On top of the 25 million people who visit New York's iconic park each year are those with an extra two legs who utilize the 800-plus acres, be it to soak in the sun, fraternize with fellow canines, or promenade along the walkways with their well-heeled owners. Big dogs. Little dogs. Multibreeds. Photographer Fran Reisner captures all these playful creatures throughout the seasons in their furry splendor as they delight in the natural wonders of New York's biggest green lawn. There's snow-loving Lenny, an elderly Golden Retriever who was born in Austria and has traveled the world with his owners, an opera singer and his wife. Charley is a Standard Poodle and a certified Delta Dog, doing volunteer therapy at Mt. Sinai Hospital. And there's Daisy — a mixed breed with piercing blue eyes who hails from the Bronx and to whom Roberta Flack once stopped and sang Daisy Daisy — exudes cool as she relaxes on a bench. Calmly mugging for the camera, displaying panache and flair as they pose in front of Bethesda Fountain or Belvedere Castle, these urban sophisticates are all adorable prancers who make it clear that New York City is their turf.Whimsical, humorous, and genuinely endearing, The Dogs of Central Park is a unique love letter to dogs and to New York, and is a wonderful souvenir for tourists and dog lovers alike.

Located on Italy's sun-drenched southeast coast, the unique and rustic interiors of Puglia's ancient Masserie buildings speak of a historic past and are inspiring to all those who love rustic living. Surrounded by verdant vineyards and groves of olive trees, the Masserie of Puglia — fortified domestic structures of brick, stone, and concrete dating from the Middle Ages — embody a rich cultural past largely unexplored by the tourists and villa-seekers of Tuscany. Once serving as farmhouses and way stations for those traveling along the Via Appia, these buildings have been renovated to serve as private residences or boutique hotels, with their beautifully preserved interiors thoughtfully adapted and turned into a cool serenity. With striking photography by Mark Roskams, this book offers a previously unseen look into these spaces. Simultaneously austere and luxurious, the simple yet spacious rooms retain their original charm, including stone kitchen fireplaces, churchlike arched hallways, and magnificent marble floors. The rustic reds, golden yellows, and cornflower blues of classic Italy are surprising when set against the dazzlingly white backdrops of medieval stucco and stone. Richly contextualized with original essays by architect and scholar Diane Lewis, this volume will inspire interior lovers with the details of this unique and rustic architectural style.

A lavishly illustrated and definitive look at the design evolution of the racing motorcycle. The dynamic between competition and design has always fueled the evolution of racing motorcycles and inspired astonishing feats of design and engineering. This book traces the development of the sport bike, from the earliest French motorcycles to the dominance of British machinery in the 1930s, the exotic Italian motorcycles of the 1950s and 1960s, the influence of American racing in the 1970s and 1980s, and today’s Japanese superbikes. More than fifty classic motorcycles—from Harley-Davidsons to Peugeots, Velocettes, Moto Guzzis, BMWs, Kawasakis, and Ducatis—are presented chronologically illustrated with stunning studio photographs that present the machines as works of art and wonders of design in themselves, accompanied by rare and beautiful archival images that place the subjects in the contexts of classic races, rallies, and motorcycle shows, and accompanied by essays revealing the legends behind the machines. Some of the championship motorcycles featured include the 1902 Manon, the 1922 Harley Davidson 8-valve, the 1935 Terrot 500, the 1948 AJS Porcupine, the 1954 Moto Guzzi V8, the 1965 Honda GP 250, The 1976 Suzuki RK67, the 1986 Cagiva GP, and the 1990 Ducati Supermono.

A highly detailed look at the English country house interior, offering unprecedented access to England's finest rooms. In this splendid book, renowned historian Jeremy Musson explores the interiors and decoration of the great country houses of England, offering a brilliantly detailed presentation of the epitome of style in each period of the country house, including the great Jacobean manor house, the Georgian mansion, and the Gothic Revival castle. For the first time, houses known worldwide for their exquisite architecture and decoration — including Wilton, Chatsworth, and Castle Howard — are seen in unprecedented detail. With intimate views of fabric, gilding, carving, and furnishings, the book will be a source of inspiration to interior designers, architects, and home owners, and a must-have for anglophiles and historic house enthusiasts.

