Frances Lincoln

Lars Sjöberg has made it his life's work to understand and preserve the Swedish manor houses of the 17th and 18th centuries. Here, exquisitely photographed by Ingalill Snitt, are the eight houses (and one church) that he has acquired over more than 40 years. The book focuses on Sjöberg's first, most complex project: the manor of Regnaholm. Unoccupied for about 40 years when Sjöberg arrived in 1966, it allowed him to experiment with interior decoration and refurnishing, copying old furniture, reweaving, and reprinting old fabric patterns. His other projects include Ekensberg, a three-story Italianate villa near Lake Mälaren, built in 1788-90, and Salaholm in Västergötland with a garden laid out in the first half of the 17th century. Odenslunda, a small manor from the 1770s with a panelled exterior and a säteritak or manor-house roof, is his family home, while Sörby, a scaled-down early 17th-century manor house, was reproduced in its entirety for an exhibition in Stockholm. Full of insight and inspiration, this is a deeply personal summary of everything Lars Sjöberg has learned in his years of working and living with classic Swedish interiors.

This volume is the first scholarly study in the English language of Croatia's extraordinary artistic heritage. Leading specialists analyse the key cultural developments in this small country's history, from the extensive Roman remains on the Adriatic coast, through the gothic splendour of the Dalmatian cities in the Middle Ages and intensive artistic exchange with Italy during the Renaissance, to the grand houses and art collections of continental Croatia. The essays address iconic monuments like Diocletian's palace at Split and the walled city of Dubrovnik alongside more unfamiliar treasures, some never published before. This books sets Croatia's cultural past in context, reflecting the country's unique history at the crossroads between Italy, Central Europe and the Mediterranean. With contributions by leading British, American and Croatian writers and scholars, including John Julius Norwich, Timothy Clifford, Marcus Binney, Brian Sewell and Sheila McNally this book presents for the first time a portrait of the culture of this captivating and too little known country.

The Ivy Look is a pictorial celebration of the clothing and accessories that dominated the American male dress code from 1955 to 1965. Democratic, stylish and comfortable, the Ivy look's impact and influence can be seen to this day in the clothes of designers such as Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani and a host of imitators worldwide. From the button-down hip of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Miles Davis to the continental Ivy influenced sharp suits of Jean Paul Belmondo and Marcello Mastroianni, from the preppy elegance of the Kennedy brothers to the enduring style of the clothes-obsessed London mods — they all knew the true cool of the Ivy look. The Ivy Look digs deep into the vaults to produce the ultimate guide to the genuine article. New still life shots of original clothing and accessories plus key examples of the cover art of Blue Note, Stax, Motown and Atlantic Records. Contemporary magazine advertisements, French New Wave and key American movie posters and new illustrations will bring the Ivy look into sharp focus.

For anyone who wants their children to understand and love the art of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, this guide has questions and answers about thirty amazing objects. Anticipating how children will react to artifacts ranging from a Congolese mask or a Sioux warrior's tunic to a Javanese puppet or an Easter Island Moai, each section begins with very simple observations — 'This face doesn't look very African!' — and moves on to more complex questions such as 'What do the decorations on the forehead and temples represent?', 'Does white mean something special in Africa?'. Written in everyday language for people with no art expertise or teaching experience, the book includes maps, colour coding and thumbnail images to help you see where each featured work of art comes from. The explanations also include guidance on what's most appropriate for what age, from four to fourteen. There are invaluable tips for planning a visit to a museum and a thorough discussion of modern western perceptions of world art and the tricky terminology associated with the subject.

In Japanese gardens, visitors find nature consdensed and brought to perfection: trees are trained and sculpted; the finest natural landscapes are reproduced in miniature; and the seasons are celebrated with spring blossom and the fiery leaves of autumn. In this introduction to Japanese gardens Helena Attlee captures the essence of Japanese garden style and gives an outline of its history. She then explores in detail 28 of the great Japanese gardens, explaining their character and nature. Alex Ramsay's superb photographs, specially taken for the book, illustrate every aspect of the gardens.

Sandra Lousada grew up amidst a circle of actors, writers and artists living alongside the River Thames at Hammersmith. Through her grandfather, A.P. Herbert, her mother, the stage designer Jocelyn Herbert, and Jocelyn Herbert's lover, George Devine, founder of the Royal Court, she had privileged access to the worlds of literature, the arts, and the theatre. By the late 1950s she had begun to forge a language of her own, using the camera as her medium. This book is a rare compilation of photographs, culled from a career spanning over half a century, capturing Lousada's insider view of figures such as Lawrence Olivier and Joan Plowright, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Christie, Helen Mirren, Joanna Lumley and David Hockney as well as images from her glittering career as a fashion and beauty photographer working for magazines including Queen, Vogue, Tatler, and Harpers.

