Home - Witold Rybczynski

Our need for domestic well-being is deeply-rooted, and home is the unique phenomenon that answers that yearning. Witold Rybczynski takes a close and entertaining look at the place we all know, and which is such an elusive mixture of house and household, dwelling and refuge, of notions of ownership and affection.
From Jane Austen's homely novels to the sleek lines of Art Deco, from luxurious Rococo to the nostalgia of Ralph Lauren, Rybczynski peels away the layers of design, technology and habit to reveal something of the true nature of home.
Using vivid historical examples to conjure lifestyles as distant as the Dutch domesticity of Vermeer and the aristocratic excess of Versailles, HOME takes us on a journey, inviting us to visit the houses of people throughout time and across the world. Modernity is here too, in all its electrical, gas-heated, vacuum-cleaning glory, but there is also recognition of the desire for personal touches and individual comfort that resist the logical progression towards efficient minimalism.
Le Corbusier called a house 'a machine for living in', but Rybczynski's writing asks us to reclaim our homes from the architects, whose plans surely need to live in harmony with less easily categorised ideas like pleasure and ease, domesticity and intimacy. HOME opens a rare window into our private lives - and how we really want to live.