This Creative Life: Fashion Designers at Home

Photographer Lea (A Room of Her Own) explores how clothing and jewelry designers decorate their living spaces in this inviting coffee-table book. She explains that Lucinda Chambers, the former fashion director of British Vogue, “inherited her mother’s embrace of multiple design and architecture styles,” placing, for instance, “a super shaggy Colville rug next to one with Aztec-style geometric patterns” in her sitting room. Pointing out continuities between designers’ fashion sense and their interior decorating, Lea suggests that English jeweler Sophie Keegan’s characteristic “playful use of colour” comes through in the “furniture upholstered in vivid patterns and hues” that adorns her German home. Elsewhere, Lea describes how Edgardo Osorio filled his palatial Florence apartment with a mix of antique and mid-century furnishings, and how Martin Grant removed nonessential walls to bring more light and open space into his Parisian apartment. The attractive interiors span a wide range of styles, and the biographical sketches humanize the designers while offering insight into their tastes. For instance, Lea describes how Soledad Twombly’s penchant for synthesizing the old and the new can be traced to her childhood in Argentina, where she was drawn to both the “contemporary ensembles her mother wore” and the “traditional garb worn by her grandparents and their farmhands.” This delights. (Oct.)