'The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now! Start to unravel from there.' Design for Living is a wickedly witty dark romantic comedy by Noel Coward. Initially banned in the UK, this provocative play portrays three amoral, glib and stylish characters and their hopelessly inescapable, if also unconventional, emotional entanglement. From 1930s bohemian Paris to the dizzying heights of Manhattan society, a tempestuous love triangle unravels between a vivacious interior designer, Gilda, playwright Leo and artist Otto - three people unashamedly and passionately in love with each other. They are trapped in what Coward called 'a three-sided erotic hodge podge.' With Coward's trademark piquant style, this lively, funny but also atypical play looks at dazzling, egotistical creatures and their self-destructive dependence on each other. Exploring themes of bisexuality, celebrity, success and self-obsession, Design for Living is a stylish and scandalous comedy.
From the much-admired biographer of Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and the Barrymores (“Margot Peters is surely now . . . our foremost historian of stage make-believe”—Leon Edel), a new biography of the most famous English-speaking acting team of the twentieth century. Individually, they were recognized as extraordinary actors, each one a star celebrated, imitated, sought after. Together, they were legend. The Lunts. A name to conjure with. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne worked together so imaginatively, so seamlessly onstage that they seemed to fuse into one person. Offstage, they brawled so famously and raucously over every detail of every performance that they inspired the musical Kiss Me, Kate. At home on Broadway, in London’s West End, touring the United States and Great Britain, and even playing “the foxhole circuit” of World War II, the Lunts stunned, moved, and mystified audiences for more than four decades. They were considered to be a rarefied taste, but when they toured Texas in the 1930s, the audience threw cowboy hats onto the stage. Their private life was equally fascinating, as unusual as the one they led in public. Friends like the critic Alexander Woollcott (whom Edna Ferber once described as “the little New Jersey Nero who thinks his pinafore is a toga”), Noël Coward, Laurette Taylor, and Sidney Greenstreet received lifelong loyalty and hospitality. Ten Chimneys, their country home in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, “is to performers what the Vatican is to Catholics,” Carol Channing once said. “The Lunts are where we all spring from.” In this new biography, Margot Peters catches the magic of Lunt and Fontanne—their period, their work, their intimacy and its contradictions—with candor, delicacy, intelligence, and wit. She writes about their personal and creative choices as deftly as she captures their world, from their meeting (backstage, naturally)—when Fontanne was a young actress in the first flush of stardom and Lunt a lanky midwesterner who came in the stage door, bowed to her elaborately, lost his balance, and fell down the stairs—and the early days when an unknown and very hungry Noël Coward lived in a swank hotel in a room the size of a closet and cadged meals at their table to the telegram the famous couple once sent to a movie mogul, turning down a studio contract worth a fortune (“We can be bought, my dear Mr. Laemmle, but we can’t be bored”). We follow the Lunts through triumphs in plays such as The Guardsman, The Taming of the Shrew, and Design for Living; through friendships and feuds; through the intricate way they worked with such playwrights and directors as S. N. Behrman, Robert Sherwood, Giraudoux, Dürrenmatt, Peter Brook, and with each other. Margot Peters captures the gallantry of two remarkably gifted people who lived for their art and for each other. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were once described as an “amazing duet of intelligence and gaiety.” Margot Peters re-creates the fun and the fireworks.
The power of design to create a life worth living even in a refugee camp: designs, inventions, and artworks from the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan. This book shows how, even in the most difficult conditions--forced displacement, trauma, and struggle--design can help create a life worth living. Design to Live documents designs, inventions, and artworks created by Syrian refugees living in the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan. Through these ingenious and creative innovations--including the vertical garden, an arrangement necessitated by regulations that forbid planting in the ground; a front hall, fashioned to protect privacy; a baby swing made from recycled desks; and a chess set carved from a broomstick--refugees defy the material scarcity, unforgiving desert climate, and cultural isolation of the camp. Written in close collaboration with the residents of the camp, with text in both English and Arabic, Design to Live, reflects two perspectives on the camp: people living and working in Azraq and designers reflecting on humanitarian architecture within the broader field of socially engaged art and design. Architectural drawings, illustrations, photographs, narratives, and stories offer vivid testimony to the imaginative and artful ways that residents alter and reconstruct the standardized humanitarian design of the camp--and provide models that can be replicated elsewhere. The book is the product of a three-year project undertaken by MIT Future Heritage Lab, researchers and students with Syrian refugees at the Azraq Refugee Camp, CARE, Jordan, and the German-Jordanian University. Copublication with Future Heritage Lab, MIT
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.
