Inventing the California Look: Through The Lens Of Fred Lyon

Inventing The California Look Through The Lens Of Fred Lyon:  Interiors by Frances Elkins, Michael Taylor, John Dickinson, and Other Design Innovators . Author Philip E. Meza, Photographs by Fred Lyon, Foreword by Jared Goss

The long wait is over for interior design aficionados. Rizolli has compiled Fred Lyon's residential photos of San Francisco's wealthy elite spanning from the 1940s to the 1980s. While this ephemeral world no longer exists, it has influenced generations of designers. Before Lyon trained his camera on the aristocratic aesthetics of Frances Elkins and Tony Hail or the eloquent originality of Michael Taylor and John Dickinson, American design was East Coast-centric. Inventing The California Look Through The Lens Of Fred Lyon: Interiors by Frances Elkins, Michael Taylor, John Dickinson, and Other Design Innovators shows how the now 90-something photographer helped shape the globally recognized "California Look" through his work with designers and magazine editors.

Whitney Warren Jr. House: Interior Design, Billy Baldwin and Tony Hail. Architecture, Gardner Dailey. Photography, Fred Lyon for Architectural Digest

A native San Franciscan, Lyon did not start with interiors. He first found employment in Washington, DC, and New York before returning home in 1946. Impressed by his portfolio, which included snapshots of high-profile places from the White House to top fashion houses, prestigious East Coast magazines offered him assignments in the Bay Area. One of these was House & Garden, photographing socialite Whitney Warren Jr.'s Telegraph Hill home, designed by master architect Gardner Dailey with interiors by master designer Frances Elkins. Elkins liked Lyon's images, and he would go on to document many more of her projects. In 1974, he shot Warren's second Dailey residence on Telegraph Hill for Architectural Digest. Since Elkins had passed away in 1953, Billy Baldwin and Tony Hail handled the decor.

Russian Hill Apartment: Interior Design, Michael Taylor and Mimi London. 

Photography, Fred Lyon

No name is more synonymous with the "California Look" than Michael Taylor's. Described by Vogue's former editor-in-chief Diane Vreeland as the "James Dean of Interior Design," Lyon shot Taylor's interiors almost from the beginning of his career in 1954 when he was in partnership with designer Frances Mihailoff. Two years later, he went out on his own, crafting his exquisite rooms until he died in 1986 from AIDS. A native of Modesto, Taylor originated high/ low design, deftly mixing period antiques and fine art with natural elements and inexpensive items from Cost Plus. Lyon captured these timeless spaces for House & Garden, Vogue, and Architectural Digest. Now they are preserved for posterity in Inventing The California Look Through The Lens Of Fred Lyon: Interiors by Frances Elkins, Michael Taylor, John Dickinson, and Other Design Innovators with text by Philip E. Meza.

Self portrait by Fred Lyon, taken in the 1990s.