This summer, I fulfilled a long running desire to go beyond the pages of my Julius Shulman coffee table books and visit the 1950s Ace Hotel in Palm Springs. Speeding along the freeway through desert dust and strip mall monotony, the city emerged like an oasis.

Ben Adams bought his 1960s town house in Forest Hill ten years ago and spent two years renovating the building. Designed by British Architect Norman Starrett, it’s fairly unassuming from the outside. I’d walked past many times and barely given them a second glance. It was only when I was invited to take a look inside by resident Ben Adams, founder of mid-century furniture store Designs of Modernity, that I realised just what incredible living spaces they are.

With a palpably Victorian approach to collecting objects for their home, James and David have created an eclectic Modern interior in their 1960s house.

While looking to buy a Victorian home in London, husband-and-wife design duo Cathy Spooner and Peter Wall unexpectedly fell in love with a 1960s house.

Mad Men is, arguably, the most effortlessly seductive show on television – and one that has placed mid century modern style firmly in the mainstream.

Pattern designer Beth Evans lives with partner Matthew, eight-year-old son Stanley and Jack-Russell Elton in her mid century home, a 1958 terrace townhouse on the Dulwich Estate, a leafy oasis in south-east London.

Perhaps more Palm Springs than Dorset, The Garden House Studio, a retro holiday let in picturesque Lyme Regis, gives its visitors a 1960s style vacation.

With an exhibition celebrating the interior photography of John Pantlin soon to open at London’s Geffrye Museum, we caught up with Curator Valeria Carullo.


100 Interiors Around The World does what it says on the cover. But what sets this two-volume tome apart is its global perspective.