The Best Coffee Table Books to Buy in 2025, According to AD
We’ve picked the best coffee table books from this season’s batch, and we’re thrilled to hole up with them in the long-anticipated warmer days. Here are our favorites from spring’s bountiful assortment of debuts—many of them featuring AD-approved talents—all packed with invaluable design insights and gorgeous interiors past and present.
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The Best Coffee Table Books of 2025
Beauty, according to publisher Beth Benton Buckley, “is the silent symphony that resonates within spaces crafted with care and intention and courage.” This coffee table presents projects that embody this sentiment, including three from AD PRO Directory designers: Aspen’s Kristin Dittmar Doremus treated a Snowmass residence like an art gallery, for one, and the Tuxedo Park, New York–based Crystal Sinclair took cues from a moody rainstorm for a Hoboken brownstone. Also note the approach that Carola Pimentel of Miami’s Assure Interiors took with a 1920s Coconut Grove home’s layered color palette.
Few locations are as synonymous with architecture as Palm Springs, California: Almost 100 years on, its modernist marvels remain in deep conversation with the remote, beguiling desert landscape. Alan Hess, an architect and historian, sheds light on the evolving vernacular first introduced by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1924 with the Oasis Hotel, and later popularized by the likes of Richard Neutra’s daring glass boxes, John Lautner’s futuristic forms, and Albert Frey’s industrial creations. Stunning archival photographs add vibrancy to this canonical coffee table book.
“What makes life astounding, I think, is not the things we’ve collected and lived with, but the people and the memories we associate with them,” writes Mary Randolph Carter in her latest coffee table book. Through a guided tour of her own longtime New York apartment, the former Ralph Lauren creative director encourages readers to thoughtfully amass a variety of objects, from a weathered cupboard to thrift shop art. Glimpses into the homes of fellow tastemakers provide additional perspectives into holding on and letting go.
Laurence and Patrick Seguin, founders of Galerie Patrick Seguin in Paris, have been ardent collectors of Jean Prouvé’s adventurous 20th-century works since the late 1980s. This bilingual publication is an expanded edition of the volume first published in 2013, during which an exhibition organized with Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli opened in tandem. This sequel further probes the gallerists’ robust trove, including the well-known Métropole and Cité armchairs that straddle furniture and art with their gleaming metal elements. Rarely seen prototypes and previously unpublished archive drawings plunge readers deeper into Prouvé’s world.
Japanese and Scandinavian design converge in Japandi, an aesthetic with roots in both the former country’s rich Heian period and latter region’s flourishing 20th-century modernism. Despite differing cultures and geographies, the minimalist design sensibilities shared by these two countries is remarkable. Katherine McLaughlin, AD’s digital features editor, examines the design history of both regions, and highlights examples from around the world. The title is rounded out with handy advice for curating a Japandi look, from selecting a minimal base to finding balance.
Pascale Sablan, CEO of Adjaye Associates’ New York studio, has long been a champion of underrepresented women and BIPOC designers in architecture, and Greatness puts the spotlight on many of them. “I started to ask historians for expanded content about women, people of color, and African Americans who held prominent positions and impact in the profession. Over and over again, the answer was, ‘I don’t know,’” she writes of the impetus behind the coffee table book. In addition to calling out such groundbreaking projects as the Caples Jefferson Architects–led Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, Sablan poignantly reflects on past injustices.
A former dancer entranced by set design, Miriam Ellner is the foremost American practitioner of verre églomisé, the labor-intensive French technique of gilding glass. Golden Glass takes readers into Ellner ’s studio in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, where she imagines fantastical, shimmering creations for designers like Cullman & Kravis Associates, Dan Fink, Steven Gambrel, Tony Ingrao, Celerie Kemble, David Kleinberg, Brian McCarthy, and Alex Papachristidis. For the New York–based Wesley Moon’s Park Avenue apartment, Ellner enlivened a niche with gold leaf, lemon gold, and white gold, as pictured in this coffee table book. The reflection, points out Moon, “creates the illusion of an enfilade.”
Of course designers treat their lush, ever-fluctuating gardens with the same savvy they lend their interior projects. Penned by F. Schumacher & Co. chief creative officer and Frederic editor-in-chief Dara Caponigro, Glorious Gardens proves many of these sanctuaries are in California. Take Martyn Lawrence Bullard’s 1927 villa in the Hollywood Hills, complete with banquettes surrounding a fire pit, or the Pasadena paradise behind Todd Nickey’s Spanish Revival, where he feeds chickens every morning. Equally transporting is Bunny Williams’s pristine vegetable garden planted behind her Federal-style house in Falls Village, Connecticut, as is Veere Grenney’s terraced, sun-drenched wonder in Tangier, Morocco.
No detail is too small for Britt and Damian Zunino to overlook. The couple behind New York–based Directory firm Studio DB immerse themselves in every project to ensure their interiors are every bit as comforting as they are elevated, being both family-friendly and buoyed by skilled craftspeople. Drawn Together reveals how Damian’s architectural training and Britt’s background in fashion yield intriguing juxtapositions, like vintage Vladimir Kagan chairs set underneath a glossy white ceiling in a 1920s Park Avenue apartment.
