The Best Home and Design Coffee Table Books to Buy Right Now

• Best Overall: Architectural Digest at 100: a century of the world's most celebrated interiors.

• Best for Home Decorating Projects: The Art of Home: walks room by room through the principles behind Studio McGee's most celebrated projects.

• Best Luxury Object: Yves Saint Laurent at Home: covering the private homes of Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé across Paris, Deauville, and Marrakech.

A beautifully designed home does not happen by accident. It comes from understanding proportion, texture, material, and the accumulated decisions that give a room its character. The homes worth aspiring to are not the ones with the largest budgets but the ones where beauty and livability have been treated as the same goal, where every detail has been thought about and every room feels like it belongs to someone with a genuine point of view. That kind of home takes time, a trained eye, and the willingness to look closely at how spaces work. The ten books below are a guide to getting there.

This centennial volume draws from a century of the magazine's archives and features personal spaces belonging to Barack and Michelle Obama, David Bowie, Truman Capote, David Hockney, Michael Kors, and Diana Vreeland, alongside the work of architects and designers including Frank Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright, Axel Vervoordt, India Mahdavi, and Elsie de Wolfe. With an introduction by Amy Astley and a foreword by Anna Wintour, it reads as both a design reference and a record of how American taste has shifted across a hundred years.

Architectural Digest at 100 — Shop the Century's Most Celebrated Interiors

Written by designer Jacques Grange, who oversaw the interiors of the homes Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé built together, the book moves through the Château Gabriel in Deauville, the Villa Majorelle in Marrakech, the apartment on rue de Babylone, and the maison de couture on avenue Marceau, with photographs by Marianne Haas and contributions from Catherine Deneuve, Betty Catroux, and others from their inner circle. Over 200 illustrations make it one of the most visually rich volumes Assouline has ever produced.

Yves Saint Laurent at Home — Shop the Most Intimate Design Book Ever Published

An instant New York Times bestseller, this 408-page volume moves through every room of the house, entryways, living rooms, kitchens, offices, kids' rooms, with step-by-step guides and case studies drawn from Studio McGee's project portfolio. McGee, the co-founder of Studio McGee and the face of Netflix's Dream Home Makeover, brings the same layered, livable approach to the page that has built her following of over five million. Instructive and beautiful in equal measure.

The Art of Home — Shop Shea McGee's Room-by-Room Design Guide

The EyeSwoon creator opens the doors to her own residences and a wide network of international interior decorators, fashion designers, and tastemakers, including Jenna Lyons, Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch, breaking down the specific details of each room and offering transferable principles for applying them at home. This is a book that teaches as much as it inspires.

Live Beautiful — Shop Athena Calderone's Guide to Beautifully Crafted Interiors

A national bestseller, this volume walks through eight homes Lewis designed, including her own, with detailed essays on the thought process behind every major choice, from fabric and paint selection to tile, flooring, and finishes, with over 200 photographs across living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and baths. Lewis, the founder of Amber Interiors, has one of the most recognizable points of view in American residential design right now, warm, California-inflected, textural, and deeply considered.

Call It Home — Shop Amber Lewis's California-Inspired Design Bible

This is the working reference on the list, the book you keep close during a project and return to long after it is finished. Lemieux moves through furniture, textiles, and decorative details with the kind of authority that separates it from most of what the category produces, and Miles Redd's foreword sets the right tone from the first page. It has aged exceptionally well and belongs on any serious design shelf.

The Finer Things — Shop the Definitive Guide to Timeless Furniture and Textiles

This volume gathers spectacular houses and gardens belonging to figures including Tory Burch in Southampton, Dries Van Noten in Belgium, Lauren and Andres Santo Domingo in Paris, Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber at their lakeside Canadian cabin, and Stella McCartney at her English country estate, photographed by François Halard, Mario Testino, and Bruce Weber. More than 400 full-color photographs and writing by Bowles, Plum Sykes, and Chloe Malle make it as enjoyable to read as it is to look at.

Vogue Living: Country, City, Coast — Shop 400 Pages of the World's Most Spectacular Homes

The newest title on this list covers a dozen summer residences across the American Northeast, lakeside cottages, seaside retreats, and country houses, with a focus on how each home preserves its character while absorbing the personal histories of the families who have lived in it. Conry, a design journalist and the editor of Boston Home, brings a warm editorial intelligence to every property she profiles. For anyone decorating a seasonal home or planning one, this is the most timely book available.

The Summer House — Shop Rizzoli's Most Beautiful New Release of 2026

A photographic study of more than twenty homes spanning continents and climates, including artist retreats in Morocco's High Atlas, a villa in Switzerland's Engadine Valley, modernist masterworks in Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro, and clapboard cottages and minimalist prisms set into some of the world's most dramatic alpine landscapes, depicted across over 200 images. Freudenberger, the founder of Freudenberger Design in Los Angeles and a Rhode Island School of Design graduate, brings rigorous architectural thinking to every property she selects.

Mountain House — Shop 20 of the World's Most Extraordinary Alpine Homes

The hosts of Bravo's Backyard Envy approach exterior spaces exactly as an interior designer would a room, with the same attention to concept, proportion, zoning, material, and finishing detail. The book covers backyards, brownstone patios, and three-season porches with equal care, moving from hardscaping and furniture through to the finishing touches that make an outdoor space feel as considered as anything inside the house. For anyone with an exterior project on the horizon this season, this is the place to start.

Take It Outside — Shop the Best Guide to Outdoor and Transitional Space Design

A beautiful home is never finished. It evolves with the people who live in it, accumulating objects, memories, and decisions that give it depth and character over time. The books above are a guide to that process, a source of visual language, design thinking, and hard-won perspective from the designers, editors, and photographers who have spent their careers understanding what makes a space beautiful and why it matters.