The ingenuity of Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style: The Book of Interior Design is its treatment of interior design as a matter of personal style. In the book’s introduction, former Elle Decor editor Asad Syrkett elaborates on that idea. “The look of a room is so much more than the sum of its elements,” he writes. “It communicates the aesthetic preferences of its inhabitants (this chair here and this color there) while also condensing a number of values and aspirations, each one influenced by culture, tradition, and the vagaries of personal taste.” When viewed through such a subjective, unique lens, interiors become places to explore, not just items to tick off a list or add to a shopping cart. Past its beautiful sunburst cover, Defining Style is organized into sections that you might not immediately associate with interiors. A chapter called Biophilic, for example, incorporates images, colors and forms of the natural world: Think Frank Lloyd Wright’s nautilus-inspired Guggenheim Museum or Dan Mitchell’s Balinese home, which is pictured here in a gorgeous photograph and features a handwoven hammock that swings out into the middle of the spacious living room. The book’s organizing principle means that a tony English drawing room shares space with the playfully imaginative Parisian home of French designer Vincent Darré. Both rooms are found in the chapter titled Maximal, so the 19th-century portrait of Charles II by Sir Peter Lely and an oversized brass grasshopper mounted above a doorway have more in common than you’d think. This is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Valiant Women is a vital and engrossing attempt to correct the record and rightfully celebrate the achievements of female veterans of World War II.
