David Netto

When you receive an invitation like this, it seems like a fantasy…Yet the picture is of something real. This is A’maree’s, a clothing and design store in Newport Beach my friend Konstantin Kakanias invited me to visit. Just as unbelievable, in the old days it was a restaurant called The Stuft Shirt. This kind of genius—it’s only in California

When I’m designing , sometimes I need a little push. Seeing this collection of Adnet leather coathooks at Orange on Beverly Boulevard gets me excited about making a room good enough to hold them

Here’s how it turned out—we looked at my house in Amagansett during construction on another page of this section, and our first summer in it is over. When I showed this to my friend Daniel Romualdez I was sort of embarrassed by how messy and ‘real life’ it was, but he said he wanted to start a shelter magazine that showed nothing but pictures like that

More LA genius: my wife and I were recently taken to the opera to see Einstein at the Beach. Look at everybody out front, where the real show was. The Met and La Scala seem WAY too serious after a night like this

On the subject of collections, here’s a room that’s always in my head. It’s the stair hall of the Palacio March in Madrid, a room by Jansen from the mid-1960’s that has tremendous dignity but also a feeling of home. I think it’s because of those clipper ship paintings, which are all English or American, and keep things from being too sophisticated

Come look at a few more pictures of ‘real life’ at the beach. This was Madelyn’s first night in the new house

This room by John Stefanidis from the late 1980’s reminds me of everything rich people are missing today when they opt, as they increasingly do, for minimalism. I was raised on this kind of decorating, I love it, and I want to see more of it

This page is sort of a meditation on how to make a shingle-style beach house special. One of my own favorite projects is one I did a few years ago in Watermill: a tiny house, but architect Will Meyer and I wanted it to dazzle—so we gave it a tower with classical pediment and chinoiserie railing. It does

The project I’m most excited about right now: my own house in Amagansett, which I’m also doing with Meyer Davis Studio. Architecturally this place had everything going against it—but one of the great sites on the ocean in all of Long Island. Windows make the difference in giving any building a strong identity, and that’s a new one cut behind the fireplace where there used to be a wall, like a huge aquarium

The Amagansett house is a series of interlocking hexagons, which in its gray 1980 ‘before’ state sort of looked like Osama’s place in Abbottabad. Will Meyer and I decided it should be like a 50’s colonial, but sexy. I think you can have shutters and still be modern, by the way

Some of the architecture that inspired what we’re doing here is in Palm Beach, Bermuda, and those kinds of places. It’s Slim Aarons meets the Clam Bar

Before and After. Like the Watermill house my house also has a tower, like a miniature lighthouse you can sleep in

The true weirdness of the original plan is just something you have to work with, not against. At least the geometry is all about deferring to the beautiful views. Turning the hexagon with the living room into one big magic wooden tent with the new eyebrow window facing the ocean helps a lot. I’m going to paint the pole in the middle Prouve blue, and coil rope around the bottom

I’m jealous of most things designed by the great Oscar Niemeyer but this door, in a house in Santa Monica which is his only American project, is just going to kill me. It’s a luxe treatment of a standard nautical device, an idea I was getting at with my nautical conversion kit for cribs (you’ll see it on another page in this section). A few hours on a boat is worth years at design school

The travels of objects are always fascinating to me. This is a salon in the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s first Paris house at 24 boulevard Suchet, decorated by Jansen in 1938. You can only just make it out, but look at the black lacquer table next to the banquette at far right. It will reappear on this page…

This might be my favorite press I’ve ever gotten, and I can’t read a word of it. I don’t know the reason, but I do know that when they like you in Japan, it feels REALLY good

A pleasing room I decorated recently which has many of my favorite decorating tricks in it. What are they? If you have a Georgian shell, put some French 1930’s furniture in there. If you have a client with traditional taste, give them that—but use only contemporary lamps with paper shades. Every room gets better with one African stool, and worse with two. Now I’ve probably told you too much, dammit, and you won’t need to hire me

Photo by Jonathan Wallen

I don’t think there’s anything more important you can do for a room than put small sculpture in it. My living room in LA, which my friend Paul Fortune helped with, really is one of the great spaces by Richard Neutra. But it didn’t go pop until I bought the bronze Arp in the background and the plaster sculpture by John Koga at left. I was looking for a Miro but instead fell in love with this

Photo by Francois Halard

Nautical again, for comparison with the Niemeyer door pictured at top left on this page: Buckminster Fuller’s prefab Dymaxion bathroom uses the form of a steamship door as the step-in opening to the tub. These bathrooms were installed at Windshield, Richard Neutra’s incredible 1938 house on Fisher’s Island, and Neutra cut the doors from the bedrooms to echo this shape—very powerful

