Customer Reviews

Room By Room: Victorian Interiors

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

 

 

Ms. Livingston's credentials suggest she possesses more than a layman's understanding of Victorian style. Unfortunately, the images she's chosen to populate this book with prove otherwise. This book contains only a few truly Victorian rooms. Most shots are of badly overdecorated Colonial Revival interiors, replete with contemporary furnishings. Worst of all, several of these so called "Victorian" rooms are in fact Arts and Crafts in style, a direct revolt against Victorianism. This VictorianISH at best.

This coffee-table book is filled with quality color photos of rooms mostly decorated in modern times in what might be called variations of "traditional" styling--a decorating style that has remarkably little to do with Victorian interiors, which is, after all, the title of the book. If you're looking for the real thing, stay away from this book. It should have been titled Victorian Erzats.

I ordered this book because of the title. We moved into an 1893 Victorian Queen and are trying to renovate this house and landscape the yard. We want to do it right, so we are looking for info as to how the house itself would hve looked in 1893.
Our local library falls way short of what we need. This book also falls way short of what Victorian houses looked like.
The pictures of the interiors of the houses are very nice, but the pictures are of interiors of houses that have very little resemblance of the Victorian era. One room was Oriental.

We wanted info. on ceiling treatments, light fixtures, picture rails, wall treatments, window treatments, stairs, and parquet flooring. No info. concerning these topice was covered in this book.
The pictures were pretty and the decorating was nice, but many pictures were very small, and the font size was the smallest available. The font size should have been much larger - so that I could read it and because there were inches and inches of blank space on every page. The page layouts didn't fill the pages.
This book was grossly mis-named.
Over all, if youwant a book that shows you how Victorian houses looked on the inside, this is definately not the one that you want or need.

I gave this book a "1" since there was no "zero" available.

Ms. Livingston's credentials suggest she possesses more than a layman's understanding of Victorian style. Unfortunately, the images she's chosen to populate this book with prove otherwise. This book contains only a few truly Victorian rooms. Most shots are of badly overdecorated Colonial Revival interiors, replete with contemporary furnishings. Worst of all, several of these so called "Victorian" rooms are in fact Arts and Crafts in style, a direct revolt against Victorianism. This VictorianISH at best.

The book we ordered was hard to find in book stores, but was an easy find on Amazon. It shipped quickly, and arrived in excellent condition.