Product Description

The English style in interior design is admired and copied all over the world. At its grandest it means antiques, portraits, and artifacts--but the houses in this book are country cottages, farmhouses and parsonages, urban row houses, and apartments--not mansions. What links them is as much an attitude as a look. The English style of decoration is practical and informal, designed around the people who occupy the rooms rather than decorating to impress. These houses are lived in and loved, they are not afraid to be pretty and above all they are comfortable. Author Ros Byam Shaw divdes the book into Plain English, English Eccentric, English Rose, English Country House, and Classic English to reflect the many facets of English style. Each chapter end with accessible ideas for furnishing a house in that style. *A directory of suppliers will help you achieve the look in your home. *Featured homes include those of writers Rafaella Barker, Leslie Geddes-Brown, and interior designers Emily Todhunter, Gilly and Geoff Newberry of Bennison Fabrics, and Roger Jones of Colefax and Fowler *Evocative photography by Chris Tubbs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47492 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

Review
English Home, House & Garden, World of Interiors, BBC Good Homes, Livingetc.

About the Author
Ros Byam Shaw former features editor of World of Interiors, now writes on design and interiors for House and Garden, the Sunday Telegraph Review, and the Independent. She is author of "'Old House New Home,"' "'Interiors by Design,"' and "'Bedroom Essentials"' (all Ryland Peters and Small).

Customer Reviews

A Book with Oodles of Charm! Ooodles, I Say!
After months, years, decades, MILLENIA of general disappointment with books featuring traditional decor -- we have a WINNAH! Abundant with gorgeous piccies of charming rooms filled with the romantic clutter of life, I drooled over most every photograph as if it were a rasher of crisply fried bacon. But the STAR photograph (it's also on the cover of the book & not the same as the cover featured on Amazon) has to be this ancient monster of a wing chair, large enough for two and upholstered in a faded yellow floral, a deteriorating green velvet & a beige linen. And scrunched together on the seat of this throne are 2 gigantic yellow silk pillows in which one can sink in a billow of joy. Blimey, you don't see chairs like this on Architectural Digest! I really must salute the photographer Chris Tubbs who imbued every image with the glorious shabby Englishness that many of us miss in today's contemporary interiors. This book makes we want to sell my Spanish Colonial & move to a tumble-down English rectory. I must also commend Ros Byam Shaw's well-written & superbly descriptive text, as contributing much to my pleasure.

My Rating: 5 stars & a Cornish pasty!

British casual home style, updated and dissected.
This is my new favorite shelter book. The photos are lovely, and I particularly enjoyed her chapter breakdowns and discussion of styles such as eclectic English, classic English and so on. Most of the homes are very layered visually, with creative use of color and textiles(not just white on white here), many are in the country. They generally have great charm or architectural detail to begin with, although the ways they are decorated varies considerably. There is not much in the way of pure modernism, and also little of the aristocratic design of Haute Britain, although more than a few of these "cottages" of course are owned by decorators, antiques dealers, or other people with a professional interest in a beautiful home. I have not seen these homes in other books, and the book is generous on photographs. If you liked the Taschen Country Homes books, you will want this.

Slouchy and comfortable, and very, very English
This is not really a decorator book--not something you run to for the ideas on how to create a truly elegant dining room, for example. Rather, it's a collection of color pictures of country English homes.

The homes are much more about practical necessity than about decorator style, and they feature the kind of comfy, unmatched style of home that you can picture the characters of some mystery novel by Agatha Christie living in. There are glorious antiques galore, pots of just picked flowers from the garden, and the paintings of ancient relatives hanging above a fireplace.

Just the thing to sit down with a cup of tea, and enjoy browsing through.