We all have dreams, and one of mine was to have my children’s furniture sold at Barneys. They gave me a popup store, and that was a good day

Trick question: What’s the most important object in this stunningly colored room full of treasures by Mongiardino? It’s the black anglepoise lamp, of course—keeps things young

…years and worlds apart, in my apartment on Washington Square (this story began with the Windsor picture). When I found this table at Louis Bofferding I liked it because it was Jansen, but then he showed me it had “D and D de W” scrawled in chalk on the underside and, you know—I just had to put my Eddie Money CD’s on it

Photo by Fernando Bengoechea

This is a page about the process of design, so let me show you what I was getting at in developing the storage unit for the nursery collection shown in the big picture below. I wanted something playful and graphic which recalled the furniture I love so well by great French designers like Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouve. The scheme started as a series of boxes which could be disassembled and used separately, or as stools, but then in the prototype stage—when practical considerations set in—became more like the original source of inspiration. Those are my notes on proportion atop photos sent from the factory in Asia

Sketching is a tool used by you, me, and the greatest figures of art history. To illustrate, I offer this humble scrap: a design for the Pantheon restored to its original glory. Look like one of your doodles on the telephone pad? It’s by Bernini. Don’t ever be ashamed of your sketches again

The 1980’s were a fascinating time for neoclassicism, and some of the best works of that era were the part-architecture, part-trompe l'oeil interiors of Italian decorator Renzo Mongiardino. Sometimes he was a little somber and autumnal for me, but I like the crackling black and white palette of this gallery in the New York apartment of Mr. and Mrs. Randolph Hearst very much. Look at the relationship of the sketch to reality: it’s very faithful. Most of the elements of the early rendering were realized, but one wonders if he knew in the beginning that those painted panels would end up as framed drawings under glass—or was it an impulse, to add a little mischief to all this dignity?

This is cute, because it’s a series of studies for seating positions by one of the most mythical architects of all time. Drawing from 1930 is hideous and crude, no grace, and no hint of what is to spring from it—the iconic chaise longue designed collaboratively by Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand

Of all the dumb things I did when I had my baby furniture business, not releasing a truly inexpensive line with some NettoCollection style was right up there. I had wanted to do it for years. This furniture collection would have been a delight—simple forms, but paint schemes based on famous modern artists like Piet Mondrian. Or do you prefer Hirst dots?

When you think about the immense role of technology in architecture today, it’s amazing a building like this starts as a smeary pencil sketch. But it does—can you think of a better way to draw a sensual leaf, play with scale, and feel your way along as you design? CAD has its place, but I think the strongest modern architecture preserves the vitality of hand drawing in the final result

She sketched, she tested in perspective—and, being a genius, it ended well. These charming drawings of designs by Perriand and Jeanneret are from a publicity sheet for L’Equipement de la Maison, 1948

This shows the color program I developed for the Heart Glider, one of those products that I hoped would rescue us from paying for things for the nursery that should have been beautiful but kept ending up in landfills. Chairs are difficult—you design the shape and then let materials take over and inspire you. When I got to the factory and saw all those fabulous colored leathers I completely rethought what I wanted this chair to be, which we had previously planned to cover in plain white boucle

It’s very satisfying to style a bookcase, because there really isn’t anything more important you can do for a room—Billy Baldwin said the best decoration is a roomful of books, and as usual, he was right on the nose. For this rather significant house of many rooms in Nashville (the exterior is shown below), the very first object we bought was the sculpture of a racehorse shown here, which believe it or not is made of leather. Found in London on the Fulham Road, it seemed like a talisman for everything we wanted the house to be. It then waited, as beautiful objects always do, for almost three years in storage while the architecture was completed. I must say it felt very good to place it in the center of that bookcase when the time came—but just remember that for all the pretty things in here, without the books, this room would not be a success

Photo by Jonathan Wallen

If there’s a fabric line with more power to inspire than Svenskt Tenn, I don’t know about it. Little drama needed for the guest room? That’s who you call, and that’s who turned this alcove into an enchanted garden, not me. I am constantly inspired by Sweden

Photo by Julian Wass

Sometimes the most modern thing to do is to put something old in the middle and surprise everybody. This bathroom has quite an aggressively modern architectural shell, with polished concrete floors that travel up the walls, uplighting under that glass shelf, and so forth. But the Edwardian porcelain sink and 1940’s French mirror above make a surprising composition which is cool, and that is even better

Living/Dining Room of this house is to the right, so you get the vibe

Photo by Julian Wass

One of the best clients I have ever had is also one of my best friends (and stayed that way, which isn’t always the case). Nathalie Farman and her husband Amir are incredibly stylish people who wanted something for their apartment in New York not many people ask for: a house Tolstoy, or Proust, or a Rothschild in 1880 would feel at home in. This charming watercolor by Virginia Johnson from Deborah Needleman’s book shows the living room full of brocade and Napoleon III, after the arrival of a monumental palm tree bought impulsively by Amir to add some guts. I wish I could take credit for it

