Great Houses Of Havana

Havana Living Today presents both stylish homes that survived the Cuban Revolution as well as innovative Havana interiors created in recent years amid the beginning of a new era and lifestyle. Far from the cliché images of dilapidated palazzos and 1950s-era cars, Havana Living Today presents a vibrant, creative, and forward-looking city through the lens of an eclectic collection of domestic interiors. Recent changes in Cuba—such as the easing of restrictions on travel and commercial real estate enterprises—have led to a flurry of world-class renovations, giving rise to a palpable hopefulness in the Cuban capital and innovative interiors for a tropical lifestyle. Havana Living Today is an insider’s view of the styles present in this revitalizing city, taking the reader into the elegant, eccentric, sophisticated, and classical melange of the city’s finest and most fascinating interiors. This is the first book of its kind to counter long-held preconceptions about how people live in Havana, presenting a vision of the city that international visitors have rarely seen until now, offering fresh inspiration to design aficionados and homeowners in warm climes.

Great Houses of Havana celebrates one hundred years of creativity, design, and style that made the city "the Paris of the Caribbean." For four hundred years, Havana was the center of Spanish trade in the western hemisphere. With the expansion of the sugar industry, independence from Spain, and North American investment, Havana became a city of great wealth, great style, and great houses in a vocabulary that was a unique amalgam of European, American, and Caribbean elements. Great Houses of Havana traces the evolution of the Cuban home from the classic, Spanish colonial courtyard house to the “Tropical Modernist” villas of the 1950s—houses reflecting international architecture trends while remaining true to the Cuban tradition. Cuba’s social history is woven throughout the book. Vintage photographs illustrate Havana’s sophisticated lifestyle—the masked balls, yacht club picnics, and dynastic weddings of fashionable Cubans and their international guests. Popular cafes, hotels, theaters, and weekend resorts are also featured, creating a view of the privileged life inside the gated mansions of the city’s grandest neighborhoods.

Havana is a city that rarely fails to captivate. But much of the unique beauty and culture of this historic city is rapidly disappearing. As Cuban society finds itself at a crossroads, Havana is more than ever a city on the edge, for although frozen in time as a consequence of Fidel Castro's revolution, it has certainly not been well preserved. Time, climate, and neglect have eroded a rare architectural legacy, making the need to document this heritage even more pressing than ever before. Making Home in Havana is an elegant book of photographs and testimonies, recording, questioning, and evoking the meaning of place -- in particular, the meaning of home. The combination of fine photography and the words of residents of former palaces, humble apartments, and other dwellings offer us an irresistible portrait of Havana that might otherwise be lost forever. Vincenzo Pietropaolo and Cecelia Lawless have made numerous visits to Havana in order to fully understand and convey the essence of what home means to the inhabitants of the dwellings of the El Vedado and Centro Habana neighborhoods. Together, they--and we--explore how a building becomes a home through its human history as well as its architectural features. With some renovation already underway in colonial Havana, they concentrate on largely unexplored and unrecognized sections that continue to fall into ruin. The intimacy of their connection with the buildings and people offers us a rare combination of documentary realism and high art. Buildings and people speak their histories to us in classic humanistic style. Residents of Havana tell their stories of lifelong efforts to turn decay into beauty, while the photographer's evocative pictures enable us to feel exactly what they are talking about -- a creation of time and space called home.

A nostalgic celebration of the glamour of warm-weather destinations in the Caribbean and Florida, from the great estates of ambitious patrons to the most exclusive resorts of the mid-twentieth century. Through iconic photography capturing the cultural mood at the moment when social codes relaxed from the formality of the Gilded Age to the spontaneity of the jet-set era, Escape: The Heyday of Caribbean Glamour takes the reader inside a world of beach parties and costume balls set in lush tropical landscapes, of rarefied resorts and fairy-tale private estates. Escape presents the visual history of the region’s outstanding getaways, chronicling their transformations from pristine idyllic settings to personalized retreats where responsibilities could be left behind. Joseph Urban, Oliver Messel, Paul Rudolph, and other talented designers made these dreams reality, relying on regional design traditions to express the spirit of places like Antigua, Barbados, Cuba, and Jamaica, and sometimes inventing a new vernacular using fantasy imagery to emphasize the notion of escape from the pressures of urban living. Among these idealized settings blossomed the resort lifestyle of international celebrities, from Marjorie Merriweather Post to Babe Paley, Princess Margaret to David Bowie, whose escapades are spectacularly captured in these pages to make the region’s bygone glamour come alive.

A childhood in a privileged household in 1950s Havana was joyous and cruel, like any other-but with certain differences. The neighbour's monkey was liable to escape and run across your roof. Surfing was conducted by driving cars across the breakwater. Lizards and firecrackers made frequent contact. Carlos Eire's childhood was a little different from most. His father was convinced he had been Louis XVI in a past life. At school, classmates with fathers in the Batista government were attended by chauffeurs and bodyguards. At a home crammed with artifacts and paintings, portraits of Jesus spoke to him in dreams and nightmares. Then, in January 1959, the world changes: Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla has taken his place, and Christmas is cancelled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. And, one by one, the author's schoolmates begin to disappear-spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, without his parents, never to see his father again. Narrated with the urgency of a confession, WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA is both an ode to a paradise lost and an exorcism. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died-and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.

In this exquisite volume, author Maria Luisa Lobo Montalvo presents the architecture and history of Havana - part of which has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site - in an accessible and engaging text and specially commissioned color photographs."--BOOK JACKET.

Havana Living Today presents both stylish homes that survived the Cuban Revolution as well as innovative Havana interiors created in recent years amid the beginning of a new era and lifestyle. Far from the cliché images of dilapidated palazzos and 1950s-era cars, Havana Living Today presents a vibrant, creative, and forward-looking city through the lens of an eclectic collection of domestic interiors. Recent changes in Cuba—such as the easing of restrictions on travel and commercial real estate enterprises—have led to a flurry of world-class renovations, giving rise to a palpable hopefulness in the Cuban capital and innovative interiors for a tropical lifestyle. Havana Living Today is an insider’s view of the styles present in this revitalizing city, taking the reader into the elegant, eccentric, sophisticated, and classical melange of the city’s finest and most fascinating interiors. This is the first book of its kind to counter long-held preconceptions about how people live in Havana, presenting a vision of the city that international visitors have rarely seen until now, offering fresh inspiration to design aficionados and homeowners in warm climes.

Renowned photographer Michael Eastman pays haunting tribute to Havana's faded glory. In his numerous works, internationally acclaimed photographer Michael Eastman often focuses on the facades and interiors of the world's cities, such as Paris, Rome, and New Orleans. In this book he explores the houses and streets of Havana. Nearly one hundred photographs from the past two decades reveal a world where triumphant past and vanquished present collide. Painterly in quality, these richly colored photographs are dramatically lit and exquisitely detailed. Though mostly devoid of people, they manage to capture contemporary Cuban life through suggestion: an empty chair, an ancient car, a decrepit hallway, a forgotten chandelier. The result is as eloquent as a love poem written to a city rich in history, culture, and feeling.