Over 600 photographs assembled by author Judith Gura present a visual biography of the city’s interior innovators. From the refreshed Francophilia of Eleanor McMillen Brown to the high-tech minimalism of Ward Bennett, New York Interior Design unfolds a glittering panorama of New York’s old world duplexes, river and park-view towers, and its minimalist downtown lofts.

Volume I, Inventors of Tradition, highlights the careers and showcases the work of the designers who translated and then transformed European period styles into a new vocabulary for America. In addition to the work of celebrated tastemakers—Billy Baldwin, Mario Buatta, and Albert Hadley—Gura uncovers the interiors of once-influential, now-obscure designers whose work played an important role in the development of the “New York look.” Among these practitioners are William Pahlmann, the pioneer of contemporary eclecticism; the glamorous Melanie Kahane, with a fondness for shocking pink and tasteful pizazz; and the epitome of southern civility, Joseph Braswell, who believed that “a beautiful environment could make its occupants into better people.”