Prune Stacks: The Y2K book for the contemporary heads

Welcome to the latest edition of PRUNE STACKS, a look inside the pages of a beloved book from the Prune library. And please follow Prune on Instagram for more vintage design in your feed!

Tyler Watamanuk on Carol Meredith’s Contemporary Interiors. 

This book has a little bit of everything, and it knows it. There are gorgeous full-page images that are perfectly composed, followed by photo grids with captions that are actually worth your time. Seriously, the author Carol Meredith is at her sharpest in the short form. She dubs cooktop hoods the “contemporary equivalent of yesteryear’s massive cooking hearths,” and delivers these blurbs with genuine, unembarrassed delight. The book landed in 2000, a particularly charged moment in interior design, when the cool austerity of modernism collided head-on with a distinctly 21st-century appetite for luxury. Meredith also writes with the calm authority of someone who has done the homework: “Strong colors can be used in compact areas, as long as they are edited to one or two tones.” She comes correct with a receipt: a photo of a small kitchen with cornflower-blue tile and warm, richly grained wood cabinets. As an added bonus, there’s no shortage of photography from the legendary Tim Street-Porter, which is to say the book’s 159 pages are studded with MCM gems.

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