Binding: Paperback
Description: I ll Build a Stairway to Paradise is like an exquisite string of pearls: the perfect balance of elegance style design and beauty. This book is inspiring spirited and totally absorbing. Diane von Furstenberg The story of Bunny Mellon the great landscape and interior designer becomes a revelatory exploration of extreme wealth in the American century. Bunny Mellon whose life was marked by astonishing good fortune as well as tragedy and scandal remains a singular figure in the annals of American design. She had her finger on the pulse of American culture and possessed a rare once - in - a - generation sense of style and grace. Her most celebrated work the White House Rose Garden designed during the presidency of John F. Kennedy demonstrated how formal restraint and the sparing use of color could be deployed to maximal effect. Later her understated landscape design for the Kennedy grave site at Arlington National Cemetery changed the face of American public memorials. Mellon was a famously private person and many of her greatest achievements remained concealed from public view. Her rarely seen gardens and domestic interiors at eight different properties on three continents became legends and models. At Oak Spring Farm in Virginia the bibliographic riches of her Garden Library were twinned with the expansive flowering gardens lying below the Edward Larrabee Barnes designed building. At her home on Nantucket she pruned back the landscape to reveal the elemental forms of nature. Mellon also ranked as one of the great art collectors of her era encouraging her husband Paul to use his family's vast wealth to acquire hundreds of nineteenth - century French paintings many of which were donated to the National Gallery of Art. Her own tastes ranged from Mark Rothko to Richard Diebenkorn in quantity. In I ll Build a Stairway to Paradise Mac Griswold who knew Mellon personally delves into her subject's closely guarded personal archives to construct an unrivaled portrait of a woman as complex and multifaceted as the gardens and homes on which she left her mark. Mellon tested the anodyne 1950s model of woman - as - wife - as - mother by getting a divorce admitting candidly to her first husband that she wanted a richer one. She imperiously traded old friends for new and ultimately used her reputation her connections and above all her money to help fund John Edwards's short - lived presidential campaign. She led an American version of a royal court that over the years included Jackie Kennedy Hubert de Givenchy and I. M. Pei. How Mellon's character style and taste developed together to produce her greatest accomplishments private and public is the real subject of this biography.
Title: I'll Build A Stairway To Paradise A Life Of Bunny Mellon
Author(s): Griswold Mac
Publisher: Picador
Barcode: 9781250872623
Pages: 560 Pages
Language: English
Publication Date: 11/14/2023
Category: Autobiography: Arts & Entertainment