Hasta La Ideas

In a recent 60 Minutes segment, Charlie Rose and producer Katherine Davis profiled IDEO co-founder David Kelley (and revealed that even Steve Jobs himself struggled in getting AT&T to activate one of the first iPhones). This part of the piece, in which Rose pays a visit to Kelley’s Ettore Sottsass-designed home near Palo Alto, ended up on the cutting room floor, but CBS has released it as an online extra. “It’s supposed to be a humble, private house, where you don’t make a big deal out of it,” Kelley tells Rose. “That’s why it’s so plain on the front.” Sottsass studded the living room with bluish green boxes, to break up the space and make it more cozy. Here, Kelley reveals what’s inside them. Plus, his teenage daughter has an entire little (Monopoly-style) house to herself. Notes Kelley, “Ettore thought that if you were a kid you should have your own house rather than your own room.”

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Vogue is going all out for its 120th anniversary. Following a triumphant turn on the big screen in R.J. Cutler’s 2009 The September Issue, the magazine is out with a stunning coffee table book that celebrates the work of legendary Vogue fashion editors such as Grace Coddington (who is having quite a year), Polly Mellen, Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, and Babs Simpson. These behind-the-scenes figures also take center stage in a new documentary, In Vogue: The Editor’s Eye, now airing on HBO.

Produced and directed by docu-maestros Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the film is a feast of interviews about famous Vogue images (Mellen steals the show with a moving recollection of her now-famous 1981 shoot with Richard Avedon, a naked Nastassia Kinski, and a Burmese python) and musings on the slippery role of a fashion editor, all artfully combined with a running chronology of the magazine through the ages, including the servicey Mirabella interregnum of 1971-1988. “The people who are responsible for the fashion images are the fashion editors,” says a Prada-clad Anna Wintour. “They have always been our secret weapon, so it seemed to me that we could celebrate Vogue, and also, at the same time, celebrate these great editors.”

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Tonight Bravo kicks off a second season of Million Dollar Decorators, the wildly amusing docu-series that follows quiptastic interiors gurus Kathryn Ireland, Martyn Lawrence Bullard, Mary McDonald, and Jeffrey Alan Marks as they go about their appointed rounds (Nathan Turner, the fresh-faced kid brother of the bunch, has been pruned from the cast). The season opener follows the progress of Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon’s Manhattan dining room to be. The space is Bullard’s “disco frenzy” wink at the red lacquer library that Albert Hadley designed for Brooke Astor, but it’s out with the chintz and in with black patent-leather drapes, a suite of Paul Evans chairs recovered in red leather, zebra-stripey chevrons, and a custom white marble dining table that, at 3,000 pounds, will need to be hoisted through the living room window. “Good grief!” says a wide-eyed Bullard, when his assistant relays the news. “I’ve never, in my entire career, had to use a crane before.” Will the $50,000 table make it safely into the penthouse? Can Bullard locate the man who has apparently absconded with $10,000 and Mellon’s future fireplace? Will McDonald’s mercurial client change her mind, again? Can Ireland and her Diana Vreeland-esque housekeeper find relaxation in wine country? Will a tipsy Ross Cassidy locate the ice cream he seeks? Tune in tonight to find out.

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At the Mall of America, bigger is better. In addition to 520 stores and 50 restaurants, the 4.2-million-square-foot complex is home to a towering LEGO robot, a giant green sea turtle (among the 10,000 creatures at the Sea Life Aquarium), and a roller coaster known as the SpongeBob SquarePants Rock Bottom Plunge. The holiday season inevitably brings a new crop of outsized attractions and this year, design is in the mix as HGTV readies its Holiday House, a life-size gingerbread manse that will debut in the mall’s rotunda (hang a right at the 44-foot-tall Christmas tree) on the day after Thanksgiving. No word as to whether actual gingerbread is involved, but the house will host a steady stream of demonstrations, meet and greets, and other events with the likes of Genevieve Gorder, Vern Yip, Carter Oosterhouse, and Sara Peterson, editor-in-chief of HGTV Magazine. Even Scrooges with no interest in the house’s thrice-daily “spectacular holiday light show” can stop by on the way home to have purchases gift-wrapped by HGTV elves.

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When not masterminding the look and feel of Elle, Joe Zee keeps busy coming to the rescue of floundering fashion designers. With his irresistible combination of no-nonsense advice and Gucci suits, the indefatigable creative director is currently starring in the third season of All on the Line with Joe Zee, which airs Monday nights on the Sundance Channel. In this first segment of our three-part interview with Zee, he discusses his experience on the small screen, things to watch for in the new season of All on the Line, and the importance of keeping it real on reality TV.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.