Customer Reviews

The English Room

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Chippy Irvine's "The English Room" is a sumptuous overview of English decorative style. She is a stunningly effective teacher, deftly combining in very little space English decorative history, English furniture and architectural styles, and the uniquely warm English touch with fabrics, floor coverings, and drapery. The text is a miniature but very thorough education, and a delightful stroll through centuries of English history.

The photographs are something to behold. Photographer Christopher Simon Sykes has presented a panoply of different takes on classically English style with a sober, all-seeing eye. Nothing is prettied up--even a romantic candlelit dining room is presented in a straightforward manner--so that we are left to make up our own minds without Sykes' style being the thing we notice first about the pictures.

Everything the frustrated Anglophile/decorator could want is contained within these pages. Irvine neatly divides the book in two--City (think Rex Harrison's home in the 1964 film version of "My Fair Lady") and Country (think Emma Thompson's place in either "Howards End" or "Sense & Sensibility"). Within these areas, she covers front halls, bedrooms, dining rooms, kitchens, and even bathrooms. How great-looking can a bathroom be? Well, the most beautiful bathroom I think I have ever seen in my life is featured on p. 171. It may also be one of the most beautiful ROOMS I've ever seen, featuring as it does tall, divided-light mirrors which appear to be windows; a plain white tub surrounded with black, grey-streaked marble; pilasters and pediments a-plenty, but all covered with a restrained chalk white; dentil molding and paneled doors; and a perfectly handsome paneled toilet which would be perfectly at home in a living room in a lesser home. Oh, yes, and let's don't forget the curvaceous bronze and crystal chandelier. It sounds over the top, but it is perfectly composed, a lovely cameo of a room. It ably embodies the idea that good design is never wasted, no matter how unimportant the room or how poorly it is sited. Chippy Irvine continues to make that point, and many others, throughout the pages of this delightful and handsome book.

I, too, thought this book would be the penultimate guide to English style. That would only be true however, if one believes English style to be unrelentingly grim, grim, grim. All the photographs (and there were fewer than one might have wished) were of dark interiors and unwelcoming, depressing rooms. Maybe Chippy Irvine could have just explored her husband Keith's work. This book does not represent English style at all, to my mind, despite its misleading cover. Glad I didn't pay full price for it.

This book has nothing common with the classical English style if you are looking for it. It has dark, gloomy and boring room photographs. But, it has a useful information in the introduction part as it explains the history and challenges in English decoration style from early periods until now.

This is a good book, and you will like it if you favor English style. Some pictures are average, but I liked it. Very cool pictures of bathrooms!

Grandma would love the rooms in this book. I'll be sure to get her a copy for the holidays. For the rest of us, this book is filled with one super-boring room after another. Zzzzzzzzzzz........