Living with Books
Designer Billy Cotton’s luxuriously book-layered interiors prove that books really do make a house a home.
© Stephen Kent Johnson / OTTO. From the book Billy Cotton: Interior & Design Work (Rizzoli).
New York City-based, New England-raised Billy Cotton's accomplished interior design career is an extension of his richly creative life. The aesthetically varied residential projects contained within the pages of Billy Cotton: Interior & Design Work (Rizzoli, $65) reveal the benefits of a non-linear professional path that included industrial design studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, jobs in the service industry and retail, and a stint as creative director of Ralph Lauren Home. This isn't a designer in search of a defining style or replicable brand, but rather on a journey. "His rooms touch latent chords of storytelling inside all of us, making them magnificent and human all at once," writes Architectural Digest West Coast Editor Mayer Rus in the book’s Introduction.
We can't help but notice how the masterful ways in which Cotton incorporates well-loved books into these singular spaces—many of which are designed for celebrated artist clients including Cindy Sherman—is an essential tool to convey this ethos.
Here, Cotton shares how his love of books began and the ongoing role they play in his interiors and wider world.
How have books been a part of your work and creative life? Books have been a huge part of my life. My family are readers. I was born before the Kindle and when physical printed material—before the internet—was a huge part of our life. My family always had a library. My mother was a huge novel reader. When we moved to Vermont, she built this dining room that was surrounded in cases, and so there was always this idea of being around your books, that you have a relationship with them. I’ve always thought of that, and because of that, I’ve felt like books make a house a home.
© Stephen Kent Johnson / OTTO. From the book Billy Cotton: Interior & Design Work (Rizzoli).
How do you manage the library in your studio? I just moved my office. My design library is really one of the most important things that's part of my job and my creative life. I can't even overestimate how important my design library is to me, how much these books mean to me, how much they affect my practice, how they've taught me, and how they teach the younger designers in my office.
Do books travel back and forth from your home to your office? I have delineation where I have art books at my house and, at my office, I have design books. The very little downtime in my home is when I get to look at paintings and read cookbooks and do things differently, and work is really about design books.
© Stephen Kent Johnson / OTTO. From the book Billy Cotton: Interior & Design Work (Rizzoli).
© Stephen Kent Johnson / OTTO. From the book Billy Cotton: Interior & Design Work (Rizzoli).
What's your process like when you're working on a project and getting ready for an install, and looking through a client's library? It's super important. As I said, I think that books really make a home. It's great when we have clients who are passionate readers and book collectors because we are able to just create a vessel for them. And then there are clients who we build libraries with, and that's a fun process.
“Books make a house a home.”
Do you have any loose rules or guidelines about how books play best with other objects? Or is it all highly nuanced and individual in context? I consider the ergonomics of your space, and how you use books. I believe objects should be used. I don't prescribe, every coffee table should have stacks of books on it. Because if you're not going to read them, don't have them on your coffee table. I tend to take one book out from my shelves and have it on my coffee table. The topic is probably something that I'm thinking about in that moment, and if somebody comes over they can look through it and have a sense of my life in that moment.
© Stephen Kent Johnson / OTTO. From the book Billy Cotton: Interior & Design Work (Rizzoli).
What are some books that you continually return to in your practice? There's an incredible book by Jaime Parladé, a Spanish interior designer who I admire greatly. I just constantly look through that book and I see something different every time. Bruce Weber's A House Is Not a Home is to me sort of the ultimate interiors photography book. And then I have the catalog from the blockbuster Matisse show that was at MoMA in the nineties. I always see something new in there.
© Stephen Kent Johnson / OTTO. From the book Billy Cotton: Interior & Design Work (Rizzoli).
What were you hoping to contribute by publishing your monograph, in addition to documenting your career so far? I feel like I learn so much from books. I went to school for industrial design, not interior design or decoration. So, books and magazines on interiors have been a huge part of my education. I appreciate small vignettes, but I really want to see the room when I look at interiors. I want to be able to see how the person lives, and so I think that was something I really set out to do in my book. I wanted the presentation to be very straightforward, and I wanted people to see a wide view of the rooms, my thinking, and my layouts and all that.
Many of my projects have appeared in magazines and online, but my portfolio as a whole is pretty varied, so people don’t necessarily understand my aesthetic when they see just one or two projects presented on their own. Creating this monograph was an opportunity to present it all in one place. I think lining up the variations and the way that I work and being able to see those themes together, but also see the differences, was really impactful. Even with all the options we have for sharing and showing our work these days, doing a book is still a big part of this business.
“My design work is a symphony—a wild alchemical collaboration that involves many players, from fellow designers and craftspeople to fabric makers, furniture builders, paint mixers, and so many more. I’m forever grateful for the support and patience of these people through it all—the hard days, the failures, and the triumphs—but most of all, for their undying insistence on great beauty in the world. This work is as much theirs as it is mine.”
About the Book
Billy Cotton: Interior & Design Work
By Billy Cotton
Foreword by Mayer Rus
Photographs by Stephen Kent Johnson