Elle Decor USA – April 2023
English | 132 pages | pdf | 71.09 MB
Here at ELLE DECOR Usa Magazine, designers and decorators are always the stars of our show. So you can imagine how much the team relishes the voyeuristic pleasure of assembling our Designers at Home issue. There’s the alluring opportunity to discover insider secrets—the specific antiques and vintage finds, textiles, tile, and more the experts select for themselves. And there’s also the chance to see how top talents with diverse aesthetic sensibilities decide to rest their eyes, away from professional mood boards and meetings.
As we worked on the issue, a theme emerged: a sense of calm. And with chaos reigning in the outside world, what could be more seductive at home than that? Don’t get me wrong—“calm” doesn’t equal “quiet.”
In each of the homes in this issue, there is texture and color deployed intelligently, and at full voice, not at a whisper. (If you need another reference point for the power and prominence of this kind of design thinking right now, you can look to the latest fashion runways in Milan and Paris.) Perhaps a better analogy for the lush, layered homes in these pages isn’t auditory, but tactile: rooms that look the way cashmere or velvet feels; rooms with true depth and an enveloping appeal—plus details that keep you coming back for closer inspection.
Our two swoon-worthy cover stories both embody this idea— and how. In New Orleans, interior designer Michelle R. Smith’s family home, a Greek Revival pile in the city’s Garden District, is an eleganza extravaganza. The Louisiana native, who studied under decorating icon Daniel Romualdez, combines antiques and contemporary touches to astonishing effect. I’ll be thinking about her vintage dining chairs, draped in smart navyand- cream slipcovers, for a long time.
And because jewelry design is an obsession of ours at ELLE DECOR, we stopped in at the Lisbon pied-à-terre of our second cover star, Matthew Harris, founder of Mateo. There, he magicked up a pared-back space that takes inspiration from his work and—surprise!— nods to his next endeavor: creating decorative accessories for the home.
There’s so much to pore over in this edition of the magazine. We hope you have as much fun peeking behind the curtain as we did. Come on in. You’re invited.
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