Frances Elkins
Visionary American Designer
Published on 28. March 2023
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-0-8478-6546-8 (ISBN)
Description
Called the most exciting designer we have ever had by Billy Baldwin, Frances Elkins has been revered for her classic, elegant, and timeless decor. Ahead of her time, Elkins became a successful designer in the man s world of the 1920s and 30s, with a talent rivaled only by her formidable sense of style. Known as the first great California designer, Elkins brought an international perspective and architectural sensibility to her work. With a social circle that included prominent artists and designers such as Jean-Michel Frank, Coco Chanel, and Alberto Giacometti, Elkins traveled widely with her brother, architect David Adler, introducing a modern European chic to her clients. She collaborated with craftsmen and artists, commissioning handloomed carpets, Mexican silverware, decorative finishes, and custom furniture, which gave her interiors their distinctive elegance and polish. Showcasing never-before-published material, Frances Elkins includes more than sixty interiors that illustrate her outstanding sense of color and her gift of mixing periods and styles from her early work in Pebble Beach, to houses she designed with her brother in Chicago in the 1930s, to iconic hotel commissions of the 1940s such as the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, to midcentury homes for William Paley and David O. Selznick. With images by top photographers of the day, this volume will serve as a revelation and inspiration to fans of design.
Reviews / Votes
"Nearly anything that registers as great interior design in the 2020s appeared in legendary interior designer Frances Elkins's rooms in the 1920s. Her projects were replete with warm tones, interesting tile, and a mix of modern, vintage, and antique furniture. Bamboo dining chairs in a Chippendale style? Elkins did that. That thing you're calling "granny chic?" Elkins had you beat." -IN KANSAS CITY"Regarded by many as the grande dame of 20th-century design, Frances Elkins brought an international perspective and architectural sensibility to her work that nobody had seen before. This new monograph showcases never-before-published material from the groundbreaking decorator that illustrates her ability to effortlessly mix styles and vivid colors." -VERANDA
"Among a trove of images and magazine spreads of rooms Elkins designed, Powell also includes interiors dotted with furniture and fabric collaborations between Elkins and Frank, as well as architects including her brother David Adler. Famed decorator Billy Baldwin called her "the most creative designer we have ever had, and perhaps the greatest," and here her influential work stands in concert with fellow Northern California innovators Anthony Hail, Michael Taylor and John Dickinson." ~ C Magazine
"Elkins favored chic modernist European furniture, including the white plaster shell sconces, shell ceiling lights and twisted floor lamps designed by Alberto Giacometti for Jean-Michel Frank, or her own authorized copies. The Giacometti-style pieces later became basics of San Francisco interior designer Michael Taylor, who considered Elkins the most advanced designer he knew. "Elkins was a free spirit and mixed things that hadn't been mixed before," he told Dupuy Warrick Reed, writing for Connoisseur magazine in 1983. "She was experimental in scale and approach." " ~Nob Hill Gazette
"She collaborated with luminaries like Syrie Maugham, Marion Dorn, Dorothy Liebes, Alberto Giacometti and Jean-Michel Frank to specify teal and tangerine upholstery, mermaid murals and creamy ridged carpets. She turned glass pillars into gossamer balusters and spiraled a crimson-carpeted staircase around a stack of clear plastic balls. Plaster hands served as holdbacks on her fringed, plaid curtains." ~ NY Times
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Illustrations
250 colour & black and white
Dimensions
Height: 313 mm
Width: 240 mm
Thickness: 32 mm
Weight
2068 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8478-6546-8 (9780847865468)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Scott Powell is a noted arts and design historian and a frequent lecturer on Frances Elkins. Through his extensive research on her life and work, he has become a leading expert on Elkins s designs, influence, and biography and has documented more than 250 Elkins commissions, many previously unknown. Powell has gathered the most definitive images of Elkins s interiors, as well as her extensive correspondence with the leading designers, artists, and creatives of her day.