Secondhand Interior Design & Houses Bargain Book Box SP4250

Secondhand Interior Design & Houses Bargain Book Box SP4250

Eight large-format hardbacks with jackets: Houses and Gardens of Portugal, Houses and Palaces of Andalusia, New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence, In the Romantic Style, Great Designers of the World and three regional volumes of Showcase of Interior Design. Heavy, glossy coffee-table books of the kind that cost a fortune new.

1. Houses and Gardens of Portugal — Patrick Bowe, with photographs by Nicolas Sapieha & Francesco Venturi — Baroque manor houses, blue-and-white tiled garden walls and water tanks the size of swimming pools. The cover shows the Mateus palace reflected in its lake, and the rest of the book lives up to it.
2. Showcase of Interior Design: Midwest Edition III — Portfolios of the leading designers of the American Midwest, each showing their best rooms. A record of high-end 1990s decorating, swags and all.
3. Showcase of Interior Design: Pacific Edition II — The West Coast volume: California and Hawaii houses, with firelight and ocean views.
4. Showcase of Interior Design: Southern Edition II — The Southern volume: staircases, chinoiserie wallpaper and formal sitting rooms.
5. Great Designers of the World — John L. Pellam with Corinne Z. Kopen — An international survey of interior designers and their grandest commissions, with a foreword by Donald Lilly. The double staircase on the cover sets the scale.
6. Houses and Palaces of Andalusia — Patricia Espinosa de los Monteros, with photographs by Francesco Venturi — Seville, Córdoba and Granada from inside: Moorish courtyards, tiled patios and ducal palaces still in family hands.
7. In the Romantic Style — Linda Chase & Laura Cerwinske — Draped fabric, faded paint, busts on pedestals: rooms designed for atmosphere over tidiness, with advice on how the effect is built.
8. New Orleans: Elegance and Decadence — Richard Sexton & Randolph Delehanty — Creole cottages, crumbling plaster and rooms full of inherited things, photographed by Sexton with Delehanty’s history of the city. The best-loved book on New Orleans houses, and the pick of the box.