Book review: Vintage Home by Judith Miller

Vintage Home: 20th-Century Design for Contemporary Living by Judith Miller, is a new book billed as both a practical collectors’ guide and a source of interiors inspiration.

Vintage Home is published by Jacqui Small in hardback, RRP £30, and is available from Amazon and all good book shops.

What’s it about?

Vintage Home is includes information about ‘serious’ collection pieces worth thousands of pounds, and ‘cheap and cheerful’ period pieces that you can pick up in junk shops for a few pounds.

The twentieth century was an exciting and vibrant time as designers and manufacturers investigated the possibilities of mass production and the new materials available, and came up with results of every description.

Written by expert Judith Miller of Miller’s Antiques Guide fame, it includes hundreds of beautiful colour photographs and illustrations.

What we thought

This is a really beautifully presented book, and it’s everything a coffee table book should be – heavy, thick and packed with photographs.

The author’s ‘pedigree’ couldn’t be better – Judith Miller has been a top authority on antiques for many years, and I have several editions of the antiques guide sitting on the bookshelves.With those in mind, I was expecting this new book to be in a similar vein – i.e with lists of themed objects and guideprices.

In fact, Vintage Home was completely different. It covers the whole of the twentieth century from 1900 pretty much up to the present day, with a possible bias towards the 1950s and 60s when so much fresh, new design came onto the market.

This book felt much more like an inspirational interiors book than a price guide. There were no sordid pound signs to be found – each item carried a subtle asterisk as part of a system valuing it at under £1,000 (the lowest) or over £100,000 (the highest).

I thought this worked well, as not only did it mean the book will be very slow to date but it also added a certain piquancy to looking at the photographs of interiors if you could value the items in it!

Previously, I’d have said that twentieth century design wasn’t really my thing (I’m more of an eighteenth century/Georgian kind of girl), but having had Judith metaphorically hold my hand through ten decades of interiors, it’s really opened my eyes.

From bubble chairs to Bakelite, from Lalique glass to lighting, I can see that saying you don’t like twentieth century design is like saying you’re not really keen on food – the diversity is incredible and there really is something for everyone.

The book’s divided into periods, such as ‘Deco World’, 1918 to 1945, and then subdivided into the genres such as graphic and decorative and soft modernism.

There’s information about the era and the driving forces and ideas behind each genre, as well as suggestions for key pieces to watch out for and how to pull looks together.

I’m not sure I’m going to be making my fortune by hanging around car boot sales and charity shops any time soon, but this was an easy and interesting way of learning about the people behind the designs and how each one fitted into social history, combined with practical information. If you’re not interested in interiors, this book also has a lot of value as a social history.

I’d recommend this book for anyone who’s interested, not only in this period of design but in interiors in general.

Buy it for self-confessed ‘design snobs’, and slip it into their (Versace) stocking for Christmas.

And when you do track down that Eames or Sergio Rodriguez coffee table for a pound in a junk shop, then this book will make the perfect accessory to display on it.

Reviewed by Sara Walker

 

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