 Trade In this Item for up to £14.15
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Tony Duquette: A Strange Eden for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £14.15, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
This book reveals the designer's taste for the theatrical. Tony Duquette took de Wolf's no-holds-barred style in his manefsto. He crafted rooms that were beguiling, grandiose and pure Hollywood...opulent and overstated with gilded lilies, leopard patters, rock crystal, tented ceilings and endless rococo paintings.Tony Duquette designed sparkling jewels, spectacular stage sets, extravagant costumes, and interiors for pleasure pavilions inspired by dreams. He loved richness, drama, ornament, individuality and eccentricity. He considered 18th Century France the apogee of design and civilisation and recreated a Sun King's ransom of painting and festoons for his own interior spaces.'I always decorate as if I were working in that period rather than merely re-creating it'. Duquette designed with authentic fabrics and colours, painting and decorative objects. Each space was a pastiche of Duquette's passions: Chinoiserie, gold-leafed trays, Louis XV chairs, clusters of pillow made from Balinese fabrics and Japanese brocades. He is known for embellishing, draping and layering. His signature over-the-top style includes decorating with shells and faux coral, rearranging tabourets and porcelain, applied faux-malachite and vignettes set up to a crescendo of clashing colours.
About the Author
Wendy Goodman is the Interior Designer Editor of New York Magazine, the contributing Style Editor of Departures Magazine and a contributing Editor for Elle Decor. She has taught courses in interior design at Parsons School of Design in New York City, where she lives. Hutton Wilkinson is President of Tony Duquette, Inc. Wilkinson, who began working for Duquette while still a teenager, ultimately became his business partner. He is also president of the Elsie DeWolfe Foundation. He lives in Dawnridge, the Beverly Hills Estate that he inherited from Duquette.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Hardcover
To anybody interested in the development of 20th.C, interior design this book - and "More is More" is essential reading. What an amazing man - who's creative output and glorious sense of theatre make him a significant figure in both the development of imaginative use of interior spaces and in cinematic and theatrical design.
A glorious celebration of excess!
A glorious celebration of excess!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
16 reviews
64 of 67 people found the following review helpful
Tony Duquette: design magic and publishing genius
23 Dec 2007
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Most frequently, references to and photographs of the work of Tony Duquette, the multi-talented artist, designer, and decorator who passed away in 1999, have appeared in books and articles focusing on fantasy and the baroque in the applied arts. In addition, because his work was overwhelmingly concentrated on the West Coast, many Americans curious about Duquette have found it difficult to access information regarding this legendary figure. Until now, that is, for authors Wendy Goodman and Hutton Wilkinson and publisher Abrams have just issued one of the most beautiful and engaging design books ever. This generously-sized book (364 pages in length) is full of spectacular photographs, reproduced documents, and personal remembrances that combine to inspire, fascinate, and invite the reader to return to both the text and visuals again and again.
"Tony Duquette" is organized into eight chapters. The first four flow chronologically, covering his childhood and youth; the early social and professional connections that paved the path to prominence; the role of the beautiful Elizabeth "Beegle" Duquette as wife, muse, and collaborator; and the year (1950-1951) that the couple spent in Paris. The second quartet of chapters focuses on Duquette's work. First comes a look at his contributions to film and the stage and then his interior designs for others. Chapter Seven, the most visually spectacular in the book and perhaps most recognizable, showcases the exotic living environments that Duquette created for himself and Elizabeth. These sites, three in southern California and one in San Francicso, showcase his signature love of a highly layered look that drew inspiration from foreign cultures and employed spectacular antiques and many faux finishes. Where the acreage was available, Duquette's residences also included multiple "dream houses" which most resemble a fantasist's interpretation of Balinese temples. Chapter Eight, titled "The Do-it-Yourself de Medici," looks at Duquette as artisan, working with both mundane and precious materials to create fabulous jewels, accessories, and pieces of furniture, among other things.
Quite possibly Duquette's love of the exotic, of over-the-top decorating, and of formal entertaining will appeal to just a fraction of design aficionados and seem irrelevant in a modern world that moves at a faster pace, has a more fluid social structure, and has abandoned many of the social niceties so important to Duquette. Still, I am betting that a sense of wonder and fantasy is hard-wired into most of us, as our enthusiastic reaction to fantastical Christmas window displays, theatrical sets, and movie special effects suggests. And if this is not enough to draw you to this beautiful book, then glimpses of the three main environments in which Duquette operated--old Hollywood, San Francisco, and a Paris just recovering from the ravages of World War II-- should alone justify picking it up. Do I have any reservations about "Tony Duquette"? Just one. The text whetted my taste for more details and insights, and I would have loved to have seen a historian join the authors' team to expand in particular the contextual descriptions of the mid-20th century social and artistic scene in both America and France.
