Windsor Smith Homefront: Design for Modern Living

My friend and fellow Houstonian Windsor Smith is a shining talent in the interior design world and I am so thrilled she has releases a beautiful new book, as well as being her first. It features her impressive body of work. Windsor and I first met at a dinner party held at the Beverly Hills home of Julia Sorkin and knowing her has made following her breathtaking portfolio through the pages of this stunning new book all the more delightful.

Windsor’s style is deeply rooted in tradition while always bringing a fresh approach to everything she touches. Her rooms are gorgeous, but it’s her overall vision for the room and the people who dwell in them that truly set her apart. No one could explain this better than Windsor in her introduction when she writes, “I want to knock down conventions and open up rooms so they work the way we live now. I don’t aspire to create beautiful rooms for people, as much as I want to change the way we live in them.”

Windsor manages to create spaces that are both glamorous and encourage people to truly live in them–think family dinner, cocktail hour, and game night. Even the tack room with her signature equestrian flair featured in this new book is simply stunning, but completely welcoming of its intended use. Her clients including actress Gwyneth Paltrow who wrote the foreword to the book agree, “Windsor’s talent was not only artistic, it was intuitive. Her goal was to create a space for us to love in, not just live in. From that beautiful mindfulness, together we created a hybrid that worked perfectly, a house where family, and how we live, is the focus. A house where entertaining is natural. A house where, upon entering, you know you are home.”

Kitchen center island with white ceiling, center island with pot rack hanging above, dark wood wall trim, and windows surrounding kitchen.

I’m always drawn to Windsor’s work for many reasons including her tendency to create a central hallway –I absolutely love a house that has a sense of looking through it—it’s very hard to accomplish that with a lot of new architecture and she manages to accomplish this beautifully over and over again. Every page of this book is a source of inspiration that you will reach for again and again in adding a sense of modernity to your home, most especially for the livable beauty of each project.

– Bill Stubbs