Mitchell Owens

2 months ago | worldofinteriors.com | Mitchell Owens

For Mario Praz, that Italian scholar of 19th-century European literature, to decorate was to exist. Visitors to his final flat – now a museum in Rome’s Palazzo Primoli, across the Tiber from Castel Sant’Angelo – depart bedazzled by his acquisitiveness, from the portraits and landscapes that patchwork its moss-green and rose-pink walls to the Empire canapés and Napoléon III capitonné that populate its golden parquet.

Feb 10, 2025 | worldofinteriors.com | Mitchell Owens

Since her death in 1950, the age of 90, the reputation of the pioneering American interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe has devolved into a caricature so profound that it has thrown her professional insights, as well as her bemedalled service as a nurse on the Western Front during World War I, into the deepest shadow. The ceaseless chatter, brazen avariciousness and enthusiastic plastic surgeries. The leopard prints, zebra stripes and acres of mirrored glass.

Dec 30, 2024 | architecturaldigest.com | Mitchell Owens

President Jimmy Carter died on December 29 at the age of 100. And though it has been decades since the 39th president lived in the White House, it is worth looking back at how his single term, from 1977 to 1981, shaped the famous home. White House residents leave aesthetic legacies that tend to last but an instant, their decors admired for four years or eight years, and then erased.

Oct 28, 2024 | themagazineantiques.com | Mitchell Owens

If there was a contest for the most dynamic moment in Western history—when art, architecture, design, tourism, science, collecting, taste, and worldly temptations suddenly synchronized—Michael Thomas’s bet would be on the mid- to late eighteenth century, specifically in the linked kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, a period and a place so ferociously fecund that the scholar compares its influence to the invention of the Internet.

Oct 25, 2024 | themagazineantiques.com | Mitchell Owens

On the evening of April 4, 1913, Manhattan’s fashionable set crowded into the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. Though the audience wore evening dress, no society dance was taking place. No formal candlelit dinner, either, and no debutante’s graceful curtsy amid a stage-set garden of American Beauty roses hemmed by boxwood hedges.