Simon Upton’s “A to Z Interiors” Opens The Door To The Rooms Defining Design Now
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Simon Upton’s “A to Z Interiors” Opens The Door To The Rooms Defining Design Now
Simon Upton has spent more than thirty years walking into other people’s rooms and making us look closer at what happens inside. Now, with his latest book, “Simon Upton: A to Z Interiors,” out from Rizzoli, he’s brought all that experience together in one sweeping, 608-page exploration of what home means today.
There are endless ways of recording how people live. A floor plan tells you where the walls stand. A real estate listing boils a place down to facts and numbers. Maybe a magazine offers a few manicured vignettes. But a photograph, the right photograph, can do much more, such as holding onto the actual feeling of a room.
Claudia Schiffer
Sienna Miller
Lenny Kravitz
Dakota Johnson
Jeremy Irons
That’s Upton’s gift. He doesn’t just shoot interiors, he makes them breathe.
This is more than a career retrospective, as the tome rolls out a vast cast of designers, architects, collectors, and decorators from all over the style map, each one thinking about home in their own way. Upton arranges them alphabetically — an idea so simple, it feels almost crafty. The result feels like a tour through a living, shifting story.
Inside, you’ll find names that set the direction of design today. Alidad, with his velvety, layered rooms. Gil Schafer, always finding harmony between structure and decoration. Rose Uniacke, who lets silence and subtle materials do the talking. Bobby McAlpine, wrapping his spaces in a homey sort of warmth. There are more, of course — Carolina Irving, Remy Renzullo, Robert Kime, Darryl Carter, Will Fisher, Veere Grenney, Beata Heuman, David Netto, Ben Pentreath, Hubert Zandberg — each one shaping what we call home in a different way.
Upton doesn’t keep the microphone to himself. Written contributions from people like Alidad, Orlando Atty, and the Duchess of Beaufort add their voices to the mix, spinning the story out into something bigger than any one opinion.
Flip through the book, and you realize there’s nothing like a single “rule” of good taste here, making the variety the actual point. Some rooms feel as formal as they come, built on the bones of tradition. Others chase fresh lines and open spaces. Some interiors are thick with antiques, color, and history; some breathe with empty air and carefully chosen stone. All together, the message is clear: right now, interiors are less about hitting a style and more about showing who lives there. Personality is the new luxury.
Anderson Cooper
Upton has shot for everyone, from Architectural Digest to Vogue, and seen more private homes than most people can dream of. He knows, without having to say it, that the best rooms aren’t just finished — they’re lived in. You feel it in his photographs. The furniture isn’t staged, but settled. Nothing screams photo shoot. Textiles, art, books, a chipped mug — everything is allowed to be itself, even if it clashes with details that add up. You see layers of life, not just layers of design.
That unhurried, watching approach gives the book a richness you don’t find much these days. We’ve gotten used to design that sorts itself into hashtags: minimal, maximal, farmhouse, mid-century, etc. But “A to Z Interiors” resists that, with each designer bringing their own language, their own way of breaking the so-called rules. The only real thread running through is rooms with a point of view.
The alphabet becomes a kind of map through this modern landscape, with each letter a doorway onto someone’s vision, someone’s story about what it means to live well.
And if anyone’s always in the background, it’s Upton himself, quietly watching, moving on to the next.
At 9½ by 12 inches, and with its $100 price tag, the book has heft. It’s a beautiful thing to hold, packed with hundreds of photographs and smart, thoughtful commentary. But it chases something harder to pin down: a feeling, a sense of how spaces and the lives inside them keep shaping each other over time.
Design, these days, moves fast — Instagram rooms flicker past and vanish. Upton slows everything down. His book asks you to stop, really look, and let these rooms sink in.
They deserve it, because they’re made to be remembered.
Visit www.rizzoliusa.com to learn more.
