Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2025 från Veranda

DAD’S STUDY WAS MOSTLY off-limits to my sister and me when we were little girls. Maybe that’s why the room was so tantalizing: It was forbidden because it was special, where he worked and paid bills and did other Important Dad Things—and where he kept his most treasured collections: biographies, political science tomes, Cold War spy novels, elephant figurines, baseball memorabilia, photos of him and my mom on trips, keepsakes from my grandfather’s army service. Over the years, in three different houses each with a study or library for my dad, we were allowed occasional visits—interruptions—that became a bit more frequent as we got older. In those rooms is where I remember really getting to know my dad over funny stories from his childhood and memories of my grandparents and…

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LORI WEITZNER DOESN’T mince words. “I’m a magazine and a book person,” she says, “and I hate—I hate—reading magazines online or books on a Kindle. I need to touch the paper.” That hankering, it turns out, inspired the Manhattan-based textile designer to plunge deeper into the form, learning paper-making on her own and then finding artisan partners world-wide to help her harness the soulful potential of the material. “I wanted to do wallcoverings,” she says. “Not wallpaper. Wall-coverings that were innovative and interesting.” Mission accomplished. Twenty years later Weitzner Handmade (one of six branches of her design company) features two expressions that, while completely different in technique, are intriguing bookends that bracket a piece of paper’s lifespan, from the alpha of pulp to the omega of magazine pages. First, pulp. Going…

❶ Keep your gods in your sight line. “Reading is a polytheistic pastime, with all our writer deities competing for attention—a literary Mount Olympus. I like to put my gods near each other on my shelves, in the rows I can see when standing.” ❷ Let books converse. “Put Robert Caro’s multivolume biography of LBJ alongside your books on the Vietnam War, Elizabethan history next to Shakespeare. Percival Everett’s James alongside Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. As for authors in violent disagreement with each other? Pair them up. Awkward for them, amusing for us.” ❸ Approach your library like a living being. “Books, like plants, should make sense within the overall aesthetic and textural scheme. Annual pruning, cutting back, and replacing duds is essential. Cultivate it, and it will give you a…

Every new house comes with surprises, traditions tweaked, leaps of faith. In the case of a new suburban residence outside of Chicago, the first twist was the owners’ decision to build it at all. They’d initially contacted designer Summer Thornton to help plan an addition to their existing home. “They wanted to freshen things up,” Thornton says of the clients she had worked with on prior projects. However, the addition they had in mind was an ambitious two-story library—something the husband had longed for since childhood. “It looked odd to tack the library on to the existing house,” says architect Heidi Lightner, whose firm was hired to draw up the plan. So she approached the clients with a proposal: “If you really want to do this right,” she told them,…

SHARED AMONG NEARLY EVERY BEAUTIFUL, professionally designed house is one universal story: a tale of deftly dodging obstacles (the planning board, an obstinate spouse) and bending resources (money, time) to create an environment that portrays not just the character of the homeowners but also a canvas for their best lives. And at the center of each of these stories is the homeowner. But not here. This Nashville cottage exists for a purpose, not a person, and to bring it to life, homeowner Donald Miller simply stepped out of its way. A longtime author and now business development guru, Miller wanted a space where his dearest friends, among them authors and artists, could think and write and be. “My dream is to have the shelves of the cottage filled with books that…

Vıvid Intrigue BOOKS, ANTIQUES, AND 20TH-CENTURY ART MINGLE AMONG THE SHELVES AT PHILIP HOOPER’S 19TH-CENTURY SOMERSET HOME. Houses will tell you exactly what they want and will rebel if you put in something they don’t like. But a room lined with books is welcoming and immediately cozy in the presence of all those book spines.—PHILIP HOOPER Global Gusto THE LONDON LIVING ROOM OF SOANE’S LULU LYTLE REFLECTS HER LIFELONG EXPLORATION OF DECORATIVE ARTS AROUND THE WORLD. I have always been a hoarder, keeping stashes of books, postcards, newspaper cuttings, letters, photos in piles everywhere. These are the things that really inspire and make a home for me.—LULU LYTLE Rustic Warmth ENGLISH STYLE POLYMATH BEN PENTREATH FINDS HIS “HAPPIEST PLACE” IN A SCOTTISH DEN FURNISHED WITH CURIOSITIES THAT BRING NOSTALGIA IN…