As one of today's most exciting artists, Kenny Scharf rose to prominence in the New York art scene in the '80s as part of a dynamic and influential group of artists that included Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He has since returned to California, but he has retained the playful Pop aesthetic for which he is internationally renowned. This complete new volume covers Scharf's illustrious career and his experiences and activities in the downtown art scene. His work is instantly recognizable, with idiosyncratic cartoon creatures popping up in the oddest of places: in paintings, on functional objects, or piled up on top of each other to form huge totem-poles. Richard Marshall helps navigate the reader across the decades of Scharf's career. Carlo McCormick's essay focuses on Scharf's fanciful customized cars and installations. Ann Magnuson reminisces about Scharf's happenings in the East Village and the club scene.

The most comprehensive monograph on Turner Prize-nominated artist Peter Doig. In every generation of artists, there are a few-or perhaps just one-who propose a new set of questions and alter the way we understand art. Peter Doig is such an artist. While stories of painting's demise in the early 1990s deemed painters and their work quaintly anachronistic, Doig-looking ahead as much as back for inspiration-forged a new painterly language: an ironic mix of Romanticism and post-impressionism to create haunting and sometimes dreamlike landscape vistas. In this lavish new volume devoted to his entire career-which includes paintings, drawings, and reference material, such as found photographs-art historians Richard Shiff and Catherine Lampert mine the artist's rich and varied work. Doig's landscapes have been inspired by the many places the artist has lived-England, Canada, Trinidad. So, too, does memory, or the idea of memory, inform much of his production. This handsome slipcased volume is designed in close collaboration with the artist, with Doig specially creating the cover and various elements of the interior. Every facet of the painter's singular vision is explored, from his earliest paintings of the early 1990s to the most recent series of works. Published in association with Michael Werner Gallery.

An extraordinary private collection of watercolors and drawings by Andrew Wyeth depicting the subjects memorialized in his legendary painting Christina's World, one of the best-known works of American art. This book presents rarely seen watercolors and drawings Andrew Wyeth made of his friend Christina Olson, her brother Alvaro, and the weathered Maine farmstead where they lived. It features moving portraits and serene interior and exterior views of the house and the surrounding land, now memorialized in Wyeth's 1948 tempera painting Christina's World, one of the most famous paintings in the history of American art and now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Some forty-five works from the collection of the Marunuma Art Park in Japan, rarely shown before in the United States, are accompanied by works from the Farnsworth as well as by historical photographs of Wyeth, the Olsons, and the house. Otoyo Nakamura writes about the history of this collection of Wyeth works, and Michael Komanecky addresses the place of the Olson farm in Wyeth's career over three decades, and how Christina's World and the Olson House have inspired pilgrimages for fans of Wyeth's work. Despite its isolated location and seasonal schedule, Olson House draws thousands of visitors each year from around the world. The Olson House, acquired by the Farnsworth Art Museum in 1991, has been recommended for National Landmark status.

A catalogue of new work by American artist John Currin, one of the world's foremost figurative painters. John Currin's work draws upon a broad range of cultural influences that include Renaissance oil paintings, 1950s women's magazine advertisements, and contemporary politics. Labeled as mannerist, caricaturist, radical conservative, or satirist, Currin continues to confound expectations and evade categorization. While his virtuosic technique is indebted to the history of classical painting, the images engage startlingly contemporary ideas about the representation of the human figure. Currin paints challengingly perverse images of female subjects, from lusty doe-eyed nymphs to more ethereal feminine prototypes. With his uncanny ability to locate the point at which the beautiful and the grotesque are in perfect balance, he produces subversive portraits of idiosyncratic women in conventional settings. This much-anticipated volume comes four years after the definitive John Currin, and it features an interview with the artist by Angus Cook and six short-fiction essays by Wells Tower.

Evero che gli americani impazziscono per il ghiaccio, pretendono le mance facoltative, praticano la religione dello sconto e il culto delle poltrone reclinabili? Beppe Severgnini ci porta in viaggio negli Usa tra domande (perche non abbassano I'aria condizionata?) e risposte (perche gli piace cosi), descriven-do le molte sorprese della vita quotidiana, perche I'America vera si scopre solo attraverso i dettagli: le scaramucce con un idraulico di nome Marx; la terribile potenza dei telefoni e dei bambini, veri padroni del paese; le fallimentari escursioni nello shopping elettronico e le battaglie per (non) ottenere una carta di credito. Ironico, intelligente e divertente, Un italiano in America e frutto di una lunga inesperienza, perche, ammettiamolo, crediamo di sapere tutto ma in realta siamo impreparati. Allora pronti a cominciare?