Brian May's painstaking excavation of exquisite stereo photographs from the dawn of photography transports the reader back in time to the lost world of an Oxfordshire village of the 1850s. At the book's heart is a reproduction of T R Williams' 1856 series of stereo photographs Scenes In Our Village. Using the viewer supplied with this book, the reader is absorbed profoundly into a village idyll of the early Victorian era: the subjects seem to be on the point of suddenly bursting back into life and continuing with their daily rounds. The book is also something of a detective story, as the village itself was only identified in 2003 as Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire, and the authors' research constantly reveals further clues about the society of those distant times, historic photographic techniques, and the life of the enigmatic Williams himself, who appears, Hitchcock-like, from time to time in his own photographs. The product of more than 30 years research, the mixture of social, photographic and biographical detail is handled with admirable lightness of touch, belying the depths of scholarship which underpin this ambitious enterprise.

Gardening writer Ursula Buchan has combined forces with garden photographer Andrew Lawson to explore the English garden and capture its richness and diversity. Focusing on gardens that are open to visitors, she explains the historical trends and the work of garden makers of the past that have shaped the English gardens we see today. With a wealth of outstanding examples, illustrated with 350 photographs, she describes many garden styles – formality, the landscape tradition, the Arts and Crafts style, the cottage garden and recent phenomena such as New Naturalism. Color, water, ornament and foreign influences are among the themes she considers, as well as such defining characteristics as the very English urge to grow flowers and the nation's love of roses.

Old Macdonald's farm is full of surprises. What's that in the pram? Who's flying a plane? What's got four arms and goes beep? Lift the flaps and see for yourself.

'It is in its pared-down luxury, however, that the house has its edge. All the panelling, architraves, doors, windows and skirtings were custom-made for the building; new floors were laid in rich brown or bleached oak boards, with limestone used for the hallway and bathrooms; at the flick of a Lutron switch, mood lighting changes the atmosphere of each room; and furniture and mirrors are scaled up to look just right in the large spaces, such as the oversized ottoman and sofa in the living room. Although the house is sparsely furnished, the pieces are of an enviably high quality.' The Times on John Minshaw's award-winning Wimpole Street home. As an Architectural & Interior Design Practice, John Minshaw Designs has been designing and building private residences for over 30 years. At the Design & Decoration Awards in 2005/6, he won both 'Designer of the Year' and 'Classical Residential Interior'. Minshaw says he came to interiors by default. But it is clear that his early training in fine art influences much of his work. «My style is to buy good antiques and design bespoke cabinetry, then put them into pared-down interiors» he says — a design ethic that is a neat contrast to the cliched froufrou swags and tails often associated with interior design. This book covers ten projects, spanning twenty years, offering a summary of Minshaw's work.

London now ranks alongside Paris, New York and Milan as a global fashion capital, and it has produced such outstanding designers as John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan and Stella McCartney. Style City tells, for the first time, the story of how that came about, describing how fashion developed in Britain from the early 1970s, when designer fashion scarcely existed, to the present day. The story is told largely through interviews with the designers and opinion-shapers of the time, among them Paul Smith, Philip Treacy, Jasper Conran, Bruce Oldfield, Betty Jackson, Wendy Dagworthy and Antonio Berardi. Ravishingly illustrated, the book includes photographs by David Bailey, Barry Lategan, Chris Moore and other leading fashion photographers, as well as many from the designers' own archives.

John Saladino's powerful new book, Villa, is nothing less than a master class in interior and garden design by one of the world's most distinguished architectural designers. It focuses on the stone ruin in the California hills looking over the Pacific that he has painstakingly refashioned as his dream house. It shows how his principles and passions guided him through the five-year process of reconstruction, restoration and decoration of the house and its gardens. With the aid of groundplans, drawings, photographs of the house in the 1920s, as it looked when he first bought it and during reconstruction, the author traces the architectural work involved. Then, in a superbly illustrated tour of the house and grounds, he proves that he practices what he has preached for more than thirty years. He juxtaposes light and dark, old and new, classical and modern, monumental and miniscule, hard and soft, to create the serenely timeless interiors and gardens that are his hallmark. Included with the book is a DVD tour of the house and garden, with a commentary by the author.

In this book, the acclaimed designer David Mlinaric discusses with author Mirabel Cecil the buildings he has worked on and been inspired by during his long career, and takes an expert look at the creation and interpretation of historic interiors. The practice Mlinaric started forty-five years ago in London now has thriving offices in Paris and New York. He has designed spaces in buildings the world over, among them London's National Gallery, the Royal Opera House, Spencer House, the primary galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Bath Assembly Rooms; embassies in Washington, Paris and Brussels; as well as houses for the Rothschild family, Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, and myriad other private clients.

John Fowler was an interior decorator who set fashions and changed tastes. The English country house style, which he developed with Sibyl Colefax and Nancy Lancaster, his partners in the firm of Colefax & Fowler, has proved a source of continuing inspiration to decorators and home-owners on both sides of the Atlantic and indeed across the world. Today, a hundred years after his birth, his influence is almost as powerful as it was in the mid 20th century, when he was working on many of Britain's finest and most famous houses, including Uppark, Chequers and Buckingham Palace, as well as dozens of more modest projects. Fowler's style has been so widely imitated that it is easy to forget what an innovator he was. In the 1930s and 1940s his style was a breath of fresh country air, sweeping away heavy velvets and damasks in favour of crisp cotton chintzes, replacing glossy mahogany with painted Regency furnishings, elaborate porcelain and glitzy ormolu with modest pottery and painted tin. Even after the war, when he came to specialize in the decoration of architecturally important interiors, he continued to prefer 'humble elegance' and 'romantic disrepair' to pomposity.

