Coffee-table books are a curious phenomenon. I own an enormous Bauhaus book, found at Foyles in London, schlepped back to SA in my hand luggage but never read and now used as a very minimal-chic MacBook stand. Johannesburg Style, Clive Chipkin’s tribute to architectural excellence in the City of Gold, is an infinitely more loved purchase: read and reread so many times it’s falling to bits. The books we place on our coffee tables offer a window into the things that make us tick, the lives we live and the ones we aspire to. They’re powerful stuff. A luxurious, black Tom Ford tome can instantly inject an edge of risqué Manhattan glamour into even the most generic Fourways cluster house interior — a sort of cool-by-association effect...