ON A STILL, HOT DAY IN AUGUST, I’m snaking through Venice in a water taxi, gliding between the moored boats bobbing on its quiet canals. I’m dropped off at the edge of Cannaregio, at the steps of an unassuming rose-colored building with a humble cotton curtain hanging in its doorway. Stepping inside is like an entrée to another time, another world, where artists are quietly engraving, printing, painting, and binding as classical music plays on the radio. I’ve arrived at Bottega del Tintoretto. It’s nestled beside the former home of prolific 16th-century Mannerist painter Jacopo Robusti (widely known as Tintoretto), famed for his dramatic narrative scenes and the decoration of Venice’s Scuola Grande di San Rocco. The one-room atelier was formed by a group of artists in 1986 to preserve Venetian…

WRITING IS PROOF OF OUR EXISTENCE.” These words crawl across a film screen in Montblanc Haus, a three-level experiential museum celebrating the world’s most iconic writing instrument. With its opening in Hamburg, Germany, comes an invitation into the lore and craft of the nearly 120-year-old pen maker whose crown jewel, the Meisterstück, has been prized by titan writers from John F. Kennedy—famously offering his to the German chancellor at the 1963 signing of the golden book in Cologne—to Anne Frank, who is believed to have penned part of her diary with one gifted to her by her grandmother. Though the museum delves into the art of penmanship, offering classes in calligraphy, creative writing, and hand-lettering, its intersection with handcraft is most resonant. “Writing is something very unique, very personal, and…

LONDON-BASED DESIGNER Guy Oliver’s firm has worked on commissions for the legendary Claridge’s and Connaught hotels as well as the state rooms at 10 Downing Street. He’s been engaged for royal soirees at home and exhibitions internationally, including those at the Louvre and the Château de Versailles. But it was not for his prestigious bona fides that he was hired by an English aristocrat and his American wife to refresh their late 19th-century townhouse in London’s tony Kensington neighborhood. “It was more like they inherited me,” he says. “I came with the silver.” Not altogether untrue as Oliver was the protégé of the silver-haired, quintessential English designer David Laws, whose eponymous firm Oliver took over in 2012 and deferentially redesignated Oliver Laws. Oliver assisted his mentor with the clients’ town…

“I LOVE THIS COLOR—IT’S NATURE’S NEUTRAL. I WANTED SOMETHING THAT WOULD MAKE ME HAPPY WHEN IT’S GRAY OUTSIDE”. —ANNA BROCKWAY ANNA BROCKWAY HAS TAKEN A LOVER—not a human, a pied-àterre in New York City. An affair decades in the making, Brockway’s love story began when she accompanied her dad on his business trip to the Big Apple at just 10 years old. “Over pancakes at The Carlyle hotel, he gave me some money and told me to ask the concierge what to do and left me for the day. I spent the morning at The Met, lunch at the Empire State Building, the afternoon at Fiorucci, and topped it off with an ice-cream sundae at Rumpelmayer’s,” recalls Brockway. “It was the beginning of a love affair with New York that…

A stroll through Mounts Botanical Garden in West Palm Beach, watercolors by Carol Woodin, and a collection of botanical books inspired a vivid tribute to cattleya, “Queen of the Orchids.”…

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No one just goes to Antarctica. They journey there, slowly, an experience that unfolds page by page, like a long, adventurous book. By the time I reach what feels like the bottom of the earth, I’ve been traveling for the better part of a week. Even in the Antarctic summer, the temperatures are brisk enough to necessitate only brief excursions outside into the white desert, and so it happens that on one of the most adventurous trips of my life, I find myself doing a remarkable amount of sitting. I sit on planes from Washington, D.C., to Houston and Buenos Aires and finally to Ushuaia in the far south of Argentina. There at the gateway to Patagonia, a land of mountains jagged like new teeth, I board the expedition ship…