Bunny Williams and Elizabeth Lawrence: Decoration

This powerhouse duo distills their combined wisdom into an essential resource for creating rooms of enduring beauty.

With academic rigor and characteristic charm, Williams and Lawrence describe their unique approach to every commission with insights from collaborations with clients, architects, landscape designers, and a variety of trusted artisans. Interiors are arranged to inspire. They showcase the firm’s breadth and creativity while revealing the underlying principles that make spaces work: how to layer pattern and texture, achieve perfect scale, juxtapose old and new, and balance formality with comfort.

Throughout, personal anecdotes and hard-won advice illuminate the philosophy behind the choices, encouraging the reader to create interiors that transcend trends. How to marry an 18th-century bergère with a contemporary coffee table, why an old armchair gains new life in a bold modern fabric, what makes a battered farm table the anchor of an elegant dining room. As they put it, “a trained eye is the ability to see beyond surface beauty, to recognize proportion, authenticity, patina, and potential.” This approach—valuing what endures, reimagining what exists—is inherently sustainable, a philosophy of refinement over replacement that creates interiors of lasting character and personal meaning.

Mirroring the textural layering of their spaces, the cloth-bound book features alternating signatures of coated and uncoated stocks interspersed with gatefolds that highlight immersive views with extraordinary detail. The book itself is a master class in design.