LIFE BEYOND FIRST CLASS
DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE
THE CASE
FOR BEAUTY
In /be-spōk/: a philosophy of beauty, Beth Benton Buckley brings together a diverse collective of designers to consider something increasingly rare in design publishing:
not simply how a room looks, but how it makes us feel.
SHARON DAVIS
In /be-spōk/: a philosophy of beauty, Beth Benton Buckley gathers designers with wildly different points of view around one deceptively simple subject: what makes a room beautiful.
Beauty has become an oddly complicated word in design. We talk about craftsmanship, provenance, materiality, restraint, narrative and a dozen other things before simply admitting that sometimes a room stops us because it is beautiful. Beth Benton Buckley has no such hesitation.
In /be-spōk/: a philosophy of beauty, she brings together a diverse group of designers whose work makes it immediately clear that beauty has no house style. One room may be spare and architectural; the next saturated in wallpaper, antiques, contemporary art and color. A polished stone kitchen gives way to a jewel-box bedroom, then to a staircase treated almost like a gallery. The pleasure is in the contrast.
The book is at its best when it allows those differences to remain unresolved. There is no attempt to persuade the reader that one version of good design is more correct than another. Instead, each designer is given room to establish a point of view, followed by pages of interiors that reveal far more than a list of furnishings ever could. You begin noticing how someone handles scale, whether a room depends on symmetry or tension, when an artwork is allowed to dominate and when an antique is simply permitted to look old.
It also makes /be-spōk/ unusually enjoyable to move through. This is not a book that requires dutiful reading from beginning to end. Open it anywhere and something catches the eye: a marble surface with enough veining to behave like artwork, lacquered blue walls, a perfectly worn leather chair, a ceiling that suddenly becomes the most important plane in the room. The photography gives those moments space rather than crowding them with explanation.
Buckley’s own introduction helps explain why. Her interest in beauty is rooted in something more personal than decoration. She writes of learning to notice it through her mother, and the book is dedicated to her and “to all who believe in seeing and creating beauty.” That distinction matters. The interiors may be sophisticated, expensive and meticulously considered, but the book never suggests that beauty belongs exclusively to rare objects or flawless rooms.
Perhaps that is why the collection feels warmer than the usual design survey. These houses have polish, certainly, but many also have humor, eccentricity, inherited pieces, strong color and objects that appear to have been chosen because somebody loved them.
And that may be /be-spōk/’s most convincing point. The best rooms rarely announce how hard they worked to become beautiful. They simply feel unmistakably like someone lives there.
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