There are few pleasures more lasting than the gift of a beautiful book, especially one that stirs the imagination and invites lingering over every page. From the gilded grandeur of historic interiors to the poetry of contemporary gardens, these volumes open doors to worlds of style, craft, and inspiration.
Considered among the best coffee table books, each selection here is as visually beguiling as it is thoughtfully composed. These six books are, quite simply, the cream of the crop: the titles every aesthete will covet and every home will be elevated by.
(Image credit: Neptune)
The Six Best Design Books to Gift
Retrouvius: Contemporary Salvage by Maria Speake
Few would attempt to write about architectural salvage and reuse in this country without consulting Adam Hills and Maria Speake, founders of London-based salvage store Retrouvius. As students in 1990s Glasgow, they witnessed the demolition of old buildings, including a Carnegie Library, with horror and decided to address the issue head-on.
While Adam manages the salvage side of the business, Maria runs the interior design studio. A quick flick through this book shows how she challenges the blandness of new at every step, each project filled with what she describes as patina, scars, and wrinkles of reuse. ‘I’ve been infatuated with salvage for over 30 years – the book is about encouragement and passing the baton on, hence the choice of projects: small to large, old and new buildings, rural and urban – to show our philosophy can be applied everywhere.’
The captions are a joy to read, from the vintage Portuguese shop fitting repurposed as a kitchen cabinet to an island made from old Dutch cigar moulds. The reader is left with much admiration for Maria’s creative way of working with these rescued materials.
Retrouvius: Contemporary Salvage: Designing Homes from a Philosophy of Re-Use
Martin Brudnizki: My Life in Colors
This Swedish interior designer has gained an international reputation for his work on both private houses and a string of high-profile restaurants and clubs. Adjectives such as ‘glamorous’ and ‘opulent’ are frequently used to describe his creations, and each page of this book underlines why.
In this, the first survey of Martin’s work, he describes drawing inspiration from nature, art, fashion and history to demonstrate how colour influences both his life and his designs. Unlike other books that dedicate chapters to single projects, he has organised them by colour, which, he says, are mood enablers, with the capacity to reduce stress, stimulate conversation, or soothe with their tranquillity.
Chapters are furnished with personal insights and historical details. He calls yellow a ‘mercurial master of joy’ due to its sensitivity when it comes to surrounding colours and explains how it wasn’t until 1814 that a more stable green pigment was created in Germany. As it contained arsenic, it was very poisonous, and it’s thought that the toxic fumes killed an exiled Napoleon as it was hung on the walls of his prison home in St Helena.
Rizzoli International Publications
My Life in Colors: by Martin Brudnizki
Sims Hilditch: Beautifully British Interiors by Giles Kime and Emma Sims-Hilditch
This British design studio has a well-established name for capturing the modern country house aesthetic. The common theme in this book is the way it designs houses, regardless of their age, to suit today’s lifestyles – a significant challenge considering that many of the houses were built before the advent of running water and electricity.
In recent years, the team has grown substantially, with designs becoming bolder, and this second book sets out to show this maturity. ‘Despite this growth, our philosophy has remained the same,’ says Emma Sims-Hilditch. ‘It’s built on the principle that every house needs to work on a functional level before you even consider the furniture, fabrics, and paint colours.
Some houses the studio decorates are vast, while others, such as the cottage in Cornwall, are more modest in scale. Perhaps the most unexpected element in the mix is an apartment in London’s Old War Office. Here, the brief was to appeal to those with a taste for classic country house design yet remain in keeping with the urban setting. The result is a happy balance of modern comfort and pleasing good looks.
Sims Hilditch: Beautifully British Interiors
Robert Stilin: New Work by Robert Stilin and Sam Cochran
New York-based interior decorator Robert Stilin has a reputation for designing contemporary, sleek spaces with an industrial edge that crucially also have warmth. Comfort, to him, takes precedence over everything else.
A long-time collector and dealer, his client list – which includes Starbucks founder Howard Schultz and fashion designer Oscar de la Renta – takes in those who are passionate about living with art and good design but who stop short at turning their homes into museums. Sam Cochran celebrates in the introduction to the book Robert’s ability to juxtapose high and low: flea market table lamps find second lives beside bespoke headboards – ‘conventional hierarchies of good taste be damned’, he writes. Part of his success can be attributed to the freshness of an outsider’s perspective.
Robert was born and raised on a timber business in rural Wisconsin before moving to Palm Beach in 1989 and opening a vintage furniture store where his career took off. This is the second monograph on his work. The last was published in 2019 and focused largely on his home base of New York City. Here is a chance to see how he brings the signature elements of his aesthetic to projects all over the USA, and in different architectural guises, from lofts to American ‘rustic’ houses and beach homes on Long Island.
Life with Flowers by Frances Palmer
Soon after the ceramicist Frances Palmer started designing and creating pots, she began to display flowers within them. From her studio in Weston, Connecticut, she grows thousands of flowers in her cutting gardens.
In this, her follow-up to Life in the Studio, published in 2020, she has distilled her near encyclopaedic knowledge of flowers into a visual tour packed with down-to-earth advice. This is a personal account of how Frances thinks about flowers in relation to her ceramic designs. It’s organised seasonally and helps to explain her vision of flowers and trees blossoming in a series of waves.
She encourages the reader to plant in a way that ensures a continual flow of colours, heights, and shapes. Alongside growing advice and detailed profiles on flower types, the book features beautiful arrangements made from flowers grown in Frances’ garden (photography is a third string to her bow). There are useful tips, too, such as the importance of harvesting flowers in the early morning. Interspersed at the end of chapters are recipes incorporating flowers, such as flower-topped sugar cookies, and meditations on patience – surely a key skill for any committed gardener.
Life with Flowers: Inspiration and Lessons from the Garden
Wild Dyeing by Céline Philippe
Céline Philippe is a former lawyer who swapped a demanding life in Lyon for one based in rural France. She bought a run-down house and spent months rebuilding it in the most sustainable way possible. When it came to creating a garden, she began learning about plants and all the colours available in plant and vegetable dyes, eventually launching Teinture Sauvage [Wild Dyeing], a website dedicated to the artisanal practice of natural vegetable dyes.
Her Instagram page, with its 27,000 followers, is filled with photographs of her work, each one resembling an artfully assembled still life. This is her first book, and it provides a beginner’s guide to plant-based dyeing and the science behind the craft with practical step-by-step instructions.
The second half of the book is dedicated to recipes detailing how to create colours from what can be found in a flower garden, kitchen garden and foraged from the wild. These pages are particularly engaging: they read like cooking recipes and are accompanied by beautiful photography, showing both the process of wild dyeing and the impact on fibres as the colours take hold.
Wild Dyeing: From the Garden to Color
Perfect for gifting? Yes. But also ideal to add to your own coffee table decor ideas if you want to gift one of these beautiful hardbacks to yourself. We won’t tell if you don’t.
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