The first book dedicated to Henri Samuel, considered one of the best French interior designers of the twentieth century and acclaimed for his mastery of historical design, as well as his eye for contemporary presentation and furnishings—a high-point addition to Rizzoli’s continuing coverage of the masters of the field. Design legend Henri Samuel believed that a successful interior was one in which an observer never suspected that a decorator had been involved. This book takes the reader inside some of Samuel’s groundbreaking and inspiring interiors, beginning with his first job assisting Stéphane Boudin of Jansen in the 1920s through postwar Paris society and into the go-go ’80s. During his illustrious career, Samuel created rarefied and beautiful environments for his jet-set clientele—Doris Duke, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, Susan and John Gutfreund, Valentino Garavani, and multiple Rothschilds and Vanderbilts. Such was his expertise that museums such as Versailles and the Metropolitan Museum of Art consulted him on the installation of period rooms. Samuel was a master at reproducing intimate spaces in various historic styles in addition to mixing those styles in an erudite way: modernist paintings were installed over Empire consoles, Louis XIII furniture shared space with Oriental objects, neoclassical chairs were placed beside tables of brass and Plexiglas. This book records Samuel’s life, his career, and the luxurious interiors he created for his clients and himself—rooms that look as fresh and alive today as they did when they were first arranged. It is a necessary addition to any design library.

Published in 1774, Essay on Gardens is one of the earliest texts showing the progressive shift in French taste from the classical model of the gardens at Versailles to the picturesque or natural style of garden design in the late eighteenth century. In this formulation of his ideas concerning landscape, Claude-Henri Watelet describes an ideal farm and also his own very real garden, Moulin Joli, near Paris. He advances the theory that the useful and the pleasurable must be combined in the planning, preservation, and decoration of the land by offering a relatively novel design that uses experimental methods to create a comfortable estate. The result is a horticultural and ecological laboratory that includes a residence, a farm, stables, a dairy, an apiary, a mill, walks, vistas, flower beds, an area reserved for medicinal plants, decorative statues, a medical laboratory, and even a small infirmary for ailing members of the community. Given the wide scholarly interest in the field of garden design and its history, this first English edition of Watelet's small but influential book will interest historians of landscape design as well as students of the history of architecture. Joseph Disponzio's informative introduction to Samuel Danon's masterful translation situates the Essay on Gardens within the framework of other landscape and garden treatises of the late eighteenth century. Although the original text was not illustrated, this edition includes a selection of charming drawings and etchings of Moulin Joli by Watelet himself, Hubert Robert, and others.

Manufactured in Venice, Italy, textiles by Fortuny have borne the standard of quality and excellence for a hundred years. For walls, sofas, pillows, draperies, bed coverings, tablecloths, and even napkins, the sumptuous art of Fortuny textiles has been decorating old world and new world homes for generations. Not everyone can afford Fortuny, but some of those who can have opened their doors so we can take a peek. Through luscious photographs and vivid descriptions, we can almost feel the weave and smell the dyes. Contemporary modern condos, elegant historic homes, and metropolitan apartments all wear Fortuny in luxurious high style.

Life à la Henri is the delightful memoir-with-recipes of Henri Charpentier, the world’s first celebrity chef. First published in 1934, the book traces Henri’s career from his days as a scrap of a bellboy on the French Riviera and a quick-witted apprentice in a three-star kitchen (when he invented crêpe suzette) to his sailing for New York to open his renowned namesake restaurants that introduced many to the glories of haute cuisine. Life à la Henri is a memorable portrait of a top-flight restaurant kitchen, and is food writing of surpassing charm and taste. “In this book of memories...[Henri] Charpentier mingles skilfully and delightfully the philosophy of life and the art of cooking, reminiscences and recipes.”—The New York Times Book Review "unique blend of success story, food history, romance, and sheer magic"—Kirkus Reviews "thoroughly old-school”—Publishers Weekly "devastating Gallic charm"—Los Angeles Magazine

The eagerly anticipated first monograph to celebrate the fifty-years-and-counting career of decorating legend Mario Buatta. Influenced by the understated elegance of Colefax and Fowler and the doyenne of exuberant American decor, Sister Parish, Buatta reinvented the English Country House style stateside for clients such as Henry Ford II, Barbara Walters, Malcolm Forbes, and Mariah Carey, and for Blair House, the President’s guest quarters. The designer is acclaimed for his sumptuous rooms that layer fine antiques, confectionary curtains, and sublime colorations, creating an atmosphere of lived-in opulence. This lavishly illustrated survey—filled with images taken for the foremost shelter magazines as well as many unpublished photographs from the designer’s own archive—closely follows Buatta’s highly documented career from his professional start in the 1950s working for department store B. Altman & Co. and Elisabeth Draper, Inc. to his most recent projects, which include some of the country’s finest residences. Buatta shares exclusive insights into his process, his own rules for decorating, and personal stories of his adventures along the way.

Heather Clawson's wildly popular blog Habitually Chic collected the finer things in life: high fashion, fine art, interior design and arresting architecture. Now she narrows her vision in this stunning photographic collection that offers an intimate look into the workspaces of the world's foremost cultural generators. Clawson showcases the studious, workshops, offices and creative sanctuaries of cultural icons, including Jenna Lyons and Frank Muytjens of J. Crew, James de Givenchy of TAFFIN and potter Jonathan Adler, along with many more.

"[A] brilliant new book . . . Humane provides a powerful intellectual history of the American way of war. It is a bold departure from decades of historiography dominated by interventionist bromides." —Jackson Lears, The New York Review of Books A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humane In the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war. With little debate or discussion, the United States carries out military operations around the globe. It hardly matters who’s president or whether liberals or conservatives operate the levers of power. The United States exercises dominion everywhere. In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed—and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences. The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. By that time, the US military had embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but its foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Even as the two administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the “forever” war. Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all.