Customer Reviews

Dwellings: Living with Great Style

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is NOT a "decorating book" for for someone about to redo a room in their home, and looking for ideas. The book has a curious layout I found interesting: small size, no dustjacket, heavy on text; that should tip off potential readers that this one is a little different. It is more like a design essay (and it's highly readable), with photos, close-ups of fabrics, endpapers spread throughout with fancy script font, etc. There is no "how-to" here, no HGTV budget tips, no "oh THAT'S what I'll do with my lamp!" inspirations. You just sort of curl up with this and learn about their approach to design (they probably hand this to potential clients). The book is a luxury, so spend money elsewhere if you are looking for design reference.

I found this book to be like a stylish but vacant house. It looked good from the outside, but once I got inside the book, there wasn't very much in there to keep my interest. I actually became annoyed with myself for spending money on this when I tried to read this book and realized that the authors have nothing new to say. I've read it all before. Many times. ("It is your personality that brings a room alive." Oh really? I read that 20 years ago in my mother's old Better Homes and Gardens decorating book. "The bed will influence all other choices in the room." I paid money to read that? )
I also find it annoying that they keep talking about themselves in the writing.-who cares? The pictures are too small. Although the rooms look pretty enough, I kept wanting to see more of each room or to have room pictures used larger, because it was frustrating that I felt I couldn't see enough of the rooms or enough of what is in the rooms. (They take a whole room pictures of a bedroom or a living room and use it on the equivalent of maybe a quarter of a page and put some fabric design or wallpaper pattern behind it. Ick.)
I definitely did not get my money's worth on this book.

This book looks good at first glimpse but then it falls apart. The admittedly stylish graphic design cannot compensate for the small pictures, the trite prose, and the old ideas. I expected this book to offer something really fresh but it didn't. I feel majorly ripped off.

Yes, many photos are small. However, all photos are beautiful. If you want to upholster your own headboard or want new and fascinating uses for MDF, look elsewhere. Maybe I am biased -- I don't read (or look at) decorating books to learn how to decorate. I look at them for color, balance, and proportion. Sure, there are ideas here. Subtle ideas. Quiet ideas. Lovely ideas. Not all rooms of color are orange (will this trend end)! Think of grey, watery blues, nut browns! Trading places does not tread here. As far as no dust cover, who needs it? I pet my book often. Not merely a decorating book, this is an art book. Enjoy! Don't just learn how to lay tile.

Beautiful! Absolutely beautiful! As a young design professional, it always gives me pause to see the work of a talented peer...make that a pair of peers. Sills and Huniford are making their mark on the 21st century, as David Hicks, Billy Baldwin, and Jean Michel Frank did in the 20th. Having waited for this book to be published since an interview done by the pair in the early 90's, "Dwellings" fulfills its promise of making simple the secrets to a stylish interior. This tome is a pleasure to all those who harbor ascetic tendencies, yet relish a heeping helping of drama every now and again. Kudos!

Very disappointing. Tiny, unnspiring pictures. Trite narrative. It reminded me that it's nearly impossible to buy a book of this kind online. You really must be able to hold the book in your hands and look at the pictures and text in order to make a good purchasing decision.

These designers have a great gimmick going. Basically, they travel around the world, hoarding antiques, ship them back to NYC and have cheap Mexican labour refinish them. They then charge foolish, rich clients (the ONLY people they'll work for) exorbitant prices for shoddily refinished junk. The reason the book seems "shallow & vacant" is because it's a direct reflection of the designer's personalities. Their designs are more stage settings than ones for living in. They manage to pull the wool over most clients eyes, but, they have been sued when their scheme was discovered and had to drastically lower their prices as compensation. So, if empty, weirdly coloured interiors don't make you vomit, then buy this book!

I was amazed by the polarity of the reviews for this book -- always a good sign, as long as the lengthier reviews are the negative ones. Having bought a copy for resale, the reviews below motivated me to heavily skim it, and here's the fat skinny as I see it.

