The AD Aesthete

Historian Despina Stratigakos startled the academic world with her book Hitler at Home (Yale University Press), a powerful and unsettling examination of the ruler's homes. Beyond showcasing Germany's finest design, the dark premise also suggests the interiors served as propaganda intended to normalize the dictator to a global stage, as a man of culture and refinement. In her latest book, Hitler's Northern Utopia (Princeton University Press), Stratigakos turns her critical eye to the little-known story of the Third Reich's intent to reconstruct Norway as a means to bind the country closer to Germany. Join us. 

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When AD100 interior designer Michael S. Smith was tapped to decorate the private quarters of the Obama White House, he found himself pondering heady questions such as, How do you get the leader of the free world to agree to red curtains? In his new book, Designing History: The Extraordinary Art & Style of the Obama White House (Rizzoli), Smith offers design enthusiasts and historians alike a close look at his masterful transformation. Today, he joins me to talk about the Obamas' personal style and what it was like to work with the thoughtful couple on the project of a lifetime. 

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Celebrating his new book Twelve Gardens Around the World (Editions Gourcuff Gradenig), AD100 landscape designer Louis Benech takes readers on a global journey of paradises, where each acreage has "juste." As many a design writer has noted, the magic of Benech is that he conjures gardens that look as is they have never been created at all. Join us for a transporting talk through the paths of his imagination.

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Edo Mapelli Mozzi—the same who recently married Queen Elizabeth's granddaughter, Princess Beatrice—has for a dozen years been known in the UK as the founder and CEO of Banda. Created with the idea to identify unconventional buildings in neighborhoods off the slightly beaten path and to inventively transform them into impeccable luxury modern residences, he has a talent for developing top-notch urban homes at a lower price point. Long passionate about historic architecture, Mapelli Mozzi joins me today to chat about new projects, future trends, and how the pandemic has already changed what people want a home to be. I hope you enjoy the program. 

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Nicole Hollis, a leading American interior designer in San Francisco with a new monograph out from Rizzoli (NICOLEHOLLIS: Curated Interiors), describes her approach as less about pattern and color and more about shaping spaces with intention. Here, she speaks frankly about how her dyslexia acts as a creative springboard—a challenge and a gift, underscoring the importance of visual memory—and how she designs by reduction, focusing on forms and materials and how they interact and activate each other. 

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Nobody understands Moroccan style better than international tastemaker, designer, and businesswoman Meryanne Loum-Martin, owner of the celebrated boutique hotel Jnane Tamsna and author of the new book, Inside Marrakesh: Enchanting Homes and Gardens (Rizzoli), which opens the doors to multiple private houses across the style spectrum—including a most-modern home constructed via 25,000 donkey cartfuls of materials. Join us as we travel to the heart of Marrakech design today, exploring the city's best and most inspiring rooms as described through the aesthetic language of both its insiders and expats.

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Bunny Mellon may have been well known as an art collector, a philanthropist, and a self-taught landscape artist—yet it is the latter that is the focus of two new books debuting this fall: Bunny Mellon Garden Journal and Garden Secrets of Bunny Mellon (Vendome), in collaboration with garden historian Linda Jane Holden; interior designer Bryan Huffman, Mrs. Mellon's close friend; and Thomas Lloyd, Mrs. Mellon's grandson and president of the family's Gerald B. Lambert Foundation. All three join me to discuss the Mrs. Mellon, her life, and her gardens; I hope you enjoy the program.

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Architectural criticism has been a constant for centuries, with buildings under scrutiny throughout the ages. Interior design, however, has always received the white-glove treatment. Why? Join me for a lively discussion between Wendy Goodman, of New York magazine, and Suzanne Stephens, of Architectural Record, as we discuss the critiques of interiors and the history of aesthetic judgments.

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Jayne Wrightsman rocketed to international prominence from Midwestern obscurity, transforming herself into one of the most distinguished collectors of both French and English decorative arts along with her husband Charles B. Wrightsman. With the upcoming auction of her estate later this month, Christie’s experts William Strafford and Alan Wintermute join me as we discuss not just her many treasures but the woman who has rightly earned her place in the pantheon of American connoisseurship.

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