"Tony Duquette" is organized into eight chapters. The first four flow chronologically, covering his childhood and youth; the early social and professional connections that paved the path to prominence; the role of the beautiful Elizabeth "Beegle" Duquette as wife, muse, and collaborator; and the year (1950-1951) that the couple spent in Paris. The second quartet of chapters focuses on Duquette's work. First comes a look at his contributions to film and the stage and then his interior designs for others. Chapter Seven, the most visually spectacular in the book and perhaps most recognizable, showcases the exotic living environments that Duquette created for himself and Elizabeth. These sites, three in southern California and one in San Francicso, showcase his signature love of a highly layered look that drew inspiration from foreign cultures and employed spectacular antiques and many faux finishes. Where the acreage was available, Duquette's residences also included multiple "dream houses" which most resemble a fantasist's interpretation of Balinese temples. Chapter Eight, titled "The Do-it-Yourself de Medici," looks at Duquette as artisan, working with both mundane and precious materials to create fabulous jewels, accessories, and pieces of furniture, among other things.
Quite possibly Duquette's love of the exotic, of over-the-top decorating, and of formal entertaining will appeal to just a fraction of design aficionados and seem irrelevant in a modern world that moves at a faster pace, has a more fluid social structure, and has abandoned many of the social niceties so important to Duquette. Still, I am betting that a sense of wonder and fantasy is hard-wired into most of us, as our enthusiastic reaction to fantastical Christmas window displays, theatrical sets, and movie special effects suggests. And if this is not enough to draw you to this beautiful book, then glimpses of the three main environments in which Duquette operated--old Hollywood, San Francisco, and a Paris just recovering from the ravages of World War II-- should alone justify picking it up. Do I have any reservations about "Tony Duquette"? Just one. The text whetted my taste for more details and insights, and I would have loved to have seen a historian join the authors' team to expand in particular the contextual descriptions of the mid-20th century social and artistic scene in both America and France.
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful
At last a design/decor book for free spirits and free thiinkers...
6 Jan 2008
Format:Hardcover
Today everyone is a self-designer, a self-decorator, a style maven. HGTV and it's myriad of spin-offs, and copy cat shows, poses the question: "will there be any ugly houses left in America?" If ugliness is equated with cookie cutter interiors right out of big box stores, and off the pages of catalogs, then the answer is, yes.
So this huge volume on Tony Duquette is like fresh water being thrown onto a desert. It is excellent in all respects. It is a coffee table book you actually want to read. It offers biography, film history, Hollywood history, art & furniture history, fashion, travel, manners and social behavior, a glimpse of a major part of the 20th century that spanned Tony's (and his wife Elizabeth's) long and productive life. The book is gorgeous to look at, and wonderful to hold.
I would like more, maybe another book about the behind-the-scenes process, and the craftsmen and women who made Tony Duquette's visions into reality. I would like a book about his wife's Beegle's (Elizabeth's) paintings.
I would like a book about Tony and Elizabeth as a couple, and their long marriage of 46 years.
The optimistic thing is that if you have imagination you can consider the example of the Duquettes, and the possibilty of going to the 99 cents store, or the dump of cast offs, to make something wonderful. The Duquettes were "green" way before their time. Granted they also shopped the antiques markets of the world, but they collected their treasures in the most refreshing and unilateral way.
The magic of Tony and Beegle was that their lives were fully lived, experienced, and realized.
Get (and give) this joyful book and be enchanted, inspired, and filled with the gift of possibilities.
So this huge volume on Tony Duquette is like fresh water being thrown onto a desert. It is excellent in all respects. It is a coffee table book you actually want to read. It offers biography, film history, Hollywood history, art & furniture history, fashion, travel, manners and social behavior, a glimpse of a major part of the 20th century that spanned Tony's (and his wife Elizabeth's) long and productive life. The book is gorgeous to look at, and wonderful to hold.
I would like more, maybe another book about the behind-the-scenes process, and the craftsmen and women who made Tony Duquette's visions into reality. I would like a book about his wife's Beegle's (Elizabeth's) paintings.
I would like a book about Tony and Elizabeth as a couple, and their long marriage of 46 years.
The optimistic thing is that if you have imagination you can consider the example of the Duquettes, and the possibilty of going to the 99 cents store, or the dump of cast offs, to make something wonderful. The Duquettes were "green" way before their time. Granted they also shopped the antiques markets of the world, but they collected their treasures in the most refreshing and unilateral way.
The magic of Tony and Beegle was that their lives were fully lived, experienced, and realized.
Get (and give) this joyful book and be enchanted, inspired, and filled with the gift of possibilities.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Fascinating
12 Jan 2008
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Tony Duquette and his wife Beegle were two of the most original characters of the century, and this book reflects that beautifully in breathtaking photographs of his designs, which range from teacups to palaces to tiaras, and which are remarkable for their imagination, wit, whimsy and vision. The book gives the reader a never-before-seen peek at some of Tony Duquette's most remarkable projects, his incredible design talents and his original way of living life. Well worth acquiring.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
