Patience, Panic and Beautiful Interiors: Amber Lewis’ Latest Book

In her third book, Amber Lewis opens up her design process, revealing the decisions, discoveries and messy middles behind nine distinctive homes.

In the home furnishings industry, we know Amber Lewis as a lifestyle-brand-building interior designer with a love of layering eclectic, found and vintage furnishings with natural design elements to create elevated, livable interiors.|

But with Lewis’ third book being released this week — and a fourth in the works — Lewis has cemented her role as author too.

While Lewis’ previous two best-selling books (“Made for Living” and “Call It Home”) showcased finished spaces, the latest, “Interiors: Curated Spaces from Start to Finish,” takes readers behind her design process in nine projects. We see the beginnings and ends — and all the messy middles.

Sections on each project — from lake houses to desert retreats to mountain homes — are organized around stages interior designers will recognize. Lewis calls them the six Ps and describes them this way:

• Ponder: “The spark. The daydream. The big, ‘Okay, we’re doing this’ moment.”
• Play: “Where things get messy — in the best way. Think swatches and wild ideas flying around, some wins, some flops, and way too many mood boards.”
• Procure: “Aka the shopping Olympics. Vintage treasure hunts, custom pieces, flea market euphoria, and that moment when the perfect thing finds its forever home.”
• Patience + Panic: “Equal parts waiting out lead times and screaming internally when something finally arrives … and it’s wrong. (It always happens. Always.)”
• Pull It Together: “The magical, mad dash of install week, when we transcend project spreadsheets and outfit the spaces.”
• Pride: “The good kind of tears. The camera clicks. The client hugs. The ‘We freaking did it’ moment.”
I will admit here — and I told Lewis when I talked with her about the book — that I found myself flipping to the “Patience + Panic” section about each project before going back to the beginning and reading through each project sequentially.

“Everybody likes some drama,” Lewis told me. “‘That looks so pretty, but what happened for real?’”

And that’s what is at the heart of the book: What happened for real behind these projects, told in way that mirrors Lewis’ design style — warm and approachable. Her author’s voice is funny, forthright and sometimes salty, just as she is when speaking at design events or chatting with readers at book signings.

The 300-page book is beautifully by photographed by Shade Degges, who also photographed “Call It Home.” Each chapter includes a spread showing where readers can source items and wraps up detailing some specific aspect of the project, like scale right or fireplace design.

My favorite chapter: “Rooted in Place.”

As Lewis writes about the project: “Look, I’m gonna say it bluntly. Some houses are fine. They look fine, they feel fine, they work fine and they are simply fine to move into and begin living in. But fine doesn’t really do it for me. Living in a space like this can bum you out and wear you down, especially if your home is designed in such away that it doesn’t reflect your aesthetic or elevate how you live your life.” A family moving from the Midwest to a fine home with safe, lower-quality finishes in California deserved better, Lewis thought.

“They wanted and needed this new home to transcend “fine” and feel entirely theirs,” she writes.

The floor plan of the seven-bedroom home stayed. It was the details that mattered, including a stunning zellige tile ceiling from Zia Tile. (The Patience + Panic section in this chapter mentions delays caused by a slow HOA review process.)

Deciding to write No. 3

In addition to helming Amber Lewis Design, a Los Angeles-based residential and commercial design firm, Lewis is the owner of retail outlet Shoppe Amber Lewis, an e-commerce site and five brick-and-mortar stores in California. She’s also a frequent collaborator with brands including Anthropologie, Loloi, Four Hands, Visual Comfort and Etsy, and is creator of All Sorts Of, a lifestyle editorial website.
Her first book, “Made for Living: Collected Interiors for All Sorts of Styles” was published in October 2020 and Lewis felt exhausted by the process of writing her second book, “Call It Home: The Details That Matter,” which was published in October 2023.

So, she had no plans for a third book when her published approached her about doing one.
“Then I started to realize I did want to do another one. There was something in me that felt like I haven’t really talked about the processes very much,” she said. “… There’s so much that goes into (these projects) … and I felt like it was an interesting thing to demystify how much goes into interior design.”

It helped, too, that for this third book, Lewis teamed up with journalist and interiors writer Christina Poletto, after penning the first two herself with the help of her marketing manager.

Poletto and Lewis spent countless hours on Zoom calls discussing the projects in the book. Poletto wrote the framework and then Lewis went back through “to make sure that it sounds like me.”

“She really allowed me the space to get back in and write what felt right to me … the feeling and the emotion that I was experiencing at that time (of each project),” Lewis said.

But working with Poletto didn’t ease the process of choosing the projects to include in the book — except maybe the first, which is a look at her own lake house.

(You are going to want to read the Patience + Panic section of that chapter. I gasped! This is how Lewis describes her own reaction when hit with the big crisis in her lake house project: “Well, first you flip the f*ck out. You cry. A lot. Then, eventually you brush yourself off and do what all seasoned renovators learn to do: You make freakin’ lemonade with the freakin’ lemons.” )

But back to choosing projects for the new book: “It’s a Sophie’s choice in the end,” Lewis said. “How do I choose the projects that I’m going to be the most proud of now? The most proud of in five years? Were they really defining moments for me? Did (the project) really feel like a true expression of the brand and what we do as an interior design firm?”

There’s also the matter of clients’ giving permission for their homes to be featured in a book.

“All those boxes have to be ticked — and all the projects in ‘Interiors’ definitely ticked all those boxes,” she said.

Many of the projects in “Interiors” occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing new challenges to an already-challenging design process — and testing those six Ps that Lewis uses to structure the book. Getting up to speed on Zoom. Trusting teams when so much is out of control. Rolling with six-month delivery time frames “that turned into eight month that turned into who knows” Lewis recalled.
The pandemic also reinforced “that our spaces need to feel really special,” she said. “I learned during Covid how important it really is to have a space that feels beautiful and unique.”

Next up

Lewis is already at work on her fourth book, which is expected to be released in two years. This one will be about the remodeling of her own LA home.

“I bought my own house and I’m doing it all by myself, which is kind of crazy. Big life changes and then I bought a house and then decided I was going to do this big ol’ project on it. I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said with a laugh.

“In the first three (books), I’m always talking about someone else: my process but someone else’s dream. I’m a cog in the works of getting someone to the finish line,” she continued. “But in my fourth book, I’m client and designer and author.”

I suspect her fans who line up at book signings with two copies — one marked up and filled with Post-it notes and another pristine — will be looking forward to that one, too.

Lewis’ book may be purchased here.

Note: Header image by Shade Degges.