The House That Grief Built

When visiting the newly restored private apartments of the Duke of Aumale at the Château de Chantilly outside Paris, you could easily think you were seeing the interiors of an 18th-century French castle. The rooms are sumptuous, with purple damask-covered walls, marquetry-inlaid furniture, parquet de Versailles floors and exquisitely carved boiseries, or wooden panels, depicting…

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Speed-Dating Your Sofa

By now, we all know that millennials are less inclined than previous generations to buy a house or car or stick with a single employer. Apparently they have commitment issues when it comes to home furnishings, too. At least that’s the thinking behind several web start-ups seeking to lease them everything from sofas to throw…

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Dredging Up Old Modern Memories

Will Miller remembers skateboarding along the perimeter of his family’s home, a marble-trimmed glass box in Columbus, Ind., designed in the 1950s by Eero Saarinen. His record time for circumnavigating the 6,800 square-foot building was about two minutes: “I was really booking,” he said recently. Mr. Miller, now 63 and a foundation president in New…

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Four Design Books to Spruce Up Your Home

Image The Italian designers Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi, who partnered in a Modena practice from the 1960s until the ‘80s, spent their spare time obsessively sketching trees in all seasons for editions of “The Architecture of Trees” (Princeton Architectural Press, $125, 424 pp.). The book is newly available in English, and expanded into a…

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