Conspicuous Coffee Tables

Paul Goldberger

Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic of the New York Times, has built a home for himself in the publishing world as a writer of coffee-table books such as The City Observed: New York; The Skyscraper; and On the Rise. He recently added a new wing— the text of The Houses of the Hamptons (Knopf).

"The whole idea of a coffee-table book, which is an odious phrase," he says, "is kind of ironic because the books that are on a coffee table, theoretically the most accessible place for them, are perhaps the least-read things in the house."

Goldberger's sprawling Central Park West apartment (a few blocks up from his previous pad at the Dakota) is a digest of his architectural tastes: a Richard Meier stool; a Robert Stern neo-Art Deco rug; an Andree Putman side table that he bought from Steve Rubell's fashionable hotel, Morgans; and the piece de resistance, an Alvar Aalto coffee table whose glass top was redesigned by Michael Rubenstein, making it look more like a Mies van der Rohe.

As the Times critic, Goldberger has become the arbiter of what's acceptable in an urban landscape. Now he's turned his attention to the Hamptons, where he and his family maintain a second home. "I want people to focus on the Hamptons not just as a cavalcade of individual sculptural objects dropped into a landscape but as a place—a total environment. I want my book to further people's consciousness about that."

A noble ambition.

The problem with the house that Paul built is that once you pick up his book to read, the whole thing comes crashing down.

Brooks Peters