Gift-giving season is in full swing, and while a big, beautiful coffee table is a uniformly welcome present  — this one is our obvious favorite — we wanted to deep dive into a few particularly inspiring ones we’ve been living with lately. In the second edition of our new column, What We’re Reading, we’re looking at two excellent new interiors books, an archival look at the life and work of a beloved Finnish designer, and an ode to the humble lemon. 

New English Interiors

The general consensus among design folk these days is that The World of Interiors is a shelter magazine without peer. And while there are many reasons that could be true — and while the magazine doesn’t feature only interiors from the UK — part of its appeal lies in the singularity of the British decorating style. Brits have always been a bit more daring and ramshackle with their domestic spaces; one gets the feeling that America’s recent quiet luxury / beige-on-beige trend would have moved most Londoners to heave their settees out the window and into the Thames. That style — always colorful, often eccentric — gets a new showcase in the recently published New English Interiors, a compendium of 22 homes photographed by Dean Hearne and written by Elizabeth Metcalfe (who recalls in the intro that the UK went through its own sad-beige phase in the late ’90s and early 2000s). “Whether we see [the current style] as proof that the bold English decorating spirit still reigns strong or as a reaction against the uncertain times we live in, it is a style defined by layers, with the owner’s personality intricately woven throughout,” Metcalfe writes. And boy, are there personalities on show here. If anyone ever needed a visual guide to the “double-drenching” paint trend, here it is; the book might make you never want to see a white wall again. There are patterns and quilts and tiles and vases encrusted with ceramic lemons and canopies and curtains and plates and ruffles and beadboard and so.many.gallery.walls. A joy to read.

Italian Interiors

Our friend and sometime contributor Laura May Todd is the creative force behind another great location-specific interiors book out this month: Italian Interiors from Phaidon. The homes in this book are altogether different from their English counterparts, and as an expat living in Milan, Todd has a clear-eyed view of her adopted country. She describes: “Italy is a country that forces you to live with its history; an Italian house is one that lives in harmony with [that] history, whose objects and furnishings speak to the ideas and passions of its occupants; it is a space that, despite the preciousness of the objects that reside within, is intentionally configured to welcome others inside.” The book presents a mix of homes designed and/or inhabited by contemporary designers, like David\Nicolas, alongside those built long ago, like Piero Portaluppi’s Villa Necchi, which remain frozen in amber as house museums but are no less vital than the day their capstones were installed. Here, there are former convents and palazzos, a cave home on the island of Ventotene, and a former silk weaving factory transformed by none other than Luca Guadagnino. The homes in this book have less in common with each other than the English ones, though you begin to wonder if every citizen of Italia has a work by Gio Ponti in their living room.

Lemon

A delightfully bizarre little book, Lemon is part cookbook, part paean to citrus. Published by Taschen from the team behind the (late?) great food journal The Gourmand, the book is split into two parts. The first half is a series of essays that explore the lemon’s role in art, literary society, linguistics, cocktail culture, film, product design, popular music, and more. (It’s posited here that Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin specified lemons in his tour rider to stuff down the crotch of his pants). The second half is a relatively straightforward cookbook, whose recipes all feature the lemon in some fashion: a citrus-scented herby risotto, a roast chicken perched on a bed of lemon slices, a coolly acidic tart, a French 75. The book is punctuated throughout by classic pieces of art featuring the lemon as well as original photography by Bobby Doherty.

The Blue Door

Ten years after I first wrote about the work of Yrjö Kukkapuro, the 91-year-old Finnish designer is having something of a resurgence. His 1982 Experiment chair, an icon of Postmodernism, has been reissued by Hem in four different frame styles, and a new book, The Blue Door, details his life and work from the point of view of his daughter, Isa Kukkpuro-Enbom. When I wrote about him in 2014, design was at the height of its Memphis resurgence, and the Experiment chair’s wobbly, primary-colored arms seemed like a perfect distillation of the decade’s reigning aesthetic. Now, in a calmer moment, I’m intrigued by the Karuselli, a leather topped fiberglass swiveling chair that hugs the sitter in a kind of embrace, and the rolled arm, wood-framed Ateljee sofa, both of which are still in production as well. This book runs through all of those and more, with lots of behind the scenes photos from both family and factory life as well as a glimpse inside the Kukkapuro’s notorious paraboloid concrete-shelled home and studio.