Veranda November/December 2021

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“The result was deliciously imperfect and served no other purpose than to bring a brief moment of joy to someone’s day.” LEWIS MILLER, A NEW YORK FLORAL designer whose roster of clients includes luxury fashion brands, entertainment moguls, and A-list designers, describes the most gratifying arrangement he’s created ever—his first “Flower Flash”—in his book by the same title 1, out this month. Beset by feeling unsettled in his work of creating magnificent and celebratory floral works of art for “only a lucky few,” Miller took on a new mission in 2016: to produce arrangements just as beautiful, bountiful, and joyful for all New Yorkers. Thus, the Flower Flash—arrangements using recycled flowers from Miller’s events installed in public locations, often street-corner trash cans, by Miller and team before dawn—was born. By the spring…

EDITOR OBSESSIONS FOR NOW & FOREVER A COZY COCKTAIL BOOKCASE Highland House’s Benson étagère tucks ambience and aperitifs between metal trimmings that whisper of 1950s glamour. THE FIND• Highland House’s Benson étagère THE BACKSTORY• Barrie Benson is crazy about two 1950s classics: Maison Jansen furniture and cocktails. How fitting, then, that the Charlotte, North Carolina–based designer’s new étagère marries the two, wrapping a central shelf of the open-air piece with unlacquered brass for a tucked-in bar (“my husband and I love having charming little spots for cocktail-making,” she says). Swapping glass shelves for cerused oak modernizes the look and puts it in easeful conversation with libraries and living rooms, where Benson imagines a pair flanking a sofa. And, as she is quick to point out, that sexy stage can also glow with a reading…

BOOKCASE DETAIL, LAUREY W. GLENN; BARRIE BENSON, LYDIA BITTNER-BAIRD.…

LAMPSHADES, BECKY LUIGART-STAYNER; STYLING BY SARA CLARK.…

AT ITS LEAST GLAMOROUS, the folding screen is the Band-Aid of the decorative arts: a temporary fix that conceals and helps heal the results of a blunder. Just think of Jane Fonda and Robert Redford’s comically awful walk-up in Barefoot in the Park (1967), rendered almost respectable by a louvered screen splayed across the apartment’s outdated, exposed-to-view kitchenette. Divorce? Averted. The classic rom-com had the right idea. As mobile architecture, folding screens can instantly transform any space, offering ad hoc privacy, obscuring unsightly views and outdated features, or dividing an open-plan desert into room-like zones that are both functional and claustrophobia-free. But behind the workhorse facade is a decorative staple that first appeared in ancient China during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–220 A.D.). Hinged wooden panels lacquered to the hilt by…