GLAMOUR Keeps Busy

Granted this post will seem more than a little self-serving, but I have to start somewhere, and I'm figuring out the technology of the site as I go along. I'm working on a principle I've employed for years: When I first decided to study photography seriously, I expressed my fear of failure to my friend Gavin Dillard, who said simply, "Please, if everyone else can figure it out, so can you." Actually, he was not quite so neutral about "everyone" and may have used an expression some people might find more than moderately crude, but you get the gist. While there is a lot to learn in creating a blog, I assume that if "everyone else" can figure it out, so can I.

For this, my first post, I am paying tribute to my own most recent book, GLAMOUR: MAKING IT MODERN, which was published in May of 2009, just in time for Mothers Day. I am very happy to report that GLAMOUR is now in its fourth printing and is still listed by Amazon.com as the No. 1 title in interior design.

GLAMOUR was published by Filipacchi Publishing, which is owned by Hachette Flilipacchi Media U.S., which also owned Metropolitan Home magazine, where I was the features director for a very long time. The magazine closed in November 2009, after a run of some three decades, a victim of the struggling economy. I had the pleasure in writing and shaping GLAMOUR of working with long-time colleages at the magazine, in particular its former editor-in-chief, Donna Warner (aka "The Boss"), Creative Director Linda O'Keeffe, who had styled most of the photographs that appear in GLAMOUR, and art director Keith D'Mello, among others. Our publisher was Dorothee Walliser, who had published Met Home's previous book, Decorate (also written by me) and the one before that, Renovate, written by Met Home's senior contributing editor—and friend—Fred A. Bernstein.

The success of GLAMOUR pleases me enormously because it stands as something of an endorsement of the late lamented Metropolitan Home. Obviously we were doing something right. Happily, there will actually be one more Met Home book, a kind of "farewell to arms," which, as we are getting it ready for press, is tentatively called DESIGN 100: The Last Word in Modern Interiors. It is due in bookstores in the Fall of 2010. At the same time a German edition of GLAMOUR will hit the stands in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

While I'm working on the DESIGN 100 book, a collection of the 100 best locations photographed for Metropolitan Home in the last 20 years or so (some of which never had the chance to be published before the magazine closed), I'll be blogging from time to time in my usual balanced and unbiased, understated and entirely fair way about design, architecture, and allied matters of the art. I'm hoping you'll enjoy the ride. Actually, I'm hoping I'll enjoy the ride.

So, welcome to "I on Design," which began its life on pointclickhome.com when I was a fully employed member of the Met Home staff (those entries are all still posted by the way). No matter what happens from now on, alles gut, as we say in German ("It's all good").

Michael Lassell