Beth Dunlop

Indoor-outdoor living has become a valued component of many of today s homes, and a lot of design philosophy has emerged along with their development about how a landscape can enhance both the architecture and the quality of the inhabitants lives. Much of this is unknown to today s homeowners, however, and will be explored fully here as reinterpreted by today s leading garden designers. Plenty of gorgeous photos and in-depth plant information will give garden-enthusiast readers inspiration and the tools to re-create the planting schemes shown within. The 35 featured gardens are from across the US and created by today s leading landscape designers including Reed Hilderbrand, Mia Lehrer, Wagner Hodgson, Margaret McCurry, Marmol Radziner, Judy Kameon/Elysian Landscapes, Raymond Jungles, and Terremoto, with all contemporary photography by equally talented contemporary photographers. Several homes are owned by celebrities, including Mandy Moore, the founders of Vince clothing, and others.

The go-to architect for the Jazz Age elite of South Florida and beyond, Addison Mizner created a new architectural style and a new lifestyle for the wealthy and socially prominent of Palm Beach America s preeminent winter resort town of the time. Building mansions, clubs, hotels and apartment houses with a bent toward fantasy and romance, Mizner established a design vocabulary and tradition that to this day influences architects, designers, and builders. Evocative of old Spain, Venice, and the Moorish capitals of Granada and Seville, Mizner s work is a dream realized: courtyards with fountains, trellises with climbing bougainvillea, arched windows, glazed tile floors, spiraling marble columns, expansive interiors with grand proportions. This book explores Mizner s legacy through the extraordinary houses and other structures he built, including such storied homes as La Guerida, an 11-bedroom Spanish Revival mansion, best known now as the Kennedy Estate the place where JFK he composed his Inaugural Address. Known for their beauty, opulence, fantastic detail, as well as the stories of those individuals who have lived or played in them, the houses and buildings of Addison Mizner stand as monuments to grand living and romance made in stone and iron, stucco and tile.

As one of Miami’s most influential architects, Rene Gonzalez revolutionizes the way luxury buildings are equipped for climate change. Tactile, experiential, and holistic, the work of his namesake office demonstrates a belief in the inseparable connection between nature and architecture, creating spaces that are memorable and timeless. Surveying fourteen residential, commercial, and cultural projects in Florida, marking the first phase of his career, Rene Gonzalez Architects: Not Lost in Translation illustrates Gonzalez’s ability to distill the essence of place, distinguishing his work both in his home state of Florida and in the global landscape of contemporary architecture. Projects featured in the book include three Alchemist boutiques, the first of which won the 2011 National AIA Institute Honor Award; the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, whose one million glass mosaic tiles create the illusion of a jungle oasis on the exterior; the eighteen-story GLASS Residential Tower in Miami Beach; the “pocket sanctuary” that is vegan restaurant Plant Food + Wine; and the North Beach Oceanfront Center, which serves as an inviting gathering ground to the North Miami Beach community. Gonzalez is especially attuned to environmental issues that are affecting the world, and which will drastically alter design practice in the coming years. RGA is receiving widespread attention for its efforts to respond to these emerging conditions, and these projects reveal Gonzalez’s commitment to embrace and celebrate the environment, seizing the opportunity to enhance our future. Rene Gonzalez Architects: Not Lost in Translation is a deeply personal book that illustrates Gonzalez’s fascination with the world that surrounds him. Featuring a conversation with Gonzalez’s colleagues Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, essays by journalists Caroline Roux and Beth Dunlop, as well as his own photographs of Miami’s vernacular architecture, this book documents Gonzalez’s progressive and responsive architecture that is of its place yet universally resonant.

The first monograph of the California firm whose regional sensibility and early attention to sustainable design anticipated the prevalent trends in residential architecture today. A generous look at the San Francisco Bay Area architects’ pioneering approach to sustainable houses, ranging from the vineyard regions of California to Telluride, Colorado; the rugged ranch lands of Montana and the picturesque hamlets of the Hudson Valley and Martha’s Vineyard. Since its formation in 1981, Fernau + Hartman has become renowned for its imaginative expansion of the possibilities of site- and region-specific architecture. Leaders in these concepts, as well as in sustainable design long before its currency today, Fernau + Hartman’s houses maximize the connection between the natural and built environments, intensify the experience of place, and invite an open, playful, and inventive approach to life. A Newport Beach weekend house has flexible sleeping quarters and almost everything else (spaces for cooking, eating, showering, and bathing) is outdoors; a house made of alternating indoor and outdoor rooms climbs up a Sonoma County hillside; and an island house inspired by the fishing village of Menemsha is composed as three independent gabled “sheds” docked at a central screened porch featuring a fireplace and dining table. With essays by Beth Dunlop, Laura Hartman, Thomas Fisher, and Daniel P. Gregory, Improvisations on the Land creates a multifaceted portrait of the firm’s history, philosophy, and practice - revealing as much about their process as the finished houses themselves. Models, axonometric drawings, floor and site plans, elevations, and photographs of vernacular structures - from a collapsed barn in Montana, to Colorado mining compounds and a louvered colonnade in the Sacramento River Delta - contribute to a full appreciation of Fernau + Hartman’s work, how its sense of spontaneity and joy provides the antidote to so much of the self-conscious architecture that surrounds us, and results in houses that push the possibilities of residential design today.

The Miami Beach-based architecture and interior design firm presents luxurious private residences from Orlando to Key West, reinterpreting Florida styles from Mediterranean to Art Deco. Though the husband-and-wife team of Taylor & Taylor travel widely to find design inspiration in the U.S., Europe, South and Central America, and the Caribbean - they always retain their first love: the historic architecture of Florida itself and its blend of rustic and romantic, from Italianate palazzos to Art Deco hotels and Key West’s bungalows. Classic Florida Style presents ten coastal residences in resplendent photography to match the tropical hues and lush natural surroundings of the sunshine state. Design lovers will see not only homes that integrate orange groves and sunsets reflecting off Biscayne Bay, but also gorgeous interiors that take full advantage of Florida’s crystalline light - superbly crafted spaces in which the ocean breezes can almost be felt ruffling the curtains. Locales range from a private island near Key West, to Coral Gables, Fisher Island, and Lake Thonotosassa, northeast of Tampa - even the South Carolina home of one Florida-minded football giant, a former quarterback for the Miami Dolphins. Whether drawing on the architecture of British Colonial Bermuda, or the Spanish-inspired designs of George Washington Smith and Wallace Neff in California, each home takes full advantage of glamorous indoor-outdoor living and a seamless blend of native Florida materials and singular antiques.