Customer Reviews

The Private House

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After reading and flipping the pages of many architecture and design books over the last 20 years, I have found none as fun or in truly informative as this one Ms.Tarlow has put together. It's her human quality in the writing that really comes across in this book to make it warm and a real learning experience, not like a difficult professor in grad school but more of caring private tutor who tells you all the stories so you learn the lesson not just memorize it. Some of the design situations certainly will not arise in my life (dealing with a kitchen in the pool house comes to mind.) But it's full of great perspective, many lessons and a wonderful read nonetheless. Ms. Tarlow takes us on a journey that is so personal yet so professional and exotic you feel lucky to have been invited into her Private House.

This book is minimally instructional. It's filled with the author's memories of the small things that make life interesting--but they don't make the book interesting. This is really a poorly-organized memoir, and not a book on design. The "tips" that the author shares are fairly common knowledge, and it's not worth slogging through yet another paragraph on the joys of a finding a scrap of exquisite fabric in a shop in Paris after a lovely little lunch at an out-of-the-way cafe, and how lovely it looked in Mr. Insert-Name-Here's quaint chateau. Rose Tarlow should have just written her autobiography and not tried to disguise it as a design book. Two stars for the fact that it wasn't completely false advertising.

Rose Tarlow invites us into her rarefied world, and aren't we lucky. She has created sublimely elegant furniture and environments for a number of years, yet her work has not received the kind of extensive editorial converage that some of her less talented contemporaries have. She has composed a relatively slim volume of words and images that is at once very personal yet instructional.

We are given a peek into her private life with descriptions of the house she grew up in as well as the creation of her magnificent home in Bel Air California and other projects.She shares some of her fundamental design pricipals in addition to a history of how she began her very unique and successful career.

This is a book for anyone who appreciates extraordinary design in addition to being a wealth of information culminated from a lifetime of exploration and study.

In some ways, this book is shabby chic taken to its ultimate extreme, that is, if you can apply "shabby" to virtually priceless museum-quality antiques absolutely dripping with patina and shop-keeper's lore. Rose Tarlow's prose will make you howl -- she is so wealthy and privileged, yet so visceral in her love for the very best, it's pure decorator's porn. I adore this book, although I feel her own home is the best example of her talent, wit, and fantastically comprehensive knowledge. Some of her featured clients' homes are merely opulent and, for my taste, rather predictable and stuffy.

Rose Tarlow knows more about art history and interior design through the centuries than any living person. Unfortunately, she really isn't interested in teaching you a thing.

I read the book carefully and then went through it a second time to see if there was a single design principle or piece of advice I could come away with. Amazingly there wasn't.

Rose plays her cards close to her chest.

Rose Tarlow is a genius.The elegance and beauty of her interiors is without equal. I adored the chapter about the house of her parents.It sets the stage for her attitudes about life and buildings. The more frequently I look at the photographs the more I learn. If you buy the book look at the details after the first shock of the freshness of the rooms. The lessons learned from this book could be used by the person who has a very limited budget, although obviously the furniture and objects in these rooms are extremely rare and must have taken years to find. The strange thing is that although the furniture is rare and the fabrics expensive there is never anything pretensious. Choices are made about the shapes of objects and reverance for the integrity materials. There is a freedom in her work that borders on the whimsical; she allows vines to grow up and over the walls and it doesn't matter if a few leaves fall; she uses simple bamboo shades in a great house next to fabulous 17th century furniture; she hangs red velvet bags at the end of a severe formal double bed.She turns seams inside out. Actually,although these rooms use period furniture, they feel modern because of the use of fabrics, mix of styles.Tarlow's rooms have genius because of the consistency of attitude and reverence for materials and comfort for everyday life. The text is very well written and clear and is especially easy for those not initiated into design world jargon.I have used the book already to solve some problems in my own 1,200 square foot house.

Ms. Tarlow has decidedly good taste and most of the photographs are quite lovely.
However, the writing is painfully bad.
To ferret out the few, good tidbits of advice, one must slog through pedestrian prose. Full of contradictions and further weighted down with the author's incredible self-absorption.

As an interior designer, my library is bulging with design books. Yet, time and time again, I reach for "The Private House." Insightful and genuine, "The Private House" always provides me with a bit of stimulation, a bit of grounding, and a subtle reminder to always use the best and most unusual furniture, fabrics, and art available to a client's budget. The information provided within the pages of "The Private House," are worth the journey - constantly.

I waited a long time for a Western interior design book that speaks directly to me; it was worth the wait. Paul Goldberger says it best in his foreword: "Rose Tarlow's work celebrates the reality of living -- the way in which, out of a complex mist of memories, emotions, aspirations, and knowledge, each of us builds a life that is like none other. Her rooms are like no other, and they are marked by a natural grace." Her wonderful, delicate text and intensely satisfying photographs are to return to time and again; this is a treasure that is much more than an obsessive-compulsive personal summary of what antiquaire Rose Tarlow teaches in her UCLA master interior design class. As she also writes (and I've long agreed), "If I were forced to choose, I would much prefer to live surrounded by carefully selected and much loved books than by indifferent art" -- add the fabulous At Home With Books by Estelle Ellis to your purchase. A true connoisseur.

Rose Tarlow's very beautifully illustrated book THE PRIVATE HOUSE will disappoint decorators, would-be decorators, and possibly students. This is not a textbook meant to offer 'how to' steps to force-feed the recipes for private spaces.

Instead, this book is a gentle read of how the highly respected Tarlow has created beautiful rooms and homes with elements of furniture, art, antiquities, and memorabilia with choices in fabrics and wall and furniture treatments that make one's home a castle. She deftly demonstrates how to make use of available light, making hallways, niches, windows and rooms focal points for praising light as an art entity.

The writing is simple and readable. The photography is elegant and descriptive and offers the eye many moods and examples of ideas of how each of us can make our own space uniquely ours. And that is a lot for a book on home enhancement to do! Grady Harp, October 05