interesting read, a collection of essays by english ladies of means about their adventures in remodeling, furnishing, decorating their homes/castles/farms--the haunts of the rich and mostly famous. their enjoyment in choosing colors, fabrics, furniture, and collaborations with skilled artisans and builders is palpable, and transfers to the reader no matter how humble our domestic circumstances.

So many damned black and white photos! Colour is one of the things about these places that is so striking.
Rather frustrating & falls short of Lees-Milne's An Englishman's... -which is actually very good.

The stories which talk about the interiors shown here are interesting and explain a lot about why these rooms look like they do. Pity that many of the pictures are in black and white, not colour..

Good book

This book asks 28 (privileged) Englishwomen to write essays about their homes, and the results are personal, compelling, and beautifully photographed. None of them give "decorating tips", per say, but instead reminisce about how they acquired their homes (often through marriage), a bit about the building's history, and how the spaces came to look the way they do now.

There's only one "contemporary" interior showcased, designer Jean Muir's all-white London flat. The rest either have ancestral decor, or an either real or faked Colefax & Fowler air. ("My style of decoration is, I suppose, a debased and poor woman's version of John Fowler," muses Anne Scott-James. "That [Surrey] house was my ideal and I carried its picture in my mind when I set about converting my slummy cottage.") (PS: I like her home best, with its modest but lovely rooms, scads of built-ins, and neat-as-a-pin creaminess.)

Other highlights include the classically gracious but livable house of Susanna Johnston (who was determined to use an old roll of Voysey wallpaper in her study, and had to make it stretch by leaving big patches undone behind sofas, chairs, and cabinets), a converted stone barn for Joan Holland ("All our friends were of the same opinion [about our purchase], which, when we looked at the tree growing out of the roof and the fourteen furrowing sows wallowing happily in a foot of liquid manure in what was to be my bedroom, was hardly surprising"), a snug castle outside Bath (built in the shape of a clover, with three rooms and a landing per floor), and Daphne Fielding's luxurious converted outbuilding, erected as a laundry on the grounds of a large estate in 1662. There are also a number of National Trust buildings with historic rooms, which I find less interesting and attractive.

With so many individuals contributing to a book, it almost serves as a personality test, and you find yourself actively liking or disliking the different authors. The late Laura Ashley sounds like a bit of a grump, and her interiors are perfectly balanced and perfectly sterile, like a showroom in one of her stores. Barbara Cartland's house is in appalling taste, with the most vulgar, gilded, canopied bed I've ever seen, complete with heart-shaped pillows. ("My two favorites are Nile blue and bright coral pink...wherever I have lived I have had these colors.")(Note to self: AVOID AT ALL COST!) You even begin to wonder if one couple is trapped in a homosexual marriage of convenience, as the wife describes grabbing all the best rooms for her own suite during a remodel and banishing her husband to the attic.

But the landlady who makes me giggle is one Lady Hussey, who seems like the classically dry, intimidating mother in law. She shares her distress at having to use some of her castle's many heirloom damask tablecloths (re-dyed) for curtains and slipcovers during the lean war years. (Horrors!) But don't worry about Betty; she found an entire "lamp room" in her vast house stocked with old Tiffany lamps, and in an old cupboard, masses of "ravishing eighteenth century original watercolors, labeled birds and butterflies of the Brazils" which she used as art.

Things like that happen in English houses.

A lovely read.