Book review of This Must Be the Place by Chloe Warner

Weirdness is currency in interior design, an area often crowded with boring disguised as tasteful. What sets This Must Be the Place: Homes With Atmosphere apart from the glut of interior design books is its weirdness. California-based designer Chloe Redmond Warner presents 11 homes and two showcase rooms. Each project begins with Warner and her clients compiling a list of references and ideas that serves as a working mood board. “A concern as I edited this manuscript,” Warner writes in one of the book’s first chapters, “was the sheer number of obscure references to music, to movies, to books, to bars.” She even creates a playlist to soundtrack each of the projects. But whether or not her references are too obscure to recognize, like a mid-aughts Boston band called Fruit Bats, the effect they have on the design is a highly personalized, thoughtful charm that doesn’t have to scream to announce itself. For the project called “Twin Peaks on Prozac,” for example, Warner and her client began with a list: “woodsy, socialite, happy, 1980s, busy, ornament, Twin Peaks, totems, motel-florals, talismans, magical with a tiny bit of sinister.” The book’s cover image is from the living room of this house, and it shows how effortlessly Redmond incorporated those references; the combination of floral wallpaper, velvet sofa and vintage coffee table has been done before, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it done this well. Each project includes a dozen or more photographs, so every corner of these beautifully designed homes is documented in rich detail. This Must Be the Place is ideal for burgeoning designers looking for an outside-the-box guidebook, but also for readers who crave offbeat sophistication.