Architect Gil Schafer III has built a reputation on creating classic homes - both new homes with the warmth and appearance of old houses, and older structures renovated for today's way of living.
He shares his secrets and takes readers inside some of his projects in The Great American House: Tradition for the Way We Live Now.
In the book, Schafer explains what he calls the elements of a great house - architecture, decoration and landscape, which he considers parts of a gracious, livable whole. He also delves more deeply into the process behind the creation of four homes, two of them new construction and the other two renovations of existing homes.
His text is illustrated with ample photographs of his own homes or those he's designed, all of which share a traditional, time-tested look.
The Great American House is published by Rizzoli and sells for $55 in hardcover.
- Akron Beacon Journal
Edith Wharton at Home: Life at The Mount by Richard Guy Wilson takes us behind the scenes at the summer "cottage" of a turn-of-the-century writer and socialite. She wrote novels, poetry, stories and non-fiction between 1900 and the mid 1930s.
Back then, there were no major appliances - it took armies of servants to run such a home.
If you enjoyed Downton Abbey, you'll love John Arthur's scores of full-colour photographs of the house and garden in Massachusetts as it is today, plus the many pictures taken by the family and their guests in decades gone by.
Edith Wharton at Home is published by Random House; $51 hardback.
