Christmas Reading, Part 1

A must-have for lovers of fashion, glamour and design, Cecil Beaton: The New York Years chronicles the legendary photographer’s life – and creativity – in New York City from the 1920s through to the swirling 60s. With dozens of sketches, set designs, costumes, letters, and more than 220 photographs and drawings, it’s an extraordinary insight into a brilliant mind. (Who knew he had an affair with Garbo?) As whimsical, as wonderful and as unexpected as Cecil himself, it’s the perfect accompaniment to the exhibition of the same name currently showing at the Museum of the City of New York.

Cecil Beaton: The New York Years.
Museum of the City of New York, 1220 5th Avenue at 103rd Street. Until Feb 20, 2012. www.mcny.org

From Dior to J'Adore

The news that the Arts Centre in Melbourne was about to stage a new version of that old classic Grey Gardens, the story of Big Edie (Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale) and Little Edie (Edith Bouvier Beale) started me thinking about the colour grey. Although grey has very little to do with the fascinating lives of these two Hamptons-bound has-beens, apart from the fact that it was the name of their now-famous decaying mansion, it does seem to represent them, in a curious, match-the-colour-to-the-personality way.

Another personality that grey represents – and in a much more stylish and dignified way – is that great, glorious French couturier Monsieur Christian Dior. Dior was so enamoured with the colour dove grey he made it one of his signature colours, if not his brand.

It's perhaps fitting that we're doing a post on Dior because a beautiful new book has just been released on the designer's life. Entitled Dior Couture Patrick Demarchelier, it's a collection of fashion portraits of the world's most glamorous women wearing Dior – all shot by Patrick Demarchelier. Locations inclide Shanghai, Times Square, New York, the grand staircase of the Paris Opera House, and the garden of the Musée Rodin. Published by Rizzoli, it's fashion as art. Just glorious.

Here, in tribute to the master of shape and silhouette, are a few Dior-esque posts...

Dior-ettes

DID YOU KNOW:

– The English singer-songwriter Morrissey released a song titled “Christian Dior” as a b-side to his 2006 single “In the Future When All’s Well”.

– American Rapper/Producer Kanye West released a song titled “Christian Dior Denim Flow” as a 2010 Fashion Week single.

More Dior

It’s not widely publicised, but Christian Dior’s childhood home in Granville, ‘Villa Les Rhumbs’, is open to the public. The only ‘Musée de France’ dedicated to a couturier, a this 19th-century, Belle Epoque-style clifftop villa overlooking the sea features hundreds of Haute Couture garments over three floors, including designs by Christian Dior, Yves Saint-Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré for Christian Dior and John Galliano. There is also a gorgeous garden, designed by Dior’s mother, which is beautiful in the spring and summer.

www.musee-dior-granville.com

Design Wise: Piet Boon

Each week here in The Library I'd like to play librarian, if I may, and introduce you all to someone I think you'd like; someone who's not only worthy of mentioning but also of further reading. It will usually be someone I've met or come into contact with. And it will usually be someone inspiring. Because we can't get enough of those types...

Last week it was Mr Jeffrey Bilhuber, interior designer to the stars. (Including Ms Anna Wintour, although I can't imagine how difficult it would be being her decorator.) This week, it's another extraordinary design talent: the inimitable, always elegant Dutch designer Piet Boon.

I first came across the work of Piet Boon and his design studio when I bought one of his monographs, Piet Boon 2 (which features what must be the most beautiful cover of any architecture or design book ever published). The project inside were imbued with a quiet elegance and understated sophistication, and yet they had a polished drama as well. In a word, they were soigné. Then I discovered that Mr Boon started his career as a carpenter. What an arc, to go from chippie to world-renowned design star! Now his busy studio not only designs architecture and interiors for residential and commercial clients, it also produces furniture and products for the likes of Dutch manufacturer Moooi. (Another great brand.) I was so impressed that I asked him if I could feature his work in a book I was editing at the time, called Design in Black and White. He couldn't have been more gracious.

If I had an extravagant income, I'd hire Piet Boon in a heartbeat. As it stands, I'll just have to be content with his beautiful books. Although I DID see that his studio is having what appears to be a sale of some kind, so if you're in The Netherlands this month perhaps look it up? I'd offer more details, but I don't quite understand the language. All I can recognise is "Pin of Cash", which I presume is Dutch for bring all the money that you can?
Datum: zaterdag 19 en zondag 20 november 2011 . Tijd: 10.00 - 17.00uur 

Lokatie: in het nieuwe gebouw tegenover de hoofdingang van ons hoofdkwartier Skoon 78, 1511 HV Oostzaan 

Betaling: Pin of cash 

Garantie: op items uit deze sale zit geen garantie en kunnen ook niet worden geretourneerd

Look up pietboon.com for more details of his projects and signature style (which he describes as "Simple Sophistication" but I tag as "coolly glamorous"). But in the meantime, here are some images of his well-groomed style, as featured in  Design in Black and White. (Images Publishing.)

