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16 coffee table books worth owning — and what each one is actually for
Sixteen coffee table books that earn their space twice — from architecture and art to fashion, travel, and one book about public toilets.
The small number of things worth owning — chosen slowly, and kept for years.
The closest thing in print to the argument this site keeps making. Norm Architects are a Copenhagen studio, and the book is about a sensory approach to space — light, texture, acoustics, restraint — rather than a portfolio of finished rooms. The photography is low-contrast and warm, which means it sits quietly on a table instead of shouting. It is one of very few design books that makes a case you could disagree with. Most just show you nice rooms.
Buy this one alongside Soft Minimal and you have both halves of the Japandi argument on one table. Where the Danish book is about warmth and material, this is about emptiness and what you leave out. Generous white space, restrained typography, photographs that make a room feel calmer sitting open. It is the rare book where the layout practices what the text preaches.
An architectural photographer shoots extraordinary houses, and in every frame there is a dog. It sounds like a gimmick and it absolutely works: the animal gives you a sense of scale and stops the interiors reading as showrooms. It is the one book here that people physically pick up. If your stack is in danger of looking humorless, this fixes it in a single volume.
A hundred years of interiors, from the magazine that largely decided what the word "interiors" means. This is a reference book more than a reading one — you open it at a random spread and lose ten minutes. It is also physically large, which makes it the natural bottom of any stack. It gives you a century of context for whatever look you are currently chasing, and quietly reveals how many of them have come round twice.