A fashion-savvy home decorating magazine for the new generation of design professionals and consumers who know exactly what they want, ELLE DECOR covers fashionable and inspirational products that bring couture chic to every room of your home.
AS WE PLANNED THIS ISSUE, THE FIRST I’VE OVERSEEN IN its entirety since taking the reins at ELLE DECOR last September, our conversations frequently returned to art: The museums and galleries we miss. The theaters and concert halls shuttered since last spring. The art-filled interiors we swoon over as they come across our desks, making us covetous—and hungrier than ever to travel. And swoon and covet we do: This month, we stop in on a Washington, D.C., couple with an art collection spanning blue-chip and avant-garde works, and visit a curator’s home in Connecticut, where the spirits of onetime guests like Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Alexander Calder have left a lasting impression. We knock on the doors of a young family living flat-out alongside a top-tier collection in Los…
IN 1916, HENRI MATISSE PAINTED THE PIANO Lesson, which features his young son Pierre at the family piano. Part of a seminal series of intimate portraits, the work is a visual illusion that blurs the boundaries between inside and outside. Points of entry are unclear; the assumed safety of shelter feels precarious, even slightly threatened. The public display of our private spaces has a long history in art-making. From photographers to dancers and other creatives, many artists have attempted to engage with interiors—illuminating and recasting the banal spaces of everyday life as sites for the extraordinary. At a time when many of us are opening our homes to outsiders through the form of gridded squares and virtual gazes, the topic takes on a renewed relevance. In Inherent Distance (2018), the…
I’LL ADMIT IT: I FLED NEW York for Florida’s empty beaches in the earliest days of the pandemic. My Brooklyn apartment is tiny. As an art writer and consultant, I am hardly ever home under normal circumstances. Going to galleries and museums is more than an aesthetic pursuit to me; they’re a place to meet friends, and where I go to be alone. They are the living room I do not have. Since last March, the art world has bent over backward to bring itself online, and this has caused all of us to ask what it is we really value from art. Struggling museums now rely on detailed photography and virtual tours to accompany their physical shows, sometimes charging a fee to viewers. Meanwhile, galleries—which are really just small,…
IN MY FIRST APARTMENT, ON GRAND BOULEvard in Greenwood, Mississippi, I slept in a 1920s bed my great-grandmother Goggy bought with her first paycheck as an elementary school teacher for Black children in Tuskegee, Alabama. The bed was full-size. I had wanted a queen. It came with an old-fashioned vanity, complete with a curved mirror and cushioned stool. I had wanted something contemporary and lightweight. I learned to be grateful that I’d given up on the things I thought I wanted. Now I can say with pride and certainty that developing one’s “taste” in furniture means something different when you are sitting on, sleeping in, and surrounded by pieces purchased with newly freed hands reaching for a new way of being in America. When Goggy bought that bedroom set, she…
Beata Heuman hopes to help you find your voice with Every Room Should Sing (Rizzoli), the London designer’s debut. Something borrowed, something new: Designer Corey Damen Jenkins weds time-honored and contemporary styles in Design Remix: A New Spin on Traditional Rooms(Rizzoli). Juan Montoya’s Designing Paradise(Rizzoli) transports readers to pavilions, pools, and plush pads across the Americas created by the Colombia-born designer. Stay engaged with This Far and No Further (University of Texas Press), the veteran interiors photographer William Abranowicz’s enlightening chronicle of the struggle for voting rights in the American South. Explore the radical roots of the Michigan training ground of Eames, Saarinen, and other icons in With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932 (Cranbrook Art Museum). Spend A Year at Clove Brook Farm (Rizzoli) and witness the…
WE HAVE THE LIMITATIONS of Bronze Age fashion to thank for the advent of the brooch—the earliest examples were used to secure clothing around the body. The intervening millennia have led to simpler methods of fastening a frock, but nothing can supplant the brooch as one of the most adaptable adornments that can be worn virtually anywhere. Legendary French jeweler Van Cleef & Arpels has made its share of expressive brooches (or “clips,” as they’re referred to in the maison’s preferred parlance) since its 1906 inception. Each one is a painterly composition with texture, color, and radiant sparkle, often informed by other artistic disciplines. The Cristaux de Saphirs clip translates the image of a crystal cavern from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth into an arresting form…