NB Piet's new book, Piet Boon III, has just been released worldwide by Lanoo publishers. I've already put it on Christmas Wish List.

{Images courtesy of Piet Boon.}

Design Wise: Jeffrey Bilhuber

I had the good fortune of meeting the interior designer Jeffrey Bilhuber when I photographed his Long Island home for a book I was writing on beach houses of the American East Coast last year. (Coast: Lifestyle Architecture. Images Publishing.) This gracious gentleman would have to be one of the most courteous, most generous and most charming men I have ever met. He may spend his days designing homes for the rich and chic (Anna Wintour and David Bowie among them), and he may have even been invited to Obama’s inauguration (I spotteed the invitation discreetly framed in his downstairs bathroom), but you’d never know it from his demeanour. He is as down-to-earth as an Australian sheep shearer. Only with more manners, of course. And more taste.
His Oyster Bay hideaway, which is more of a grand Great Gatsby mansion than a humble weekender, is testament to his design talents, and one of the most intriguing interiors I’ve ever photographed. Bilhuber is as confident with colour as he is with form and space, and his rooms reflect this. I shot a hall wallpapered in whimsical tangerine and cream, a sitting room dressed in plum and duck-egg blue, and a living room dressed in bold lime, with sofas the colour of summer-ripe apples. The bar and main bedroom, meanwhile, were decorated were in Bloody Mary red, while the kitchen was in black, white and Tiffany blue. Simply extraordinary. For more details, see his new book, The Way Home: Reflections on American Beauty (Rizzoli New York, October 2011.)

www.bilhuber.com

A Classic Design Duet

As you can see from this blog, I have a passion for black and white. (My partner calls it an obsession but let's not go that far.) I think it stems from working in magazines for 20 years. Being saturated by colour all day and making decisions about mastheads based on minute variations in shades can make a girl long for the simplicity, clarity and minimalist glamour of monochromatics. But it's also because I think black and white represent sophistication at its best, elegance at its most alluring. Think of a black parquetry floor in the grand, white salon of a period Parisian apartment. A Robert Doisneau photo on a white gallery wall. A smartly striped marquee at a country wedding in the Cotswolds. Any of Anouska Hempel's hotels. A great many of Cecil Beaton's design. It's daring and yet quietly understated, refined and yet highly stylized, and always, always impeccably, memorably glamorous. It brings to mind Dorothy Draper and William Haines, the tailored soigné-ness of Ralph Lauren's home collections, the movie-star-inspired sets of old Hollywood. Black and white spaces are the design equivalent of a well-tailored tuxedo with a crisp white dress shirt, or a little black dress with a perfect string of pearls. (Very Grace Kelly.) It reminds us that there can be beauty in simplicity, and grace in understatement.

Here are some of my favourite black-and-white spaces.

The Raleigh Hotel, Miami. One of my all-time favourite places. An architectural ode to the elegance of black and white. Very 'old Hollywood'. Karl Lagerfeld staged a Cruise Collection here recently, sending the models out around the iconic Baroque pool. See? Even Karl knows a good thing when he stumbles upon it in his dark sunglasses.

The Mondrian hotel, Miami. Designed by that crazy, extraordinarily talented enfant terrible of interior design, Marcel Wanders, this place is a little –how can I put it politely? – "out there" (a very fitting phrase for the cheekily camp Miami), but I couldn't help but like it. It was like falling through a rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland. Only a very stylish hole. Where the 'Queen' was a well-dressed concierge who calls you "honey". (Notice the white carnations in the receptionist's black vase? They've even elevated the old carnies to art.)

The Maya Ubud, Bali. This bath was so beautiful I have could lived in it. I could have moved my books, iPhone and laptop onto that ottoman and never left.

A private residence on Sydney harbour. A former ballroom, this was converted to an astonishing home by an amazing Russian designer. It's a preview of one of the chapters in my forthcoming book, Design in Black and White II. (Notice the ornate ceiling? Glorious.)

The work of New York design firm Schappacher White. The brilliance of Steve Schappacher and Rhea White is evident in their Shelter Island beach house, which is a poem to monochromes. (Love the rustic garden chairs as dining furniture.) One of the prettiest homes I've ever seen. (More on this enchanting hideaway in a later post.)