An interactive journal that serves as a joyful, inspirational guide to building the life you've always dreamed of, using the principles and creative process of an award-winning product designer. Life, just like a design problem, is full of constraints -- time, money, age, location, and circumstances. You can’t have everything, so you have to be creative to make what you want and what you need co-exist. Design the Life You Love is a joyful, inspirational guide to building the life you’ve always wanted, using the principles and creative process of an award-winning product designer. Through four steps that reveal hidden skills and wisdom, anyone can design a life they love!
Nothing lies beyond the scope of your ability. The new design for living you create has no limitations. Literally all the good things that life and the world offer are yours to have and enjoy. But you need to recognize them, accept them, and incorporate them into the new design you are now going to create. In its scope, and in its effect on readers, A New Design for Living is second only to Ernest Holmes's magnum opus, The Science of Mind. In this cherished spiritual classic, Holmes demonstrates that wishes-from health, love, and friendship to the career and home of your dreams-are not only possible to realize but are within each person's very reach. At last available again, this galvanizing book teaches how to turn mind-power into an infinitely positive force-the very force of creation itself. Harmonize with the beauty and intelligence of the universe, watch the magnificence of life transform before you, and awaken to the nature of reality. With this newfound power of transformative thinking, every goal is attainable.
From an international authority on design, how to create a home that engages your senses and reflects your personality Melissa Penfold, Australia's foremost authority on style and design, regularly attracts a worldwide audience of more than 1.8 million to her website, newsletter, and Instagram account. Now she has distilled her three decades of expertise into a single volume, identifying the basic decorating principles--including light and space, composition and balance, and pattern and texture--and offering hundreds of invaluable tips on how to apply them to turn your house into a home that is comfortable, intimate, beautiful, and the most authentic expression of your personal aesthetic. Illustrated with images of her own home and inspirational homes around the world, Living Well by Design is an indispensable resource for everyone eager to create interiors in which decorating fundamentals are integrally interwoven with individual style.
From acclaimed architect and designer Keith Summerour comes an alluring new book of carefully crafted dwellings that redefine the idea of home for today. When we think about what home is, many of us would say a house that is soulful and welcoming, a place with an inviting porch and a lush garden, a welcoming entryway and well-crafted living spaces that will nurture our private moments and expand to welcome guests. In this alluring new book, Keith Summerour shares nine houses, exploring their architecture, interiors, and grounds, to illustrate a new idea of home. Reinterpreting and making new his own Southern legacy that speaks both of aristocratic charm and homespun appeal, these homes range from rustic retreats that draw their power from the land to elegant manor houses, but all share extraordinary character and charm that nod to history while reflecting the way people wish to live in the world today. Enriched by the work of some of the top interior decorators working today, including Beth Webb, Barbara Westbrook, Circa Interiors, and Liza Bryan, as well as world-renowned landscape designers Jeremy Smearman and John Howard, and beautifully illustrated with all-new photography, Creating Home is the ultimate dream book.
Based on the proven premise that "individuals are perfectly designed to get the outcomes they get", The Power of Living By Design provokes your thoughts using a framework called the Successful Life Systems Design Model to guide you in understanding choices you’ve made in your life, either consciously or unconsciously. Integrating classic success principles from over twenty resources as alternative choices, The Power of Living By Design then provides a sequenced system to assure your future choices are aligned to efficiently work together toward your desired success. As builders follow the architect’s plans to remodel an outdated house into a beautiful home, with lessons from The Power of Living By Design, you can use the framework to identify the rooms in your life that merit remodelling and the sequenced system to create a personal blueprint for reconstruction. You become your own architect and builder of the future you yearn. For individuals that seek to understand the cause and effect of their choices and are looking for a systematic approach to changing some choices in their life, The Power of Living By Design is an integration of proven strategies and techniques to make a difference in designing a life of fulfillment.
Home decorating and furnishing inspiration from an Elle Décor A-List interior designer and tastemaker. In Dream Design Live, decorator Paloma Contreras goes beyond interior design to show readers how to inhabit their homes in fulfilling and beautiful ways. Divided into three sections, this hardworking book proves that the most appealing interiors are also the most personal ones. Contreras takes readers through the design process and encourages them to seek inspiration from the approach that works best for them. From thinking creatively to improve both your home and your life, to showing you how to turn your dreams into realities, the author reveals how you can take the welcoming space you’ve just created and spend meaningful time there pursuing the activities you love. “With stunning photography and accessible-yet-elegant tips, Dream Design Live fuses interior decorating advice with lifestyle recommendations and demonstrates how living a happy and satisfying life starts at home." ?Traditional Home "In Dream, Design, Live, Contreras . . . explores the design process through the lens of travel, inspiration, and personal style. As such, the tome is both an instructional lesson and a personal story, a great read for the design professional and enthusiast alike." ?Architectural Digest “The 240-page volume goes beyond helpful tips and pretty pictures to show readers how to find a design approach that works best for them.” ?Southern Home magazine