Watercolor by Virginia Johnson

Just because you’re at the beach, there’s no need to resort to furniture of inferior quality or necessarily rustic design. Most people would see that dresser and think ‘city’, but I knew it would be a needed bit of glamour against all the barnlike bleached pine interior architecture Will Meyer and I had done…The rug takes you back down to earth

Living Room has some urbanity to it as well, but you're in a farmhouse envelope

Photo by Julian Wass

No, it’s not a dream…it’s one of the most beautiful houses in America. Boxwood at dusk, after a three year restoration by Gil Schafer, Mickey Benson, Joanna Heimbold and myself. Much credit also goes to the clients who decided to keep the original Charles Platt house rather than tear it down, which most anybody else in their position would have done. This is the project I’m proudest of

Photo by Jonathan Wallen

The Loggia at Boxwood was thought of by all of us as a sunporch for most of the project, and expected to be light in color. At the last minute I felt that this family needed one glamorous nighttime room, and lacquered the walls in deepest Coca-Cola brown. It has poetry now. And that, as the poet said, has made all the difference

Upstairs Sitting Room is below

Photo by Jonathan Wallen

I was very flattered to find so much of Boxwood represented in my boss Deborah Needleman’s book, The Perfectly Imperfect Home. It is one of the most beautifully illustrated books on decorating there is, full of watercolors by Virginia Johnson. Her style is both chic and cozy—not easy to do. This one shows the Entrance Hall

The Arctic Animals puzzle was something I designed for Maclaren with the help of the talented Stephanie Elias. The pieces stand up to become toys and the box a backdrop for them of the arctic circle night sky, like a puppet theater

My living room in LA has the most beautiful afternoon light in the world. No matter who works on it—and Paul Fortune and I have done our best—it will always be a room by Richard Neutra

The Heart Glider, another product for Maclaren which address the serious hideousness of most glider chairs out there today

This is one of my favorite rooms I’ve ever done, a library in Nashville all in gouged oak. Jean-Michel Frank made furniture like this based on African pieces, but there has never been a whole room in this technique—a Georgian room with an exotic soul. This is only possible if you get to work with one of the great craftsmen of the world, Jean-Paul Viollet

I always forget what’s inside if I can’t see it, so the Louis dresser/changer has drawers coded by hardware to tell you what’s in them: wood handles for clothes, holes for diapers and a laundry hamper

The second catalog for NettoCollection in 2004 featured modern baby furniture in my Neutra house, shot by the great fashion and art photographer Michael Muller. Nothing like this had ever been done before in the world of kids’ products, and this catalog launched the Modern Baby movement

Chic stroller blanket from NettoCollection. As Mies said, one of the hardest things to achieve in design is “an interesting plainness”

The Louis crib by NettoCollection was the last furniture I designed before selling to Maclaren. I thought Modern—as in angles and mid-century minimalism—was done, so here’s another kind of modern, Louis XV style

The photography for the third NettoCollection catalog was by Gail Albert Halaban, who has a stylized but playful touch. Her photographs seem super clear—but there’s always some mystery to them, you know? That’s a Loft crib

Stack of cheery woven cashmere pillows from NettoCollection—we made blankets to match

Louis in real life

The mother in the NettoCollection catalog art is so stylish, it’s hard to notice that the Cabine crib and dresser/changer aren’t so bad either

The polar bear rocker is one of my favorite pieces of furniture I’ve ever done. Or objects, you tell me. This piece, designed with the talented architect Manuel Tan, got lots of love, graced several covers, and took our mascot Rufus the polar bear to a new level of style

The Moderne collection was my first group of baby furniture, and probably my most successful. The changer was chosen by Real Simple magazine for their Top 20: Home Goods issue, but I’m showing this picture because I want you to know I built the Lego clipper ship myself. Took me two days

Orange woven cashmere stroller blanket from NettoCollection

My daughter Kate, her friend Antonia, and Antonia’s dog Rabbi. But the real star here is Michael Muller, whose photography for my 2004 catalog looked like nothing before or since

My friend and accessories director Joanna Heimbold says this picture makes it look like roadkill, but in real life this little outfit had some style, I promise you

Rufus in real life

Luscious sheepskin stroller liner by Bill Amberg was a star in the second NettoCollection catalog

Walking through a trade show in Helsinki, Finland, I came across this extraordinary bassinet made there by Seimi, which has a character of almost Shaker or Zen simplicity. I liked it so much I designed a collection in oak and white lacquer to go with it