Scritto nel 1897, Zio Vania è uno dei capolavori assoluti del teatro cechoviano. Nei quattro atti si intrecciano le monotone conversazioni e le banalissime vicende di un gruppetto di personaggi. La ricostruzione minuziosa di atmosfere sospese e vagamente inquietanti, l'indifferenza abulica dei personaggi intorno agli eventi, l'indefinito senso di attesa di una catastrofe incombente rendono questo testo una geniale anticipazione della drammaturgia novecentesca.

«The first book on the artist collective known for their raucous multimedia installations. Founded by artist Eli Sudbrack, assume vivid astro focus has been dazzling the art world since 1994 with its exuberant, visually spectacular room-size installations. Created out of recycled and appropriated imagery from a wide range of sources—such as unicorn tapestries, children’s stickers, pages from gay porn magazines, album covers, Buddhist thangka paintings, and street graffiti, to name a few—the finished works can feel like a cross between a ’70s disco, Brazilian Carnival, and a psychedelic version of Andy Warhol’s Factory. This volume, their first, will include many of the elements featured in their installations, which are known for the many «give-aways» the artists provide the visitors: a blow-in poster, postcard and sticker pages, and a pop-up, all designed by avaf.»

One of the greatest masters of the illustrated book, Antoine de Saint Exupéry has been well-known for his artistic and literary talents ever since the publication of The Little Prince in 1943. It is less well known that from childhood he decorated his letters, notebooks, journals, and diaries (and later his manuscripts) with small drawings, caricatures, cartoons, and visual puzzles, very few of which have ever been published. Now this remarkable anthology invites the reader to rediscover the life and work of one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Facsimiles of his personal writings and of his corrections to original manuscripts are reproduced along with examples of the drawings, cartoons, and sketches with which he decorated almost every scrap of his personal writings.

«Chi è, da dove viene e da cosa è fuggita Sally, la bella ragazza che di notte lavora come guardarobiera all'Irish Coffee, un locale trendy alla periferia di Roma, e di giorno si «seppellisce» in uno sperduto monolocale poco distante? A sei anni dall'assunzione neppure i proprietari Anna e Alberto Vasile, i suoi soli amici, sono riusciti a penetrare il muro che Sally ha eretto tra sé, il passato e la vita stessa. Sarà Oliviero Belli, un ricco industriale della moda, attratto e incuriosito da lei, ad aprire la prima breccia: non è il principe azzurro che le dischiude la favola, ma un trentacinquenne divorziato da una donna distruttiva e alle prese con un figlio adolescente che lo respinge, lo detesta e lo provoca sino a rischiare la morte per overdose. Il drammatico segreto di Sally comincia a emergere lentamente, come in un thriller, via via che il rapporto con Oliviero si consolida diventando un amore appassionato e profondo. Discendendo nell'inferno di lui...»

Perché la maggioranza degli italiani ha appoggiato e/o sopportato Silvio Berlusconi per tanti anni? Non ne vede gli appetiti, i limiti e i metodi? Risposta: li vede eccome. (Anche) per questo, spiegare il personaggio ai connazionali è una perdita di tempo. Ciascuno di noi ha un'idea, raffinata in anni di indulgenza o idiosincrasia, e non la cambierà. Ogni italiano si ritiene depositario dell'interpretazione autentica e discuterla è inutile. Utile è invece provare a spiegare Berlusconi ai posteri: un giorno si chiederanno cosa è successo in Italia. Nella pancia della nazione si muovono tanti elementi: umanità e opportunismo, cautela e astuzia, distrazione e confusione, fantasia e ottimismo. Chi sa interpretarli e utilizzarli può andare lontano. Anzi: c'è già andato. Questo libro è un viaggio. La guida è acuta e incisiva, generosa di notizie, dettagli e informazioni, pronta a far discutere destra e sinistra. Un Severgnini in gran forma, che non rinuncia alla consueta ironia su se stesso e gli altri, ma deciso a farci riflettere sulle nostre scelte e sul cammino che tracciamo per i nostri figli.