Customer Reviews

China Style

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an enjoyable book introducing many different places -- mostly residential, but also some hotels and restaurants -- with a variety of Chinese designs.

The best part of the book is the photography by Michael Freeman. In most of the rooms he captures a feeling that it's lived in, a part of someone's daily life. Some books I own on Asian design don't have this quality: the rooms either appear too staged or the photographer gives them a sterile feeling. I could recommend this book on the photos alone.

The text is not quite up to standards of the photos, but it's acceptable. The author, Sharon Leece, obviously knows her subject, but she often lapses into blurb-style. For example, she writes on one house: "The words colourful, extravagent, and opulent can hardly begin to describe the palatial home of Contrasts Gallery owner Pearl Lam."

Another fun aspect of this book is that the places it showcases aren't just the homes of wealthy individuals. You see not only the more than 13,000 square foot Manhattan apartment of Chinese antiquities dealer Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, with its numerous expensive Chinese antiques, but you also get to see how some people with obviously much smaller budgets still managed to design their home with a unique Chinese flavor.

Reading this was a pleasant surprise, but what impresses most about this beautifully-designed book is not that it opens up all the elements of Chinese style and how its used in modern living -which it does in a interesting way.
But that it includes homes of most of the foremost China antiques dealers/collectors in the world.
Probably for the first time ever in print, we can see photographs of the homes of China experts Grace Wu Bruce in Hong Kong, Robert Ellsworth in New York (his is the biggest single apartment in Manhattan, apparently) and Kai-Yin Lo in Hong Kong.
That this book features their private homes shows they must have given their backing to this book - making it more than another stunning Style book.
Overall, this is a luxurious, well put-together book with an
interesting selection of beautiful apartments from many Cities. Recommended for anyone interested in things Chinese.

A wide range of (mostly) rather luxurious rooms filled with everything and anything Chinese. But you won't find much of authentic traditional chinese homes here (and indeed the dustjacket clearly announces this). Although the rooms are sometimes packed with Chinese things, they almost all still feel western/international/chinese, mixed in different proportions. That said, the photos are great and it's a joy to visit all these apartements and houses and select your favourites. Since each place only gets two (or three) spreads generally, a string of different locations can be presented and you're invited to more rooms and settings than anyone can digest at one read-through. And that's great, you can return again and again to this very rich book.

Chinese art, architecture and design has a long history and blends many elements from a tradition of wooden courtyard structures, evolving to blend different styles. Modern Chinese interiors are here presented with full-page color photos - many documenting eclectic mixes of old and new styles, while descriptions document choices and discuss how these different choices blended in. It's a gorgeous visual display for any library strong in either interior design or Chinese art and architecture, holding a wide range of contemporary examples.