Rooms for everyone

A worthwhile reprint of Bradbury's 2012 edition and slightly updated with the addition of three house interiors (and it's called a compact edition but it's only around five centimetres less on the width and depth). The thing that almost all the interiors have in common is space and how it's creatively used in each room to reflect the house owner's living ideals.

The rooms are presented historically from Edith Wharton's 1902 Mount House in Massachusetts up to the 2018 Commune designed Berkeley House in San Francisco and worth saying that a third of the hundred and three house interiors are in the US, the remainder are scattered around the world though mostly in Europe. The format for each house starts with a quite comprehensive essay on the various rooms and how the actual structure could influence the way furniture and fittings are positioned. A good example of this is British designer David Pocknell's 2007 barn conversion to a home and office, planning regulations had to be taken into account as well as supporting beams, seven photos reveal the designer's clever solution. John Lautner's 1962 Garcia House in LA has a huge vaulted roof that flows over the whole structure creating sloping ceilings in several rooms, nine photos, over two spreads, show how cosy the rooms look.

Living rooms provide the big photos for each interior (with several showing those tables displaying mini stacks of thick cultural books) and smaller ones for bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms usually over two spreads. Oddly Dieter Rams has his interiors summed up with three photos on one spread (maybe less is more) and Eduardo Longo's 1979 Casa Bola in Sao Paulo is another oddity because it's a sphere, another example of how the structure dictates the arrangement of the living areas.

I enjoyed looking through the six hundred photos in the book and because the past and presents owners generally reflect a cultural or creative persona the design solutions are extremely varied and visually quite stimulating. Rooms here for everyone.