These guys really are gifted professionals, whose approach melds formal principle with intuitive insight. Their advice taken piecemeal may read like mostly conventional wisdom, but there is a LOT of it packed into a small space. And their bemoaned "writing about themselves" (hard to avoid, really) is how you get the Be-Here-Now feel of their process. This personal, casebook approach adds considerable vitality to the link between the layered and revealing text and the superbly composed interior photos.

No, the latter are NOT huge -- discernment is a mark of these designers, and the medium is as much the message here as with the design examples and text. The real learning comes Zen-like, in the space between the words and images -- that's why some readers "get it" and others (who tend to want concrete "how to" or big, flashy pix and divertingly original text) don't. Check out a library copy if you're in doubt as to whether you're this book's kind of person. Or just take the plunge, get humble and patient, and see what -- and how -- you can learn....

On the text: sure, we all know that the floor is the foundation of any room, furniture should be suitable, luxurious bathrooms will pamper you, wall surfaces offer lots of possibilities, and colors should harmonize but need not match. But then you come upon nuggets of concentrated utility, like their three (primordial) strategies for the use of color, and such interesting observations as, "When color is integral to the material -- stone, wood, metal -- it registers less strongly".

The authors' offbeat perspective surfaces here and there like a thread in a tapestry. They liken the floor to the "face" of a room -- then survey ten classic flooring materials in a sentence, list eight functions that floor designs can serve in two more, and rattle off a dozen points of practical wisdom about carpets -- all this being reflected in the accompanying pictures. You don't read this book so much as you mine it.

The use of many transitional pages with nothing but large-scripted aphorisms and chapter titles IS a tad on the indulgent side, but even here the whole can be more than the sum of the parts. "A room's function should be paramount in determining the way it looks" (4: Living in a Room), yet "The more defined a room's function is, the harder it can be to design" (8: Functional Spaces). "Be Here Now", gentle acolytes -- these dividers are really connectors as well, functioning on the rebound as subsumers of more practical wisdom than is apparent until you've done your homework. Read that text and get your eyeballs into those pix for a couple of iterations, grok the "tell `em then show `em" paradigm in play, and go to school on these guys!

In sum, "editing, function and order" are as masterfully displayed in every aspect of the layout as they are demonstrated to be essential to the design of a room. The book is multi-dimensionally gorgeous, inside and out -- quite the bonus, really (check out the super-classic "Billy Baldwin Decorates" by way of comparison, and see what I mean). You can display this coffee table gem with pride, for its fascinating Persian-Miniature style photos, discussion-provoking koan/cliches, sheer textural delight to the eye and hand, and for the delectation of your subtler friends....

This book is great!! From the text you actually learn something rather than just a bunch of boring pictures. The pictures are annotated with the designers comments- you can actually LEARN things from this book. It's not a pretty coffee table book ( thank god, do we really need another one of those?! ) but one which you can actually learns secrets to great design. One step above the beginers level. I would highly recommend this book!

Yes, the photos are all too small, and some of the advice seems surprisingly basic. But these two top designers, who were recently included in Architectural Digest's list of the Thirty American Deans of Design, do reveal some of their magic in this little gem of a book.

I'm a serious, but self-taught amateur decorator, and I've found that books by the truly top designers are worth studying because they present a photographic record of all the work by one designer (or in this case two designers).

As I've studied the photos in these kinds of books, I've learned to identify the common themes that emerge in one particular designer's style. I've also learn which themes run across the work of many top designers. This knowledge, which you just don't get from a magazine, has made the interiors I design for myself far more sophisticated and professional.

I've had this book for about a month and have paged through it almost a dozen times. Last week while I was gazing at a photo of one particularly striking room, I figured out the perfect display of objects for my coffee table, a solution that had eluded me for a year.

The objects I selected were very different from the ones in the photo, but I never would have thought of them had I not been looking at this book. Surprisingly, getting the coffee table right has made the entire room, which had always seemed to lack someting, come alive. The best part is I didn't spend a penny because I already owned every object I used.

My hunch is that if Huniford and Sills had been in the room with me, they would have suggested the very same items. I'm certain they would approve of what I did because I feel like I've "picked their brains." If you'd like to pick the brains of two of the country's leading designers, you'll find this book to be well worth its modest price.