William Stout Architectural Books

For 20 years, William Stout has been the bookstore design junkies go to for their fix. Stout, a former architect himself, started out selling European design books from his apartment. Through the years, his shop has doubled a salon of sorts for the creative community; Stout seems to know every architect in town. The bi-level store offers over 20,000 titles spanning architecture, urban planning, art, and design (industrial, landscape, interior, furniture, graphic, and beyond), dramatically backed by lipstick-red accent walls. Artists and design professionals pour over the art, typography, and graphic design tomes downstairs; design lovers and lay people sigh in envy as they flip through shelter porn on the upper level. The tomes here are pricey—many run $50 and up—but are akin to objets d’ art themselves.