Category: DesignLabs

I spend a tremendous amount of time surveying the interior design and architecture industries as I create DesignLabs pieces, practicing journalism and content creation for clients so when I can spin what is going on in these closely related worlds into a deeper story, I’m quite happy.

In my diary entry Taking a Page or Two from Eudora Welty’s Books, I highlight a chair that industrial artist Pryor Calloway and I created for the New York Cith Take a Seat auction one year, We covered the chair in pages from Welty’s books and I quoted Welty’s lectures given at Harvard University in 1983, which were collected between the covers of One Writer’s Beginnings. Pryor, one of Welty’s fellow Mississippians, gave me a poignant answer to how Eudora had inspired her so click through to the post if you’d like a feel-good moment.

In The Sense of Beauty, I write about what it means to have had a long journalism career involving aesthetics. Plotinus gets it, his Enneads, which he wrote in the third century AD, is devoted to the subject of beauty. Ezra Pound was so struck by a comment Aubrey Beardsley made, “Beauty is difficult,” he included it in his Cantos. Being a lover of books and a fan of brilliant design made featuring Max Gunawan’s Lumio—a true book of light—a no brainer for me.

My first trip to the Beinecke Library at Yale University was a revelation! I delved into Edmund Wilson’s papers, seeing the famous editor’s travel journals when he was a boy, his letters to other writers on stationary from The New Yorker, and his notebooks during the time he was an editor at Vanity Fair. I went through Henry Miller’s papers, holding his Paris diaries and going through his letters. If that’s not mind blowing enough, I held parchments containing Petrarch’s sonnets in my very own hands! This made for a DesignLabs post for the ages!