In Dream Villa Singh explores how the night transforms what seems ordinary by day into something mysterious and unsettling. This series of colour photographs presents a landscape which exists as much in the artist's imagination as in the real world. Singh travels to many different cities never knowing where Dream Villa or its inhabitants will present themselves. It is a place where nothing is quite as it seems to be - it comes alive at night, when all is lit by artificial light and the moon is just ornamentation.

Recognizable to millions as a symbol of the American presidency, the White House was first an American home. From 1800 until 1960, it kept pace with changing ideals of the American house and garden. That ended when Jacqueline Kennedy redecorated the White House as a museum to upper-class taste. Today the Obamas are pulling it back to its role as an American home. This book looks at the president's house in the context of American house design and decoration. Hundreds of historic photographs, plans, and drawings compare it to other American houses, gardens, and interiors, showing the White House as it changed through decades of interior renovation, rebuilding, and landscaping.--From publisher description.

Traces the evolution of the modern American dream house from seventeenth-century England to the present.

Having taken early retirement the author, David Charles, and his manic depressive wife Hazel, decide to rescue their failing marriage with disastrous results. Selling the majority of their belongings and buying an ageing car they drive to southern Spain, buy a plot of land on a mountain and, amid many adventures and setbacks, begin to build their new life. It is not long before Hazel's depression returns and in desperation she attempts to commit suicide. Rescued in the nick of time, and hospitalised, Hazel begins a course of psychiatric therapy but the treatment that is designed to cure her, and her marriage, backfires disastrously when she reveals her deep secret, which finally destroys the marriage and rips the family apart.

The ideal model of a suburban residence desired by Leo X (1513-1521), son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and continued by his cardinal cousin Giulio de' Medici, the future Clement VII (1523-1534), the 'vigna del papa', or papal residence, to be called Villa

Mr. Blandings and his wife buy an old farmhouse, unaware of the costly and unforseen repercussions of their decision.

This previously unpublished work is essential reading for anyone who has followed Marco Frascari’s scholarship and teachings over the last three decades. It also provides the perfect introduction for anyone new to his writings. As ever, Frascari does not offer prescriptive tools and frameworks to enact his theories of drawing and imagination; instead, he teaches how to build one’s own through individual practice. An illuminating introduction places the text in a wider context, providing the reader with a fascinating and important context and understanding to this posthumous work. Frascari's sketchbooks are reproduced faithfully in full colour to provide the reader with a remarkable insight into the design process of this influential mind.

On the outskirts of the spectacular baroque town of Noto, Sicily, Jacques Garcia has transformed an ancient monastery into an abode of earthly bliss. Celebrated interior designer Jacques Garcia invites readers inside his private residence in Sicily for the first time. The former monastery, rebuilt in Noto’s characteristic golden limestone, boasts spectacular salons that have been restored with a profusion of noble materials and techniques: colored marbles, flamboyant stuccowork, majolica tiles, damask silks, and velvets. Time stops in the elegant music room, decorated with embroidered silks and rococo-style mirrors that reflect the decor to infinity; the gilded dining room is hung with silk damask wall coverings and an eighteenth-century Murano chandelier and furnished with Chantilly porcelain and antique Italian rococo chairs. The grand marble salon features baroque paintings and a stunning collection of sculpture and Sicilian furniture. The exquisite villa—surrounded by shaded terraces planted with towering cacti and succulents—attests to Garcia’s love of ancient civilizations and his masterful blending of Arabian, Norman, Renaissance, and baroque influences that converge in Sicily’s colorful history. The domain, dotted with ancient sculptures and reflecting pools, is graced with splendid panoramic views revealing the sea near Syracuse, a distant folly, a restored villa nestled in an ancient olive grove, and the decaying grandeur of a classical temple reconstructed with ancient fragments.

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

John Saladino's powerful new book is nothing less than a master class in interior and garden design. Villa focuses on the stone ruin in Southern California that Saladino painstakingly refashioned into his dream house, and it shows how his principles and passions guided him through the five-year process of reconstruction, restoration, and decoration. With the aid of plans and drawings, as well as numerous photographs of the house — how it looked in the 1920s, shots of when he bought it, and snaps taken during reconstruction — Saladino traces the architectural work involved. Then, in a superbly illustrated tour of the house and grounds, he proves that he practices what he’s preached for more than 30 years. Juxtaposing light and dark, old and new, classical and modern, monumental and miniscule, hard and soft, Saladino creates the serenely timeless interiors and gardens that are his hallmark.