How about a library? - Deccan Herald |
| How about a library? - Deccan Herald Posted:  It took Thatcher 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 Wine, a former Internet entrepreneur who now creates custom book collections and decorative "book solutions," as he puts it, in his Boulder, Colo., warehouse. "German is easy – it's easy to find a complete set of vellum Goethe in the original German," he said. But Wine had to search long and hard to find clean copies of authors like Thackeray, Galsworthy and Conrad. More than pretty buildings 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 Jenny Fischbach, a design partner at Cullman & Kravis Inc., the tony Manhattan decorating firm, were similarly inclined – they wanted literary classics mixed with art books for a silver-inflected art library. So Wine chose works by Kate Chopin, Jane Austen and Robert Browning and wrapped them in matte silver paper, to match the silver hardware in the room. Not all of Wine's 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. For another Starck project, in Dallas, Wine used black paper to wrap the 2,000 vintage books he picked for their "distressed edges," so they could be displayed backward.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 like Wines' Juniper Books for help filling them up.Jeffrey Colle, a builder of vast Hamptons estates that mimic turn-of-the-century designs, wouldn't think of omitting a library from one of his creations. Right leather-bound look A 16,800-square-foot Shingle-style house on 42 acres in Water Mill, N.Y., comes with a $29.995 million price tag and a library Colle had built from French chalked quarter-sawn oak; with about 150 feet of shelf space, there is room for more than 1,000 books. It's up to the buyer or their decorator to fill that space, said Colle, who has collaborated with Bennett Weinstock, a Philadelphia decorator known for his English interiors, on some of his libraries. Weinstock still shops in London to find just the right leather-bound look, he said. "Some people will insist that they be in English, because they want them to look as if they could read the books," Weinstock said. "Others don't care what language the books are in as long as the bindings are beautiful." High-profile builders Even a modernist builder like Steve Hermann in Los Angeles, who makes sleek multimillion-dollar houses for buyers like Christina Aguilera, includes acres of shelves in his high-end spec houses. Hermann designed a glassy, Neutra-like house with a 60-by-14-foot shelving system, which has room for 4,000 books, he said. "But who has 4,000 books?" he said. "I always stage my houses, so it was up to me to fill the shelves." He ordered 2,000 white-wrapped books from Wine and deployed them in tidy, horizontal stacks (the white-wrapped book, it seems, is quickly becoming this year's design cliche).Why build such huge shelves?"I could have hung art," Hermann said. "But I like the textural feeling of shelves, and of books on display." So did the buyer: The place, books included, sold for $6.4 million to a British man in the fashion business.The old practice of buying yards of leather-bound law journals or Swedish medical texts for an instant library is out of favor. "I don't think you should have law journals unless one of you is actually a lawyer," Weinstock said.Instead, some designers are finding ever more elaborate ways to tweak books their clients already own. Peter Pennoyer, a New York architect, is designing wooden boxes that look like perfectly bound books – "in sort of a tomato-soup-with-cream color," he said – 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's 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. My thought is to elevate all these mismatched bindings and put them in these containers, so it all looks uniform and pretty, but the client can keep the books she's loved for decades."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 Fischbach of Cullman & Kravis. "There are always parameters, even if it's what I jokingly call the typical intellectual collector's library." Alexa Hampton, the New York decorator, remembers her father, Mark Hampton, buying "masses of random, leather-bound books to assemble libraries," she said. "But the people I work for don't want books just as backdrop or theater, which they did 20 years ago. Now they want books they actually might read."Two weeks ago, Alexa Hampton and a foreign client for whom she is decorating an Upper East Side pied-a-terre spent a morning at the Strand, picking out histories and antique sports books for a dining room, and contemporary fiction and biographies for the bedroom. Making it pretty "When people are reading less," Hampton said, "you think more people would say, 'Just fill it with books and make it pretty.' Instead, they are very involved."It's not always practical to haul the client off to a bookstore, however. Jenny McKibben, who runs the book-by-the-foot business at the Strand – which now accounts for 5 percent of the store's sales, she said – takes mostly phone and Internet orders. Designers at the Rockwell Group asked for Rat Pack biographies, gambling and other "Sin City themes," she said, more than 1,000 books to spread about the 110,000-square-foot casino and 2,995 rooms of the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, the new casino resort there. The designers of the new Bowlmor, a bowling alley-nightclub on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, envisioned the place as a TriBeCa loft – minimal and modern – and asked for a collection "that was young, fun and hip." McKibben said she procured "100 feet of brightly colored books on music, film, cars, games, retro-themed fun topics, NYC-themed topics, wine and spirits, architecture, modern art and design, contemporary fiction and, of course, bowling." "I think I'm pretty good at extrapolating tastes from a small amount of information," said Wine, who created a collection of 4,000 books, packed them up in boxes labeled by room and topic – contemporary mysteries, for example, for the front hall – and sent them off to the house to be unpacked and styled by Fischbach.As she put it: "Architects build so many shelves into new construction – it adds warmth and their aesthetic stamp. Thatcher is a necessity at this point in these large homes," she said, ticking off five projects on which she and Wine have collaborated. "I couldn't pull off filling these miles of bookshelves without him." For his work, Wine charges from $80 to $350 a foot. The rare vellum is more pricey, at about $750 a foot; the Northern California library he did for the private equity manager cost about $80,000, he said. In the custom book business, you might call Wine a designer label and the Strand, ready-to-wear (prices there start at $10 a foot and range up to $400 for antique leather).The Maryland-based Wonder Book, then, with its 54,000-square-foot warehouse, represents the mass market. Chuck Roberts, its amiable owner, said he gets requests from developers, set designers, decorators needing 1,000 books for a holiday deadline, even wedding planners. "We've had a great year – it's broken all records," Roberts said, noting that his book-by-the-foot business now represents almost 20 percent of his total sales. Though "earth tones" are his bestsellers, he said, last week a national builder asked for light blue and gray books to stage multiple homes. Wine, who is more of a library artist than a mere book dealer, and who can swathe a book in just about anything, had fun last month wrapping the autobiographies of Keith Richards and Jay-Z in old-fashioned red leather. It's a practice that irritates book designers like Chip Kidd, who creates noted covers for Knopf."It feels sort of needlessly complicated, like turning on the vacuum cleaner and going and finding a piece of dirt," Kidd said. Last year, Restoration Hardware sold a decorative product called a book bundle. It was a fascinating modern relic, even a fetish item – a clutch of books with rough edges and the covers ripped off, stitched with twine. The company's website described it rather winningly: "Liberated from their covers, stitched and bound together with jute twine, the foxed and faded pages of old books become objets d'art." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php | ||
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