What We’re Reading: Coffee Table Books
Everybody has a weakness. Ours is hoarding stacks and stacks of gorgeous books, long after we’ve filled every coffee table in sight.
I just love keeping large-format photography books around though. I find myself pulling one out when I’m feeling stuck or stagnant… it’s a quick way to get a burst of inspiration and fill my eyeballs with beauty without leaving the couch. Call me funny, but I swear I get some of my best ideas after giving myself permission to daydream for a few minutes in the pages of something beautiful.
Here are a few we’ve been loving around the studio lately. Don’t forget that you can always browse our full bookshelf for new recommendations.
Pantone: The 20th Century in Color
by Leatrice Eiseman
I’ll be honest… some books we love because the cover is beautiful and it looks great styled in a room. We definitely thought this would fit into that category… until we started flipping through it. It’s full of insightful windows into the evolving American color palette over the 20th century, and is actually a pretty profound way to look at cultural history. Plus it looks pretty styled in a room. We’re only human.
by Wendy Goodman
This book is a voyeuristic fantasy. It lets you peep into 70 ridiculously stunning homes of artists, creators, celebrities, and just stylish people. There are few things we love more around here than spaces chock full of personality that really represent the person who lives there, and this is a repository of inspiration that we love having around.
by Christine Chitnie
One of our most constant sources of inspiration here at the studio are the colors, textures, and patterns we see while traveling. There’s a reason we stockpile textiles we lovingly collect in the wild. This book is a mesmerizing deep dive into the color and fiber (literal and figurative) of India, and we can’t get enough of it. I deeply wish this existed as a series looking at other wonderfully colorful countries as well. In the meantime, we’ll be over here flipping through it for the 16th time.
By Taylor Fuller
One of our favorite categories of books are the ones that highlight just how beautiful the world is in some new way. We love guidebooks that give unique roundups, or photography books that showcase a country. This is a whole different kind of roundup though…. creating a highly specific bucket list of the most colorful sights on earth. This is the kind of list we can get behind.
by Erin Benzakein
Lately, we’ve been addicted to Growing Floret, the docu-series on the new Magnolia Network (you can stream it on Discovery +) following Erin Benzakein and her team and they expand their family flower farm by orders of magnitude. This is her book on flower arranging by season, and we think it’s absolutely lovely. It’s so compelling that flipping through it makes even me with my purple thumb day-dream for a few minutes about growing a sprawling cut flower garden before coming back to reality.
Note: Some of these books might be affiliate links. No matter what though, these posts are definitely not sponsored and are only filled things we truly love and think are worth sharing.
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