Emily Chalmers is a talented stylist with a strong feel for the current `zeitgeist': the eclectic, slightly shabby look found in shops like Anthropologie. Along with photographer Debi Treloar and writer Ali Hanan, Chalmers documents this style visually in this book, which was actually published as early as 2005.
The houses Chalmers uses to illustrate this style belong to beautiful people worldwide, and many of the room and detail shots are highly atmospheric. The interiors do have a `lived in' look which is nicely approachable. This legitimizes the `anything goes together' style; whilst warning how to avoid a haphazard mess.
For me, having grown up in the orange and brown hell of the 1970s, there's a little too much of that rather dusty colour palette here for my liking, but many of the other colour combinations shown are striking yet seem easy to live with...
I have a few quibbles. I really don't think the children's rooms shown here are either practical or appropriate for small kids - my little darlings would have had constant nightmares from the gloomy Russian painting (seemingly of a firing squad!) suggested as visual simulation on one page. And if Ms Chalmers thinks it's still possible to pick up an original Eames chair at a flea market for a song these days, she's living in a fantasy world. Car boot sales round our neck of the woods are more likely to yield melamine-faced chipboard and nests of hideously irredeemable coffee tables...
The structure of the book - element-by-element (eg lighting, seating), then room-by-room - is helpful. But like many of these kinds of volumes, this is largely eye-candy. The difference is you might actually be able to afford at least some of the quirky kind of furniture shown here, or at least be inspired to have a go at revamping a second-hand piece or two. Whether you'll be able to afford the vast semi-industrial loft space/Manhattan apartment/small French chateau to put them all in is another matter entirely...