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Thursday, March 30, 2023

SAXON HENRY

Author | Journalist | Content Strategist | The Modern Salonnière
SAXON HENRY
Author | Journalist | Content Strategist | The Modern Salonnière
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Category: Books

I simply cannot imagine my life without books! The fact I was accused of always having “my nose in a book” as a child was a sign of things to come for sure.

The claim is still true and I am thrilled I’ve created a platform for myself that allows me to use books as windows into time and on the world. I never know when a title is going to jump out at me, and it’s not simply literary titles. I get just as excited over big, beautiful design books that capture my aesthetic imagination, as the ones that did in my diary entry Narratives that Illuminate Design.

It was the fact that Antony Clayton did such a bang-up job of presenting the gestalt of fin-de-siècle London in his book Decadent London that inspired me to build a post around it. I’ve long held a fascination for Aubrey Beardsley, whose comment to Ezra Pound, Beauty is Difficult, sent me on an aesthetical whirlwind of a study at New York University when I was attending graduate school there.

Design writer Carmen Natschke inspired a great post in which I presented her summer reading list. It’s one for the ages, especially given she keeps herself on a stringent learning curve that has her reading constantly. I read a great deal and there is no way I can keep up! In my diary entry The Difficult of Writing Well, I share a bit of dissing that went on between Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein that gave me jaw-dropping pause. I knew the two could get sideways but the snark I discovered while going through Edmund Wilson’s papers at Beinecke made me laugh aloud!

The chapter of “Staircases: the Architecture of Ascent” covering 1600-1800 is titled “A Theatre of Power” and illustrated with this sumptuous image of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Reception of the Grand Condé at Versailles” [1878], courtesy of The Vendome Press and Musée d’Orsay/Hervé Lewandowski.
Architecture Books Interior Design

Summer Reading with Carmen Natschke

Saxon Henry August 3, 2014 architectural storytellingdecorating historydesign industry leadersFrancegrand residencesItalyLondonpaintersParisphilosopherssummer reading listVersailles

For those of you who think Carmen Natschke, of The Decorating Diva fame, is merely a glamorous gadabout holding court in the design stratosphere, there…

View More Summer Reading with Carmen Natschke
The Aloysius sectional by Barry Dixon through Tomlinson/Erwin-Lambeth.
Books Furniture Design Literature

Allegorical Accents from Barry Dixon

Saxon Henry July 28, 2014 American furniture manufacturersAtlantaauthenticityChinoiseriedesign industry leadersfamous writersHigh Point Marketlightingnovelistssummer reading list

Certain aspects of being southern seem to seep into the skin through osmosis. It’s as if the summer heat wriggles into our DNA, the perspiration…

View More Allegorical Accents from Barry Dixon
Darryl Carter's Room 21 at Kips Bay
Books Interior Design Philanthropy

Kips Bay Show House

Saxon Henry July 14, 2014 classical antiquitydesign industry leadersdesign narrativesfamous writersgrand residencesliterary design encountersNew York Citynonfiction writersphilosophersWashington DC

“The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind,” wrote Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of…

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Le Corbusier's Cabanon
Architecture Books

Creation’s Patient Search

Saxon Henry May 25, 2014 architectural storytellingauthenticitydesign narrativesEmotionality of ArchitectureFranceGroundbreakersHigh Point Marketlibrariesnonfiction writerspoetry

The title of this post references a book penned by the lauded Swiss architect Le Corbusier, first published in 1960. In all honesty, it’s more…

View More Creation’s Patient Search
IFDA TAS entry Miss Welty.
Books DesignLabs Philanthropy

Taking a Page (or Two) from Eudora Welty Books

Saxon Henry May 10, 2014 authenticitybooks of lettersdesign narrativesfamous writersliterary design encountersNew York CitynovelistsVenice

Taking a Page (or Two) from Eudora Welty Books “Why don’t you design a chair, Saxon?” My normal response to the question, posed by the…

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