Defining Style reads as an upbeat encyclopedia, organizing an array of striking interiors, many of which have been featured in AD—including the art-filled La Jolla abode of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beats designed by Kelly Behun—under 25 culturally-fueled themes. Modernism, for instance, continues to enthrall through Studio Shamshiri’s revamp of Rudolph Schindler’s Lechner House in Los Angeles, and the power of pattern is amplified in Lorenzo Castillo’s vacation home in northern Spain. Laura Gonzalez’s 19th-century French manse points to the importance of texture, while a Milanese palazzo from Vincenzo De Cotiis makes a case for grounding neutral palettes.
An alum of storied design firm Parish-Hadley, New York–based David Kleinberg crafts balanced, refined spaces that evoke a bygone era, and they are front and center in this monograph. Consider the swish Sutton Place residence of fashion designer Thom Browne and museum curator Andrew Bolton, where a George I japanned bureau cabinet complements the 18th-century English gilt-framed mirrors. Conversely, in another of Kleinberg’s projects in Aspen, a new-build is dominated by glass walls, a choice attuned to the local geography and culture. “His interiors feel effortlessly natural and right,” writes coauthor and AD West Coast editor Mayer Rus, “obscuring the deeply intellectual apparatus that went into their creation.”
Although Santiago Calatrava is known for his futuristic works like the World Trade Center’s Oculus Transportation Hub and the Turning Torso skyscraper in Malmö, Sweden, the Spanish-Swiss artist, who has offices in New York, Dubai, and Zurich, is also a notable artist, quietly turning out ceramics, drawings, and sculptures over the years. Alongside more than 200 images, Nick Mafi offers an extensive overview of these works, recognizing Calatrava’s talent in a markedly different yet complementary oeuvre.
Earlier this year, the industry mourned the loss of architect Ricardo Scofidio, who founded Diller Scofidio + Renfro with his wife Elizabeth Diller in 1981. Since its inception, the legendary New York firm has tackled projects of all stripes—from an innovative apartment building in Japan to an open-air platform conceived for the Swiss National Exposition to New York’s exhilarating High Line. Architecture, Not Architecture explores 128 of them, including offbeat installations and exhibitions that are a testament to the AD100 firm’s vast cross-disciplinary range.
Alfredo Paredes spent more than 30 years at Ralph Lauren, dreaming up the Madison Avenue flagship and Polo Bar. Paredes, who now leads his own eponymous studio, reveres the notion of home, and this coffee table book delves into four that he shares with his husband and their two children. Along with a patinated cabin in Provincetown and a Shelter Island Victorian cottage, there’s a Harrie T. Lindeberg–designed abode in Locust Valley, and an East Village duplex awash in European energy. “I had fantasized about a place like this for so long,” writes Paredes of the latter, “that by the time we found it, I knew exactly what it should become.”
Nicole Salvesen and Mary Graham founded their eponymous London studio in 2013. Shortly after this 10-year milestone, the duo began hatching their inaugural monograph with design journalist David Nicholls. Showcasing the versatility and modern-day appeal of an English country house aesthetic, the nine featured projects, including an early 19th-century vicarage in southeast England done in various hues of green, and a bi-level Mayfair pied-à-terre brightened by a hand-painted silk wall-covering, are bolstered with tips on topics like antiques and layering.
In her first coffee table book, Beth Webb argued that senses can and should be imbued into interiors to achieve tranquility. Now, in Embracing Beauty, the Atlanta-based designer demonstrates this philosophy through 12 of her projects. From a black-edged Jackson Hole new-build to a sprawling Kiawah Island residence with a rural English air, the new title is a tribute to Webb’s determination to fuse beauty and emotion. “I do what I do with passion,” she writes, “because I care as deeply about how a house feels as how it lives and looks.”
Everything may be bigger in Texas, though for some, the saying carries an implication of gregariousness. Chad Dorsey, a life-long Lone Star state dweller, proves the opposite with a full-fledged design philosophy to boot. In Chad Dorsey: Relaxed Luxury, the interior designer equates the titular term to “quiet luxury” in fashion circles. And in the pages of this monograph, imagery from a dozen projects is paired with swatch tips, decor tricks—every room needs one antique, Dorsey preaches—and more actionable items to inspire your next project. A combined sense of approachability and refinement abounds across the Dorsey–designed homes, from the historic to newly built.
The AD Coffee Table Book Gift Guide
One of the few completely fail-proof gifts is one of the best coffee table books of the season—weighty tomes whose thick, glossy pages feature stunning photographs and illustrations, to be specific. On a superficial level, they add ambiance, whether you place them in a library or a living room. But the best ones live in your home forever, while expanding your horizons far beyond. They also come across as far more memorable and thoughtful than the expected candle or bottle of champagne. Like works of fiction, there are limitless topics that can make deciding on an eye-catching hardcover (that doubles as home decor) seemingly impossible.
But that’s where we come in. Our team has gathered its favorite giftable recommendations for everyone from tennis enthusiasts to globe-trotters to interior design aficionados. From a book focused on hotels around the world to another that spotlights Tokyo style, there are plenty of ways to adorn the coffee tables of all the people on your holiday gift list. Most of them came out in 2024, but we’ve also included a few evergreen picks that make worthy gifts any year.
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