Modern Glamour: The Art of Unexpected Style

Bold, complex, decadent, dizzying, rich, colorful: Wearstler's residential and hotel designs are not for the faint of heart. The founder of the Los Angeles""architectural interior design"" firm KWID worked as a Hollywood set designer before she decided to focus on real-life living spaces, and her vibrant, multi-layered interiors still look like backdrops for drama. In this design cum promotional book, Wearstler explains her aesthetic philosophy and lays out suggestions for those readers who would like to emulate her""unusual and kaleidoscopic"" style, which graces such famous California hotels as the Viceroy, Estella and Maison 140. Certainly, the book's large, full-bleed color photographs do justice to the variety of her creations. One two-page spread showcases a bathroom tiled in maroon, pink and white stripes and lit with a dainty glass and gold chandelier. Another shows a cool, all-white bedroom decorated with a silver bamboo chair and a black wood bedframe. Wearstler encourages readers to stop thinking about rooms in terms of furniture and accessories and to start imagining them as combinations of color, texture, shape and form. This, she writes, is the secret to creating a""graphic style ... that lends itself to crispness and richness that make you say 'Wow.'"" While there's no firm, step-by-step advice in the volume--a chapter on""Process"" does little more than describe her office's client meetings--the photographs and the author's attitude will surely inspire amateurs who are looking for a design style that goes beyond Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel and Ikea.