Domestic Art

Domestic Art: Curated Interiors captures a mind-set, piques a curiosity to look at things anew, appreciate oddities and revel in uniqueness and personal work. It s a loopy but sublime drawing-room comedy with ghosts of dandies and soulful poets and style aesthetes ... all lounging, sipping and chattering away in 18th-century châteaux inserted into downtown lofts, whitewashed shotgun houses filled with Twomblys and Rauschenbergs, and dark-as-a-hedgehog tiny Tudors.

The selected houses in this book were pulled from the pages of PaperCity, from the years 2000 to 2008. Roughly a decade of design alchemy and clinking highballs. The editors of this book foraged for both the musty and gutsy and the soaring and sensual, from a 500-square-foot bedsit to a mid-century organic architectural wonder thirty seven glorious projects, from follies to disciplined mansions, from Dominique and John de Menil s International-style house with its interior by the great couturier Charles James to artist Christian Eckart s abandoned 1940s warehouses polished to gleaming architectural wonder. Marvel at a compound of rescued, early-1900s clapboards, and an 1880s German-immigrant cottage. We ve included a 50s masterwork by the great organic architect Bruce Goff, and an industrial space that crackles with own surreal designs, while a chalet-style 1913 bungalow manifests the best bits and pieces of the past. A turn-of-the-century seaside gingerbread is a study in anthropology peppered with good art; an antiquarian aims his cerebral arrows at Louis this and Louis that, then electrifies it all with saturated color; and an 18th-century château and an old-world hunting lodge is installed in a downtown loft space. Meanwhile, a stylish gent sips scotch neat in his Scotch Room, watched over by two mounted deer, a pheasant and a wildebeest. Shouldn t everyone have a wildebeest ... and a Scotch Room?

Call it what you will: lavish, loopy, eccentric assemblages, moody modernism. All in all, quite a look at a genre of design we call, simply, inspired.