Interior and Decoration

When it came to her own family’s lush and leafy oasis in Venice, Los Angeles–based designer Kate Driver started off, surprisingly, by abandoning her aesthetic roots. In September 2016, she and her husband spontaneously abandoned their renting life—and Driver’s long-held dream of owning an “old house with character,” not unlike the Georgian-style homes of her native Atlanta—to dive head-first into owning a new-build home with no real architectural soul to speak of.

“But when we walked through, it felt like no place we had ever been before, like a tropical wonderland,” Driver, the founder of the interior design studio West Haddon Hall, says of the home’s soaring windows and proliferation of palms. “So that night we felt really inspired. We stayed up until 3 am googling ‘how to buy a house’ and put in an offer the next day.”

In the eyes of a lesser visionary, the house’s grand

Women-led mobile gaming startup Robin Games raised funding around the idea of ​​carving out a new niche in the market of “lifestyle gaming.” The idea, the company explained at the time of its 2020 public debut, was to create a fantasy gaming experience that’s more sophisticated and stylish — something more in line with the sort of content you’d typically find in a lifestyle magazine or Instagram influencer’s profile . Today, the startup is releasing its first title to tackle this concept with the launch of a mobile game, PLAYHOUSE, which combines both gameplay and shopping in one experience.

Available on iOS and Android, PLAYHOUSE is a DIY design game that allows players to drag-and-drop furniture and décor into spaces to create original looks for rooms using elements like wall art, sofas, chairs, tables, plants and more. This alone doesn’t make the app unique — the interior design genre is

When summer starts receding, the string of picturesque seaside communities that make up the Hamptons on Long Island’s South Fork traditionally begin retreating to their small-town roots. The cooler and calmer months of fall bring with them a slower pace.

That shift in tone certainly won’t defer Mimi Ritzen Crawford from the manicured two-acre property she owns with her husband in Southampton, New York. Though the vestiges of summer abound at her 8,000-square-foot residence—a heated gunite pool and grass tennis court sit on a plot just half a mile from one of the most private stretches of beach in the Hamptons—Ritzen Crawford isn’t abandoning her bounty amenities when the weather turns crisp.

“Summers are always beautiful out here, but I really think the fall and winter months are more special in so many ways,” says Ritzen Crawford, a longtime photo editor who now works as a photographer. (Her portraiture and

Ask yourself, “What would make me the happiest when I walk into my home?” poses interior designer John McClain in his first book, “The Designer Within: A Professional Guide to a Well-Styled Home,” (Gibbs-Smith, Sept. 6, 2022).

That’s a good question. It might be THE questions. I am reviewing an advance copy.

What would make me the happiest? After coming home to people and pets dear to me, next would be a home that’s clean and orderly. Walking into a dirty home in disarray gives me hives. Prettiness comes next. That is, I want my eyes to sweep across my home’s interior without hitting a sour note. I want to see only objects and vignettes I love, pieces my husband and I have collected over time that tell stories.

I’ll say this for McClain’s book. He had gotten me thinking before I was even through the introduction.

“I want readers