Category: Book review

  • The Home-sewn Home

    Cover of book The Home-sewn Home by Vanessa Arbuthnott with Gail Abbott.Vanessa Arbuthnott needs no introduction to fans of modern country interiors. From its beginnings on the kitchen table 10 years ago, Vanessa Arbuthnott Fabrics has grown to include the current fabric collections featuring natural and classic motifs, stripes and spots, plus co-ordinating wallpaper, rugs, runners, sofas, chairs and quilts.

    The Home-sewn Home uses Vanessa’s fabrics as a basis for 50 projects – from curtains and blinds through cushions, chair covers, tablecloths and runners to hot water bottle covers and lavender hearts – providing step-by-step instructions so you can make them yourself.

    For complete beginners, some instructions might prove somewhat challenging on first reading. A little more hand-holding on the basics, such as curtain and blind measuring, is helpful for those who have never tackled their own projects before, and a glossary would be a great addition to a future edition. For British readers, the US spellings and terms – cozy, miter and shade rather than blind, for example – can jar a little.

    However, the projects themselves have generously sized illustrations as well as fabulous photography that make them easy to follow, and the range of soft furnishings covered mean there’s something for every confidence level.

    The photography of the completed projects – beautifully styled by Gail Abbott and Sally Denning – is a great prompt to use the fabrics shown, but there are useful tips so you can select and team fabric designs with the same attractive results if you’re shopping elsewhere.

    A resurgence of interest in making your own interior furnishings, and a desire to create the traditional comfort associated with country interiors wherever your home happens to be located make this book a timely addition to the sew-your-own section – and the interiors are inspiring enough to make this a great buy for your room design library even if you don’t fancy getting out the sewing machine.

    The Home-sewn Home by Vanessa Arbuthnott with Gail Abbott, Cico Books

  • Mid-Century Modern

    Mid-Century Modern book coverIt’s hard to turn the pages of an interiors magazine these days without spotting an iconic piece of mid-century design inside a real home or as part of a decorating scheme. Eames chairs, Ercol tables, Lucienne Day’s textile designs, Poul Hennigsen’s ‘Artichoke’ lamp for Louis Poulsen – shown on the cover of this book – are all familiar elements in 21st century homes.

    Many of these celebrated designs have remained in production since they were launched, but mid-century modern was derided for many years, Judith Miller’s book reminds us. Thoroughly rehabilitated and objects of desire once more, your originals might now be worth a bob or two, as you’ll discover using the price guidelines here.

    For those of us buying or admiring the newly made examples of these classics instead, this book will still prove a great guide to the work of designers from Alvar Aalto to Frantisek Zemek. And if the furniture and lighting of the late 1940s to the 1970s are more familiar to you than the glass, ceramics, metalware and textiles, it’ll sharpen your skills in spotting the designs of the period and its continuing influence.

    Miller put this period in design history in its context as a reaction to what went before, and an antidote to post-war austerity. She examines how the availability of new materials and techniques also inspired designers, and how the forms visible for the first time through electron microscopes were reflected by the patterns of the period.

    But if you want to feast your eyes on the designs as well as learning the history, there’s plenty for you, too with generous illustration of individual pieces.

    Mid-Century Modern, Living with mid-century modern design by Judith Miller, Miller’s