These days it is commonplace for design whipper- snappers to roll out books celebrating their latest interiors. But Mario Buatta, a premier American decorating talent who has been working since the late 1950s, has patiently waited until now to take the publishing plunge. "I wasn't looking for more business," the septuagenarian Prince of Chintz explains, "and I really wanted to do a complete volume and to make it personal, with pictures and stories of people I have worked with." 

A hefty 432-page album with a glowing foreword by Architectural Digest's editor emeritus, Paige Rense Noland, and spirited text by Emily Evans Eerdmans, Mario Buatta: Fifty Years of American Interior Decoration (Rizzoli) traces its hero's jubilant adaptation of English country-house style to an unlikely source: his Italian-American childhood on New York's Staten Island, where he grew up as the elder son of society bandleader Phil Burton, né Felix Buatta.

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Source: http://www.architecturaldigest.com