Customer Reviews

House & Garden Book of Style: The Best of Contemporary Decorating

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Dominique Browning, editor of HOUSE & GARDEN magazine, has a triumph on her hands with "House & Garden Book of Style." HOUSE & GARDEN has long been the sophisticated cousin to the more accessible HOUSE BEAUTIFUL, and that chicness is in evidence here. The HOUSE & GARDEN cool austerity--sometimes sacrificing warmth for hard-edged style, but many times not--is amply displayed throughout.

The book covers a panoply of styles, from "Country Luxe" to "New International" to "Mid-Century Modern" and beyond. The shabby warmth of English-inspired rooms is covered, as is the prissier French look--but as HOUSE & GARDEN so often does, there is almost always a visual wrench thrown into the works to get your attention and make you rethink your assumptions about a particular genre. Perfectly making the point is the photograph on p. 25, which shows an 18th-century settee decorously covered in a taupe damask, above which hangs what appears to be a piece of Spirograph art made with screamingly bright primary oil paints. The effect is jarring--but it works.

The thinking which goes into the decoration of these rooms is explored just as deeply as the looks themselves. Although photographs take up most of the room--as they should, since this is a case when a picture telling a thousand words is not only desirable, but necessary for instructing the reader--the text is informative and enlightening. The end result is that these profoundly individual rooms make their own cases, and what beautiful cases they make.

I'm usually a fan of House and Garden and considered it a real treat to be able to pick this book up for a few dollars, but sadly, page after page was simply an exercise in sensory overload with room collections that were overdone and extreme. So to borrow a line from the previous reviewer, "the effect was jarring"...and while I favor traditional interiors, this book had very little that I could appreciate and even less that I could translate into something for my own home.