The World of Interiors
May 2021Get The World of Interiors digital magazine subscription today for the most influential and wide-ranging design and decoration magazine you can buy. Inspiring, uplifting and unique, it is essential reading for design professionals, as well as for demanding enthusiasts craving the best design, photography and writing alongside expert book reviews, round-ups of the finest new merchandise, plus comprehensive previews and listings of international art exhibitions.
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books
ROMANTICS AND CLASSICS: STYLE IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSE (by Jeremy Musson; Rizzoli, rrp £45) Architectural historian Jeremy Musson set off to explore 20 privately owned stately (and some not-so-stately) houses in search of the much-emulated yet elusive quality alluded to by this book’s title. Certainly, although opulent and atmospheric, all the interiors (beautifully shot by Hugo Rittson Thomas) seem to strike a delicate balance between aesthetics and quotidian practicalities. Perhaps nothing sums up that equilibrium quite so neatly as the picture of an 18th-century bust by Joseph Nollekens serving as a hat stand or as charmingly as one of the scenes that greets us at Haddon Hall in the Peak District, where one of Lord and Lady Edward Manners’s young twin boys can be seen absorbed in his Lego…
pour relief
serious pursuits
After a year of involuntary confinements a trip to a cave mightn’t be everyone’s idea of pure escapism. But the BUONTALENTI GROTTO in Florence’s Boboli Gardens is no ordinary cavern, as you will gather from its façade, which is topped by a heavy fringe of weird pendant encrustations. It might just be the maddest tympanum in the history of architecture. Inside, the 16th-century architect Bern ardo Buontalenti went full Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen – or, better still, Florence Llewelyn-Bowen – in the name of Mannerism, with murals, sculpture, fountains and water jets to delight (and drench) Francesco I de’ Medici, his ducal client. To think, you might have been looking at your ultimate lockdown garden project here, but with restrictions slowly lifting it’s perhaps a bit too late to set about recreating…
