Jan 15, 2011
Books are decorative, literally
Home owners are using books to dress up their interiors, never mind if they are not for reading
With cosy seats and hundreds of books, it is no wonder one can spend hours in the Four Seasons Residences library in Austin, Texas. -- PHOTOS: NEW YORK TIMES
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New York - Book lovers, you can exhale. The printed, bound book has been given a stay of execution by an unlikely source: the design community.
In this Kindle-and-iPad age, architects, builders and designers are still making spaces with shelves - lots and lots of shelves - and turning to companies such as Mr Thatcher Wine's Juniper Books for help filling them up.
It took Mr Wine a year to amass 2,000 well-preserved white vellum and cream-coloured leather-bound books for a 'gentleman's library' in the Northern California estate of a private equity manager.
Perfectly matched sets of books bound in antique vellum, a pale leather made from goat or sheepskin, are an elusive quarry, especially if they all have to be in English, said Mr Wine, a former Internet entrepreneur who now creates custom book collections and decorative 'book solutions', as he puts it, in his warehouse.
He had to search long and hard to find clean copies of authors such as Thackeray, Galsworthy and Conrad. For this client was after more than pretty bindings: He wanted the option of being able to read his books.
The young Upper East Side clients of Ms Jenny Fischbach, a design partner at a Manhattan decorating firm, were similarly inclined - they wanted literary classics mixed with art books for a silver-inflected art library.
So Mr Wine chose works by Kate Chopin, Jane Austen and Robert Browning and wrapped them in matt silver paper to match the silver hardware in the room.
Not all of his clients, who include hotel designers and high-end builders, are so fastidious about content.
For the spa in Philippe Starck's Icon Brickell, the icy glass condo tower in Miami, he was asked to wrap 1,500 books in blank white paper, without titles, to provide a 'textural accent' to the space.
He chose mass-market hardcovers that flood the used-book outlets - titles by John Grisham and Danielle Steel, or biographies of Michael Jackson, he said - because they are cheap, clean and a nice, generous size.
Mr Bennett Weinstock, a Philadelphia decorator known for his English interiors, still shops in London to find just the right leather-bound look. 'Some people will insist that they be in English because they want them to look as if they could read the books,' he said. 'Others don't care what language the books are in as long as the bindings are beautiful.'
Some designers are finding ever more elaborate ways to tweak books their clients already own.
New York architect Peter Pennoyer is designing wooden boxes that look like perfectly bound books to contain an unruly-looking collection of literary classics owned by a client.
'A book,' he pointed out, 'is a meaningful, sensory experience. If we buy her all new Trollope, then she is suddenly looking at a volume that's foreign, that doesn't smell right or have the typeface that's familiar. If she doesn't have the memory of having read the book, it's not going to mean the same thing.'
Other designers say their clients are asking for more personalised content: colour-coordinated regional histories, for example, or Western- themed titles with punchy, early 20th-century jackets.
'I don't think anyone says blatantly, 'I don't care' anymore,' said MsFischbach. 'There are always parameters, even if it's what I jokingly call the typical intellectual collector's library.'
As it happens, the-book-as-relic was forecasted by marketers.
Ms Ann Mack, director of trend-spotting for marketing and advertising agency JWT New York, noted: 'Here's what we said: 'The more that objects become replaced by digital virtual counterparts - from records and books to photo albums and even cash - watch for people to fetishise the physical object.
'Books are being turned into decorative accessories, for example, and records into art.''
She added that she was working with a decorator to 'refresh' her own Manhattan apartment and was hoping to decorate lavishly with books. She wondered if she might stack her books and turn them into legs for a coffee table.
'Then,' she said, 'I can put my Kindle on top.'
New York Times
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