7 French Coffee Table Books We Love
© Assouline
Every new season sends us looking for inspiration, and we usually find it surrounded by beautiful images and good stories.
That’s why we love keeping a stack of stunning coffee table books out year-round.
A few of the books we have out as we sip our morning drinks include a new volume from our own founder, Sharon Santoni, alongside titles on Antoinette Poisson, the Paris flea markets, French flower arrangements, and four centuries of the Château de Versailles.
Here’s a look at some of the inspiring French coffee table books that double as home decor.
The Art of Antiquing in France
By Sharon Santoni
In this stunning new book, Sharon draws on three decades of antique hunting through the flea markets, brocantes, and antique fairs of France. Ten story-loaded chapters walk through the categories collectors chase most such as tableware, textiles, furniture, mirrors, and jewelry, each paired with interviews from specialist dealers. Photography by Franck Schmitt and Joanna Maclennan captures real places and real objects in a way that will make you feel like you’re walking through the markets yourself. A full shopping guide, French antiquing glossary, and phrases for buyers round out the book, making it just as useful as it is beautiful.
Extraordinary Collections: French Interiors, Flea Markets, & Ateliers
By Marin Montagut
Eccentric artist Marin Montagut opens his own Parisian home and studio before leading readers through the collections of dealers and collectors he’s met across France. Stops include the Saint-Ouen flea market in Paris, a folk-art and antique-glassware collection in the Perche, Provençal ceramics and basketry inside a hôtel particulier, and a plaster-cast workshop filled with sculptures from antiquity. Flipping through the pages will take you through a Parisian apartment filled with mannequins, a set designer’s search for a film prop, an artist’s magnificently messy studio, a writer’s book-lined home, and more grand cabinets of curiosities.
Paris Chic
By Alexandra Senes, photography by Oliver Pilcher
Photographer Oliver Pilcher and writer Alexandra Senes visited a range of stylish Parisian homes, hidden corners, and iconic destinations to build this portrait of the city’s daily rhythms. Bistros, alleyways, and artists’ studios sit alongside private home interiors, so the book reads like a series of intimate visits with a lifelong local. Assouline published this 280-page masterpiece with a silk hardcover to become the centerpiece of any Paris-inspired living room.
French Blooms: Floral Arrangements Inspired by Paris and Beyond
By Sandra Sigman
Floral designer Sandra Sigman learned to arrange flowers while living in Paris in her twenties, training under a florist she still cites as her biggest influence. French Blooms breaks the design principles behind that training into tutorials for the home: a mantel display built in ironstone gravy boats, compote-style arrangements for the dining room, powder-room posies, and hand-tied bouquets finished with ribbon. Separate chapters cover choosing containers — vintage stoneware crocks, baskets, white ceramic footed vases — along with flower care and tools. Photography runs through Paris, Normandy, and Provence.
St. Tropez Soleil
By Simon Liberati
Part of Assouline’s Classics Collection of iconic destinations, this book on the famous French Riviera destination includes text by award-winning French writer Simon Liberati, tracing Saint-Tropez from the fishing village discovered by writers like Colette and Françoise Sagan through the Brigitte Bardot years and into the present day. Along the way, the photographs capture the Bravades and Voiles de Saint-Tropez sailing races, a Chanel show staged at the café Sénéquier, and the Nikki Beach white party started by Naomi Campbell.
A Year in the French Style: Interiors & Entertaining by Antoinette Poisson
By Vincent Farelly and Jean-Baptiste Martin
Vincent Farelly and Jean-Baptiste Martin, the art historians behind Antoinette Poisson, restored Maison Lescop — the eighteenth-century Breton townhouse of a French trading-company importer — as their own home, and this book walks through a year of entertaining inside it. Their domino paper, a hand-block-printed technique they revived after finding original eighteenth-century examples during a separate restoration project, has since appeared in collaborations with Gucci, Ladurée, Diptyque, and the Château de Versailles. Photography is by Ruth Ribeaucourt, founder of Faire magazine.
A Day at Versailles
By Yves Carlier
Curator and writer Yves Carlier, a specialist in sixteenth- through nineteenth-century French decorative arts, structures this slipcased volume around a single day at the château, tracing how its rooms and rituals shifted from 1682 to the present. Photography by Francis Hammond moves through salons rarely open to visitors, the Petit Trianon, and Marie-Antoinette’s hamlet and dairy at the edge of the gardens. It’s less a guidebook than a history of how one building held four centuries of French life.
For more French books and décor to help inspire your space, take a look through the MFCH Boutique.
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