Fiona Alison Duncan Curates Books for Homes, Hotels, and Shops
In 2016, Fiona Alison Duncan left New York, where she worked as a buyer at the bookstore McNally Jackson, for Los Angeles, where she cracked the spine of Hollywood's print-as-prop aesthetic and found success as a personal book curator, transforming unconventional spaces like the penthouse suite of The Standard, Downtown LA and Eckhaus Latta's retail shop into literary salons and stocking libraries for homeowners. AD PRO spoke with Duncan, whose debut novel Exquisite Mariposa will be published this fall, about her uniquely West Coast career.
You began privately curating books by furnishing your friends' apartments with personal libraries. It is easiest, of course, to do personal book shopping when you're intimate with someone. I think of it as part therapy, part divination, part gift giving, and part polemical.
And this is a uniquely Los Angeles experience.
Los Angeles was lacking good bookstores. I remember there were all these book titles I loved that I couldn't find in L.A. I'm very service-oriented; it's hard for me to justify doing anything if there isn't a need. There's already a good book and record store in the same Chinatown mall as Eckhaus Latta's Manhattan location, 2 Bridges Books & Records. And McNally Jackson, the best, is nearby in SoHo. I would love to curate books in shops beyond L.A., with cities' missing book markets in mind.
For your next project, you're expanding your literary salon “Pillow Talk,” from The Standard hotel to an apartment at the El Centro in Hollywood, where you'll be curating a new library and expanding into interior design.
Half of the apartment will be filled with wall-to-wall mattresses and pillows. My cocurator and I are sourcing a custom mattress and sheets from a local manufacturer to fit the space. You'll open the door and step onto a runway of narrow mattresses that runs beside the kitchen, then into a large rectangle of mattress. This, with many king-size pillows, will form the seating for our readings.
Do you believe the bedroom is the best reading room? That home libraries should be as much a place to sleep as read?
I recently conceived an exhibition-cum-bookshop at Jeffrey Stark gallery in New York, which centered around a video of 15 notable readers in my life. I sold the books they read from, in addition to their own works. One reader, the artist Matthew Hilvers, created a "book" that also functioned as furniture. [The piece] is made of felt, foam, and cotton; it could sit upright, open into a couch, or be spread open like a bed. A writer subletting my apartment in L.A. noticed: "This is just like your bedroom."
Materially, I maintain very little, so for a long time, my bedrooms have been comprised of a good mattress on the floor surrounded by stacks of books and a closet full of wild clothes. I only read in my bedroom, on a bed. As my friend noticed, I'm always recreating a variation of my home space for clients.
What does the book want to see in your home? How do you make it not regret going home with you?
I love the implication that books have consciousness. Lighting is important; I love natural light. The more windows the better. What most people don't realize is that comfort is essential to a library or reading space. There's no reason a reading room can't include a bed, a pile of clothes, a yoga mat, a carpeted floor, or another body. They all work.
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