Customer Reviews

Victorian Kitchens & Baths

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

 

 

This is a wonderful book for anyone dreaming of restoring a Victorian home. Lots of pictures but also well researched and interesting text. Helpful for those of us who do not want to model "mimic" our rooms after a specific photo spread in a book, but would like to understand, incorporate, and enjoy the historic details of our beautiful homes.

Plenty of eye candy to drool over and a nice variety of photos from over-the-top high-end rooms to simple log cabins, especially for those who are more interested in "period inspired" than "period accurate". (For that, get Jane Powell's book "Bungalow Bathrooms".) However, it suffers in the editing department. The book is a conglomeration of short articles by a bunch of different authors rather than a single author's work. Typos and misused homonyms disrupted the flow of reading. Some factual errors were particularly irritating: for instance, "It marks a period of 'balloon construction', which implies that moldings and other architectural elements would no longer be molded into place individually or carved one by one. Rather they would come in strips and be shipped from factories in bulk." I'd like some of what that contributor was smoking, because it was apparently pretty good stuff - balloon construction referred to a specific style of FRAMING a house, it has nothing to do with the moldings. If you want information on the history of household sanitation and on residential construction of the Victorian era, read something else, this one's primarily for the pictures.

This is the exact book I've been looking for. I recently bought a victorian house and want to bring it back to its original period, and this book has helped more than any other I've purchased. Many books tell the reader to "be creative", but I don't want to "be creative". I want to be accurate. I needed a detailed synopsis of what is really period and how the Victorians lived and used their kitchen/bathrooms. This book explained what furniture, accessories, finishes, and styles the Victorians actually used and why. And they talked about what Victorians DID NOT use and why. Very helpful.

This book provided lots of photos of Victorian elements incorporated into today's homes. That's exactly what I was looking for.

I was surprised to discover that "Victorian Kitchens and Baths" is more a collection of articles from various experts than a treatise by the listed authors. Some of the articles were extremely helpful. Others were a bit redundant. The changing role of the kitchen through Victorian times was interesting. I guess it's hard to write much about the changing role of the bathroom, though. I do like this book; I'd just have liked it better if it had more details about bathroom fixtures, like embossed toilets and tubs. Guess that's why you go to more than one source for information. Oh, as for the resources listed in the back, don't expect all of them to be available still. The internet is a quickly changing place, after all.

I was kind of hoping this would be a "Bungalow Kitchens"/"Bathrooms" that was exclusively for Victorians, but I was wrong. It's still a very useful book but it's got a lot of modern interpretations in it - it's by no means a purely period book. There are some photos of period house museum rooms, but there's a lot more photos of "Victorian inspired" rooms. Sadly, some of the latter rooms already look a tiny bit outdated. Still, if you love Victorians and want all the info you can find on recreating or improving your own Victorian, then this book may be helpful to you. Not as helpful as Jane Powell's stuff, of course, but still helpful. ;)