Secondhand Interior Design & Houses Bargain Book Box SP4251

Secondhand Interior Design & Houses Bargain Book Box SP4251

Eight large-format hardbacks with jackets, five of them from the “Living in” series: Venice, Paris, Rome, Provence and Scotland, each photographed inside private homes a visitor never sees. With them are The English Country Room, The Traditional Buildings of England and The Mansions of Long Island’s Gold Coast. These are expensive coffee-table books, and good ones.

1. Living in Venice — Elizabeth Vedrenne & André Martin — Palazzo rooms with clouded mirrors, faded silk walls and water light on the ceilings, lived in by the families who have kept them for generations. The book shows a private Venice behind the façades, and Martin photographs decay as if it were luxury.
2. Living in Scotland — Lesley Astaire, Roddy Martine & Fritz von der Schulenburg — Castles, shooting lodges and tenement flats, all tartan rugs, peat fires and walls crowded with pictures. Von der Schulenburg’s photographs make you want to move in, draughts and all.
3. Living in Provence: Interior Styles and Decoration — Sara Walden, with photographs by Solvi Dos Santos — Farmhouses and village houses in ochre, blue and terracotta, with stone fireplaces and big glazed pots. Terence Conran, who had a house there, wrote the foreword.
4. The Traditional Buildings of England — Anthony Quiney — Timber-framed halls, stone cottages, barns and farmhouses, explained region by region by an architectural historian. It shows why an English village looks the way it does, down to the local stone and thatch.
5. Living in Paris — José Alvarez — Apartments, studios and town houses behind the courtyard doors, from grand Left Bank salons to painters’ attics. Christian Sarramon and Nicolas Bruant took the photographs, and the range of homes is the strength.
6. Living in Rome — Bruno Racine, with photographs by Alain Fleischer — Roof terraces, frescoed ceilings and rooms built into ancient walls, in a city where people live on top of two thousand years. Racine ran the French Academy at the Villa Medici, so he had the keys.
7. The Mansions of Long Island’s Gold Coast — Monica Randall — The Gatsby houses themselves: the châteaux and castles built by the Vanderbilts, Phippses and Guggenheims, many since demolished. Randall grew up exploring them empty, and her account of what was lost is the heart of the book.
8. The English Country Room — Michael Pick & Fritz von der Schulenburg — Halls, libraries, bedrooms and boot rooms in English country houses, with the dogs’ beds and straw hats left in the picture. A classic of its kind, because the rooms look lived in.