Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8606 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Review
Part of the pleasure of Villa is the detail - every photograph is carefully captioned giving an idea or a lesson, from a master craftesman. --villa

The infrared photos Mr Saladino includes among the color ones are ghostly and lovely, and Mr Saladino's interiors are as painterly as ever. --New York Times

This big, square, beautiful book is about a single house. But what a house! In 1985, Interior Design Hall of Fame member John Saladino came across the ruins of a 1920's Italianate stone villa overlooking the Pacific in Santa Barbara, California. Divided into four sections, Architecture, Interiors, Landscape, and Entertaining--this last part including dinner menus and recipes--the book is beautifully illustrated. "Before" images and construction photos give some idea of the four years of reconstruction and design work, perhaps the source of the house's punning name, Villa di Lemma. Interior views and vignettes show Saladino at his celebrated best, creating old-world character and patina but able to snap a room into the present with deft touches. Note his own 1970 table lamp, with its clear glass cylindrical base, juxtaposed with an Italian Renaissance chest in the bedroom. An enclosed DVD, narrated by Saladino himself, adds a tour of the house and its grounds. Is anything missing from this justifiably elaborate presentation? Just one thing. Although site plans, drawings of interior details, and delightful freehand sketches are all provided, there is no floor plan. Other than that, here is an extraordinary subject, handsomely recorded. --Interior Design

Villa by John Saladino chronicles the architectural designer's transformation of a dilapidated 1920's dwelling into his personal paradise; the bonus DVD narrated by the author takes viewers on a tour. --Elle Decor

Villa is designer John Saladino's personal account of restoring an Italianate 1920's stone ruin set in the California hillsides. Room-by-room and garden-by-garden, Saladino gives a personal tour of his romantic home, illustrated with atmosphere-drenched photos that highlight his connoisseur collections of antiques, architectural fragments and art. Discover Saladino's talent for creating "axes of desire" and admire the Napoleonic bed floating theatrically in the center of his master bedroom. The tour of the gardens reveal Saladino's knack for unifying classicists tastes with modern sensibility. --The Atlantan

Review

About the Author
John Saladino is a graduate of Notre Dame and the Yale School of Art and Architecture. He worked in Rome with the architect Piero Sartogo before returning to New York where he opened his own architectural and interior design practice over 35 years ago. It is now known as The Saladino Group Inc. In 1986 he started his own furniture company. He has won numerous interior design and furniture awards (including the prestigious Daphne Award) and he is on the Board of Directors of the John Soane Museum in London. His interiors regularly appear in international magazines including House Beautiful, House and Garden, the New York Times Magazine, Architectural Digest, Vogue Decoration and the World of Interiors.

Customer Reviews

This book is SICK!
I work in a bookstore and we are all drooling over this fabulous book. I have seen many decorating books but this one is really special. No matter how thick or thin your wallet is anyone could incorporate elements of John's style (get a few grey/green succulents and make a chic planter for under 20$!). If your taste is traditional or modern each is represented amazingly. Must have this book NOW!

a dream of a house, a dream of a book
When the songwriter and singer Curtis Mayfield was at a low point in his career, he made sure he went to the movies every day. Why? "It's important to dream," he said.

Wise man. The "reality" we're sold in the media can't possibly define the limits of our lives. To think so is to invite despair. So we look for beauty, for inspiration. But when we find it in museums, in music or in books, it doesn't always speak to us --- it's not immediate enough, we don't have the vocabulary to process it.

A beautiful house? That we can understand. We may not get the subtleties of the architecture or the décor, but we all have walls, windows, floors and furniture --- comparisons are inevitable and immediate.

If you're going to look at a home of a professional, you can't go wrong with John Saladino, America's most gifted architectural designer. (Not "interior" designer --- Saladino has a large, holistic sense of what a house can be, and that very much includes its site.) In 2001, he bought a 2,500-square-foot villa near Santa Barbara that was well on its way to ruin. Four years later, it is a treasure and then some --- it's simply one of the most beautiful houses in the world.

And now it's the subject of a dream of a book.

Villa is 13.5 inches square. It contains an informative and chatty commentary by Saladino, 256 photographs, plans and drawings, and a DVD that gives you a tour of the house and property. Let us hope that Saladino has a state-of-the-art security system, because every page and image is an invitation for you to break in --- not to take anything, just to experience what it's like to walk in beauty.

"Reality is the enemy," Saladino writes, and so he created an environment that might look natural, but is really sculpted. (The project, he says, was "75% construction, 25% decoration".) Set on a hilltop overlooking the Pacific, he first had to shore up the land, so his creation wouldn't go sliding off its moorings in a landslide. Then he had to attack decades of unfortunate decorating choices.

It took six men a year to sandblast the paint off the stone walls. Terra cotta tiles had to be hand-stained, so they wouldn't look like plastic flooring. Beams were hand-stripped. An amusing touch: Saladino asked the workmen to have a few beers before they started to sand the dining room walls --- he didn't want perfection.

This was a giant construction product, with as many as 40 workers on site each day. The transformation took four years --- twice as long as Saladino had predicted --- and cost three times more than he'd budgeted. "I did make it to dry land," he writes, "but only by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin."

Saladino's design truths can be applied to smaller houses --- and smaller budgets. Among them:

"Every home should be a sanctuary: entering it you should immediately feel physically and emotionally protected."

"The most important thing about color is that it cannot be isolated --- every color is only ever seen in juxtaposition with other ones."

"Any fragments from the past, especially those that you can touch, connect you to the makers of those pieces, making you aware that we are threads in a great tapestry of time."

"Make the largest piece of furniture in the room the same color as either the floor or the walls so its bulk doesn't intrude."

This is not stuffy advice. But then the house, for all its beauty, is strikingly relaxed. And there are a few well-placed jokes. On a statue of Sir Francis Drake, arguably the first Englishman to see the California coast, he set a pair of dark sunglasses. And, to puncture any air of self-importance, he named the retreat Villa di Lemma.

There is no dilemma, of course. In his California home, John Saladino solved every design and decorating problem. The only unhappiness he created is on your coffee table --- all your other books will be wildly jealous of "Villa".

wonderful !!!
A beautiful book !!! Very much like Bunny Williams' An Affair with a House, Saladino transformed a California Ranch into a genuine Provence Bastide- a sort of a Manor House in the french countryside. He was careful enough in his restauration plan not to interfere with the house architectural features and the interior design to, with careful chosen pieces fitted in harmony with the house fixtures. He done the landscapes beautifully also !!! It worth the ride !!!