Redefining the home library with artful displays

Sara Arnell and friend in her home library. Amy Sowder Photos

By AMY SOWDER

Sara Arnell has a fully stocked “library” in her Katonah home, “but there are no books you can read,” she said.

Don’t be misled. The best-selling author of “There Will Be Lobster: Memoir of a Midlife Crisis,” marketing and brand expert and former advertising CEO, loves reading books. Arnell has a slim shelf of readable books over her breakfast banquette, a bookshelf section in her saffron-colored home office and a vast library at her Manhattan apartment near the Parsons School of Design at The New School, where she’s an adjunct professor.

“I’m a writer and marketer. I’ve always worked in fashion, design and product design. I came up in advertising as a copywriter. Words are important to me,” Arnell said as she gave a tour of her home, which showcases a striking, sculptural art piece.

At the terrazzo entryway flanked by two white ceramic dogs, visitors who turn right are immersed in a black-and-white motif in the library and kidney-shaped living room with scalloped walls overlooking lush, wooded acres.

The spines of the 200-plus books of identical size lining the black, curved bookcases are painted a stark, homogeneous white, serving as a blank canvas for Katonah artist Ned Snider’s typographic artwork.

The idea started with architect Wallace K. Harrison, who designed the 1940s modernist addition to Arnell’s 1930s farmhouse. Harrison worked on Rockefeller Center, the United Nations headquarters and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He also designed the Metropolitan Opera House.

But more than 75 years later, Harrison’s addition to this Katonah home needed some love. 

Arnell used Katonah-based, residential-focused Kroeger Intinarelli Architects to renovate and restore the addition. They agreed that the bookshelves have historical value as part of Harrison’s scalloped, curvilinear, somewhat nautical creation.

“We like these projects that have a historical provenance. We tend to have a lot of historical architecture here, but this house had such a rich history and it was fun to work within that particular vocabulary,” said Craig Intinarelli, managing principal of Kroeger Intinarelli Architects. He is also board president of the Katonah Museum of Art, board president and a commissioner of the Bedford Village Historic District.

It wasn’t long before Arnell realized her monochromatic vision felt incomplete. “I didn’t want to tear down these bookshelves, yet it looked like a giant white space. It ended up, to me, looking boring,” she said. So Arnell reached out to her friend Christopher Brescia, an entertainment lawyer and art aficionado who owned Katonah’s CB Gallery at the time, with the idea of creating a large piece to inhabit that wall of books.

Brescia introduced her to Snider. “I was familiar with his work, and he was local, and I knew he worked with words, and as a writer, I’m all about words,” Arnell said. 

Snider is a finalist for the Hopper Prize, and Whitney Museum of Art associate curator Laura Phipps selected one of his pieces for the 2025 Northeast edition of “New American Paintings” and featured it on the table of contents page. Phipps wrote that his latest art “throws into question just how formalism and design interact with and grow out of the natural world.”

Commissioned in June 2020, Snider’s piece for Arnell represents his earlier conceptual work that primarily incorporates typography. Since then, he engages with line, shape, form, composition and the grid. All of his work is shaped by his formative years in graphic design. 

Because the COVID-19 pandemic was raging when Snider began on this books-as-canvas piece, he took the books to his studio to work on it in sections on makeshift bookshelves. He then had to transfer those sections back to Arnell’s home.

At first, he wasn’t sure what to paint with, because the somewhat waxy surface of the painted book covers meant that acrylic, Flashe vinyl, and oil paints weren’t sticking. After more experimentation, Snider discovered an archival paint marker that worked well.

“I will say, the process for completing this piece was somewhat arduous and nerve-wracking, simply due to the fact that I had one shot at getting it right,” Snider said. “Sara did not have an extra set of these books lying around, so I had to make absolutely sure everything was fail-safe prior to laying the first paint down.” 

Snider liked the practical challenges of this project.

“It forced me to be resourceful and learn new methods of production, which otherwise, I might not have been exposed to. I’m always grateful to learn,” he said.

The piece itself extends several feet. Its typographic work relies on context and content to drive meaning, which Snider worked closely with Arnell to form. Each word connects with the word before it and after it, leaping from one idea to the next: “Laughing-Gas-Light-Speed-Walking-Advertisement.” 

As someone who helmed an ad agency, Arnell considers herself a walking advertisement for that career. Now she said she is grateful to be part of a community that lets people nourish their creative passions, whether in literature, visual arts, architecture, graphic design or home decor. “This town really supports its authors, and Katonah really supports people who live here,” Arnell said.