This book takes the reader on a guided tour of London's public squares, community and allotment gardens, front gardens and window boxes – and the myriad and monumental public parks, from the grand formality of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens to the wild heathland of Hampstead and the commons. Illustrated with photographs that capture all the diversity of London's green spaces, presenting a unique and fresh viewpoint on the familiar, crammed with intriguing information as well as practical details, this book is for Londoners, gardeners and environmentalists, and for all visitors to the city.

Penelope Hobhouse uses some of the finest gardens in the world to show how to lay out and plant formal, patterned, natural and flower gardens. Her examples range from Italianate Blake House garden at Berkeley, California, with its spectacular curving staircase and rectangular pool, to the Jekyll-inspired planting of white foxgloves in the wild garden at Knightshayes, Devon; from the excitement of the summer flower border at Pontrancart, Dieppe, to the simple greeness of a garden room at La Pietra in Tuscany. But this book is more than a tour of beautiful gardens. Penelope Hobhouse informs, advises and inspires on every aspect of garden design. She explains how to relate a garden to its setting; the importance of establishing a proper structure, whether as an end in itself or as a backdrop for decorative planning; and how to create a successful small garden. These themes are balanced by in-depth portraits of more than 20 gardens, some famous like Great Dixter, Villandry and Giustry, other less known and previously unpublished.

Each picture in this book could stand alone as a work of art — a testament to Sweden's innate sense of style. Period by period, house by house, breathtaking images and elegantly authoritative text focus on those special features of the traditional Swedish room that have made it one of the major influences on decorating today.

Van Gogh was inspired by the beauty and colours of nature. He brought this passion to life in some of the most vibrant depictions of the natural world ever put to canvas. This book takes a look at this side of the artist's life and work. It offers insight into the artist's unique vision with the help of his most beautiful paintings and excerpts from his own writings. We see that flowers such as the iris and the sunflower served as emblems of self-identity and that the fields were a testament to the cycle of life and a warning of the inevitability of death. The book offers a portrait of the joy and pleasure that Van Gogh experienced in his life and expressed with his brush.

Part of the Sticker Art Shapes series, this book offers children a chance to get to know six of Arcimboldo’s paintings on a truly interactive level. Young readers see a finished painting on one page, and on the opposite page, they recreate it with reusable stickers. Arcimboldo’s lively portraits, made of painted fruits, vegetables, and flowers, provide children with a unique understanding of composition, color, and style.

What is a Treevipus? A fantastic creature with the head of a trunkfish, the body of a weevil and the tail of a platypus, of course! Here, a host of creatures presented in humorous pictures and informative captions take on new names, and a hilarious new identity when their heads, bodies and legs are swapped around as the pages are flipped. Tony Meeuwissen's witty interchangeable text and beautifully detailed artwork combine to make an exceptional novelty book.

This book is an antidote to the sterility of the modern age. It's about capturing the romance of the past, but it doesn't advocate throwing away your washing machine and living in an old fashioned way. This is primarily an inspirational source book. As the featured interiors are often laced with fakery, Barbara explains how to recreate the tricks the designers used: she shows why a room looks romantic, and how the effect can be achieved through colours, paint, wallpaper, flower arrangements or still-lives on a shelf. The opening chapter of the book is a detailed story of the featured houses. The following sections are divided room by room: halls, sitting rooms, studies, bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens and dining rooms. The creators of these interiors are not all designers by trade, but with imagination they have created an individual and romantic style of their own.

This sticker book invites children to take a look at the works of art of the Impressionist painter, Claude Monet. It should encourage an interactive approach to art appreciation. The book contains 45 full-color reproductions of Monet's paintings, specially chosen to appeal to children. The 20 color stickers are reusable. Carole Armstrong is the author of All My Own Work and My Sticker Art Gallery: A Tour of Western Art.

The British Library Diary 2008 is illustrated with works from the Topographical Collection of George III, now held by the British Library. The collection of some 50,000 items, dating back from 1824 to around 1588, includes printed maps and topographical drawings, watercolours and prints. There are works by leading 18th-century watercolourists, among them Paul Sandby, William Pars, Samuel Hieronymus Grimm and Michelangelo Rooker. This evocative collection is far more than a mere accumulation of maps and views, it is an expression of British patriotism and it breathes the interests, activities and attitudes of the British people.

The harder gardeners work, the more problems seem to multiply. But if we let them, plants can do much of the hard work for us. This remarkable book, first published in 1997 and now revised and reillustrated, shows how plants can be combined into self-governing communities to create naturalistic low maintenance gardens. The universal principles of 'matrix' gardens are explained, and illustrated with case studies showing detailed applications. Further chapters explore soil health, biological controls in the garden, pools and wetlands, shrubs and perennials, and how to pull it all together in a string self-sustaining design.