Required Reading: Vogue Living—Country, City, Coast

A decade ago Vogue gathered many of the lavish houses and gardens it routinely features and put them all into one huge hardcover book called Vogue Living: Houses, Gardens, People. In the years since, it has become almost impossible to look at any chic design-books collection without spotting this breeze-block-size tome—and now there is a follow up.

The new book is not so much required reading as required viewing; Vogue Living: Country, City, Coast is packed with 400 color photographs of the gorgeous homes and gardens of a glittering roll call of designers, models, artists and society figures.

Chloe Malle, a contributing editor at Vogue and Hamish Bowles, the magazine’s international editor at large, have gathered 36 beautifully shot homes, from beachside retreats to rural idylls. There are loving portraits of Plum Sykes and Stella McCartney in their English estates, coastal boltholes belonging to Cindy Crawford, Michael Kors, or Tory Burch, and the more-is-more city homes of entrepreneurs and designers including Lauren Santo Domingo, Karl Lagerfeld, and Miranda Brooks. This is the kind of book houseguests will eagerly dip into for a peek at how the other half lives.

Let’s flip through the pictures:

Photography courtesy of the Condé Nast Archives.

Brooks applied her signature blend of wild and formal planting in the garden, mixing clipped box with a lush mix of cottage-y flowers and romantic climbers.  The Arcadian mood continues inside, where there are custom-made Tree of Life wallpapers from de Gournay and padded doors decorated with vines drawn by artist Hugo Guinness.

After buying the property from Comoy’s family (the house formerly belonged to his grandmother), the couple set about taming the wilderness outside. But they’ve retained the naturalistic feeling by planting with a light touch. A cozy dining area sits under the shade of an ancient oak tree.

The couple completely renovated the interiors with the help of French decorator Francois Catroux. Here, the Madison Cox designed terrace with roses and lavender creates a beautiful escape from the city. The striped awning and formal Versailles box planters add an old world French feel.

With every remodel it pays to take time to really observe what should stay and what should gothis is even more crucial in a garden. When Tory Burch bought her sprawling Long Island estate, the 1929 Jazz Age property already boasted beautiful formal gardens originally designed by Annette Hoyt Flander with yews, hollies, and rhododendrons. Landscape architect Perry Guillot chose to retain much of that original plant palette and largely followed what was already a successful structure.

When Jacqueline and Mortimer Sackler rented a romantic Amagansett property that had once served as the village’s lawn tennis club, they quickly decided that they wanted to make it their permanent holiday home. After they’d purchased the house, they asked landscape architect Edmund Hollander to reimagine the grounds and then brought in Miranda Brooks to create “wild and poetic” plantings; the garden now boasts an abundant potager, flower beds planted for pollinators and a stone fruit orchard. “A Munder-Skiles bench provides the perfect perch in the kitchen garden planted with gaura, verbena, fennel, and allium,” the authors write.

Romualdez has retained much of the charm of Blass’s interiors but brought it up to date with a whimsical mix of old and new; in the hallway he blends antique pieces including a Swedish console and a 19th-century German Klismos chair with quirky warthog taxidermies. Blue and white china vases hold foraged flowers from the Miranda Brooks-designed gardens outside.

N.B.: For more glamor in the garden (and coffee table books to document it), see:

• Required Reading: Private Gardens of the Bay Area.
• Villa Astor, a Paradise Restored on the Amalfi Coast.
• Required Reading: The Rockefeller Family Gardens.