Country living evokes bucolic landscapes and picturesque villages—rolling Connecticut countryside, verdant farmland, the sun-drenched hills of Malibu—and the architecture that echoes these idyllic settings. These houses, ranging from family estates to weekend retreats, are the personal homes of decorators and tastemakers, including Jonathan Adler, Martyn Lawrence-Bullard, and Steven Gambrel. The properties exemplify varied design perspectives and provide fresh ideas about how country living is ideal for creative expression. This inspiring medley ranges from Tony Duquette’s exotic pavilion-style California home to a charming New York Victorian, a modernist Palm Springs desert getaway by Neutra, a nineteenth-century Gothic cottage on Shelter Island, and an eighteenth-century Connecticut house. Along with design ideas for interiors, the book also covers the garden and pool areas. Since outdoor entertaining is an integral part of country living, a section devoted to tabletop display is included. These beautifully photographed inspirations encourage the reader to explore the design opportunities in the country guided by the best interior designers.
Author Annie Kelly is also a decorator, design writer, and magazine editor.
With her husband, photographer Tim Street-Porter, she is based in Los Angeles, and has a second home two hours outside of New York in Litchfield, Connecticut.
Born in Australia, Kelly first trained as an artist. In 1993 she started work in Los Angeles as a decorator, and her projects have been published in a variety of design magazines: House and Garden, House Beautiful, Australian Vogue Living, Elle Decor, Metropolitan Home, English House and Garden, Traditional Home, Country Living and World of Interiors. Kelly's renovation of Frank Lloyd Wright's La Miniatura in Pasadena was featured as a cover story in Architectural Digest. She is currently working on several decorating projects in New York and Los Angeles.
In the 1990s she was a contributing editor on House & Garden (USA), and worked as a stylist on shoots for them, as well as Town and Country, Western Interiors and many others.
Kelly's design work has been featured in numerous books including three written and photographed by her husband Tim Street-Porter. They are Freestyle (Stewart Tabori and Chang,) Casa Mexicana (Stewart Tabori and Chang) and The Los Angeles House (Clarkson Potter,) as well as Be Your Own Decorator (Rizzoli) by Susanna Salk.
She has been a guest in the past on many decorating television shows, and apart from her books, writes about design and decoration for national magazines both here and in other countries. These include World of Interiors, the Robb Report, German, French and Russian Architectural Digest, and Belle magazine in Australia. .
Kelly is currently reviewing design books for the on-line website magazine "Introspective," at the furniture-selling website 1stdibs.com where she writes for a column called "Required Reading," as well as putting together designer profiles for "Style Compass."
Her first book was Casa Mexicana Style in 2006(Stewart Tabori & Chang,) then Rooms to Inspire,(Rizzoli)followed by Casa San Miguel in 2008.Two more books in the series came out in 2009 and 2010, both from Rizzoli- Rooms to Inspire in the Country and Rooms to inspire in the City.
In 2011 she produced Litchfield County Style also for Rizzoli, which recently won the New England Society Book Prize and the latest is Rooms to Inspire (Rizzoli) by the Sea, published in 2012.
