Architecture & Interiors - 3 Book Bundle

Victorian Modern: A Design Bible for the Victorian Home by Jo Leevers and Rachael Smith - Published: Thames and Hudson Ltd - 2023-05-25 - 240 pages.

The ultimate design bible for the Victorian home, placing period features and 19th-century design in context and exploring how today’s designers are adapting these houses in innovative ways for contemporary lifestyles.

Loved for their period character, Victorian homes aren’t always suited to modern living. Victorian Modern is the ultimate design bible to help you make sense of those inherited quirks and features, showing how leading designers and creative homeowners are turning their own homes into contemporary showstoppers.

The book comprises seven chapters, organized according to how we use our homes: dining, cooking, entertaining, sleeping, bathing, working and transitional areas, such as hallways. Each chapter explains how the Victorians designed and decorated these spaces, before moving on to their modern interpretations. Inside are plenty of tips, tricks and inspiration for transforming your 19th-century home into a light-filled modern one, ready for the 21st century.

Combining cultural context with advice and inspiration from the homes of interior designers, architects and stylists, Victorian Modern reveals how the history and design of 19th-century homes can influence and inform our modern lifestyles and home decor in fresh and interesting ways.

The Japanese House Since 1945 by Naomi Pollock and Tadao Ando - Published: Thames and Hudson Ltd - 2023-10-12 - 400 pages.

The definitive overview of and ultimate resource on the iconic architect-designed houses built in Japan from 1945 to the present.

Imagine a terraced house whose courtyard separates the kitchen from the bedroom. Or a tiny, triangular tower of rooms stacked one above another. Quirky, experimental and utterly fascinating, the houses produced in Japan since the end of the Second World War are among the most exceptional in the world. The Japanese House Since 1945 is a cohesive chronology of the most compelling architect-designed Japanese homes, showing developments in form, material, architectural expression and family living over almost eight decades.

Unparallelled in their conceptual purity, many Japanese houses have become icons at home as well as abroad. Presented with clear prose and accompanied by compelling photographs and drawings, this book features 97 houses, divided among nine chapters and organized by decade. In addition to acquainting the reader with individual homes, the book illuminates the social, technological, geographic and historical factors behind these era-defining houses. Developments over the period are underscored by the visual presentation, as it evolves from monochrome to colour and from hand-drawn to digital. Decade lead-ins set the historical context for each chapter, while ‘Spotlight’ segments draw attention to the separate components of the Japanese house. ‘At Home’ sections, most written by architects and their family members, bring to life the experience of living in these unique houses.

Quiet Spaces by William Smalley and Edmund de Waal - Published: Thames and Hudson Ltd - 2023-10-12 - 256 pages.

An elegant presentation of interiors for introverts, placing the memorable work of London architect William Smalley alongside buildings around the world that have inspired his practice.

Quiet Spaces places the work of architect William Smalley alongside spaces that have inspired him. Places of private contemplation – calm spaces to read a book or listen to music in, to walk through or simply be in – they are spaces that achieve a rare sense of repose and peace.

From his own Bloomsbury Apartment and projects in the UK, France and New York, the book expands to include the work of other architects: a sixteenth-century villa by Palladio, houses in Mexico and Sri Lanka and the Secular Retreat in Devon by Swiss master architect Peter Zumthor. There are also places of making and displaying art: simplicity in Barbara Hepworth’s garden and studio in Cornwall, and intimacy in Kettle’s Yard gallery in Cambridge.

Specially commissioned photography by Harry Crowder conveys the atmosphere of the spaces. A foreword by acclaimed potter and writer Edmund de Waal records the small, unspoken ways in which we relate to buildings and how they come to have meaning for us.