The Way We Live: An Ultimate Treasury for Global Design Inspiration

by Stafford Cliff, Gilles De Chabeneix (photographer)

Spectacular in scope yet intimate in detail, The Way We Live transcends the archetypal style book to reveal global connections and patterns in home decoration. This unique body of detailed design inspiration encompasses the full range of options, from climate, location, and size to surfaces, arrangements, and colors. Whether you’re decorating a beach house in Chile or a loft space in Paris, you’re sure to be inspired by hundreds of images from around the world—a Moroccan house that coolly mixes the modern and traditional in elegant interiors; a dramatic arrangement of shells decorating a tabletop in Mauritius; flowers strewn across bare floorboards for a Christmas feast in Sweden. The enormous range of places here highlight connections and parallels of very different habitats in a way both striking and reassuring. The same attention to detail can clearly inform the layout of a dining room in a modest Mexican home as it does an exclusive club in Buenos Aires. This encyclopedic tome, a sublime visual record of how we construct and adorn our living spaces, celebrates our communal experience of the home.

Genres: Architecture, Interior Design, Nonfiction, Design

480 pages, Hardcover

First published November 4, 2003

Reviews

[jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is heavy. If you walk to the library to pick it up, bring a burro to help you get it home. It's the "ultimate treasury for global design inspiration" which is kind of pretentious title and yes, the book flawlessly executes this sense of first-world entitlement on every page. It's lie, "Here is the Globe and its homes, waiting to inspire your design!" The whole thing is kind of squicky. So, anyway, there are about 100,000,000 pictures in here of homes in different places from different eras, none of the materials are sourced, which is fine by me because we probably couldn't afford any of it. There are handy cross-referential footnotes on most pages - looking for more homes with ornate staircases? Check these pages. Dining rooms? Here, here, here and here. In need of another Irish Mexican Portuguese Indian Manila Spanish Colonial home? Go to this page. You get the idea. Every time I look through this book, I see something I missed before, but frankly it is mostly smaller photos of very busy rooms, so there's no way your eyes/brain could process even 1/20-th of this info in one or five readings.

[Lydia · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of many interior design books written by Terence Conran's designer and book writer--He started the "Style" books with Conran's "The House Book." This one has 1000 photographs of his travels internationally, photographing dwellings around the world, including many finishing touches inside as well as outside.

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting as a reference book to design elements around the world.