Customer Reviews

House Beautiful Details (Great Style Series)

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These views, often showing a corner of a room or the area around a fireplace, are from the pages of HOUSE BEAUTIFUL magazine during the first half of the 1990s. For the most part, the high-quality color photos are not focused on details as much as they are vignettes showing an interesting part of the room. This can be frustrating for those wanting to see more of a room as well as those who would truly like to see close-up details. But those seriously interested in interiors will likely find notable touches to be savored. There is little text of any consequence and no index, but there is a listing of interior designers whose work appears in the book.

The rubbed, painted stripes of Thomas Jayne's Living Room walls is shown as is Sam Blount's showhouse Sitting Room with a panelled effect created with a wallpaper border. Sister Parish's former assistant Libby Cameron creates an homage to her idol with her own Living Room decorated with slipcovers, a quilt, a striped rug, and trompe l'oiel painted valances. Stephen Sills & James Huniford use a ladder to create a bookcase in a showhouse Living Room. One of Mario Buatta's most published showhouse Living Rooms is shown with a glorious giltwood mirror over the fireplace having invitations and postcards sticking out of the frame.

As with all of this series under the direction of then-editor Louis Oliver Gropp, the appeal of the book would probably be greater to those with sophisticated tastes of the traditional sort. But with prices ranging at this time to one cent to one dollar, one might consider ordering a stack for host/hostess gifts.