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Mediterranean Architecture

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glamorous contemporary European house designs

If you like looking at examples of beautiful mediterranean architecture, designer homes overlooking the sea, and experiments with shapes, materials, and domestic organisation – then this new book from Thames & Hudson is worth your consideration. It’s like A Place in the Sun on steroids. Dominic Bradbury has assembled mini-essays on twenty-five of the best in modern architect-designed houses.

Mediterranean Architecture They differ in their styles, but are united by their clean lines, open plan living, and a serious commitment to integration with their surroundings. The overall style, which might reflect the editor’s taste or might represent the movement of the current decade, is for buildings that are minimalist, rectangular, and low-rise. They must also blend sympathetically with their surroundings. Their materials have some relationship to the area in which they’re built, large plate-glass windows feature prominently, if possible reaching to the floor, and an infinity pool is a desirable extra.

A high proportion of the examples come from Spain. There’s quite a lot of cantilevering, flat roofing, sharp-edged, rectilinear profiles, and all the example shown rise to a maximum of three floors. There’s also a recurrent theme of contrasting textures – mahogany against raw concrete, polished steel and plate glass, water features and carefully arranged gravel pathways.

I liked the inclusion of small architectural plans, which help you to gain an overall perspective of the building in its geographical location. And visually, the book is a treat, with excellent photographs – even though their relatively small format made me hanker after something more grand.

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Of course, it has to be said that most of these buildings are situated in completely idyllic locations, set amidst rolling pine forests, overlooking sun-drenched harbours, and untroubled by any neighbours or industrial blots on their landscapes. But having said that, they represent what’s possible when an architect is commissioned by a client with enough money and sufficient confidence to allow free imaginative rein.

The locations range from Morocco in the west, via Spain and the Balearics, through Greece, to Turkey in the east. Yet many of the designers of these buildings come from places as far away from the Mediterranean as Paris and Brussels – though I suppose any architects worth their salt must have their practices located in big cities.

This is part way between a coffee table book, the text of which nobody (except design anoraks) will ever read, and a serious review of modern architecture. Dominic Bradbury seeks to point out what the designers are doing that’s original, and he has a sensiitive regard for his subject. Full contact details of the architects are listed, and a trawl through their web sites is like getting a trip through another book for free.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Dominic Bradbury, Mediterranean Modern, London: Thames & Hudson, 2006, pp.256, ISBN 050034227X

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Parallel Lives

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studies of five unusual Victorian marriages

Parallel Lives made a big impact when it first appeared, and continues to be a source of inspiration to many biographers. I noticed an appreciative reference to it in Katie Roiphe’s recent study of unconventional literary relationships, Uncommon Arrangements, which deals with similar issues. Phyllis Rose has chosen to write about a series of fairly famous Victorian literary marriages in which the personal relationships were unusual by contemporary standards, and which she believes offer modern readers something to think about in our age of apparent sexual free-for-all.

Parallel Lives And I couldn’t help feeling from hints she drops at regular intervals throughout the book that she was working out some of her own personal issues at the same time. The subjects are Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle, Effie Gray and John Ruskin, Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens, and George Elliot and George Henry Lewes.

What she is trying to show is that in an age when marriages were often made as financial and social contracts, the arrangements made to cater for personal satisfaction were often more subtle and successful than we might imagine today, when sexual or romantic reasons are given precedence.

The story of Ruskin’s wedding night fiasco is reasonably well known: the authority on classical beauty took fright when he saw a real woman in the flesh. What is not so well known is that he never consummated the marriage, and after several years of misery, being presented with his failure to deliver as the grounds for divorce, he offered to ‘prove his virility’ in court. How exactly he would have gone about doing this is the source of some amused speculation.

John Stuart Mill’s case is slightly different, although it shared one important feature. He fell in love with Harriet Taylor, whose husband thoughtfully allowed them to carry on their relationship because it was sexually chaste. Even when the tolerant Mr Taylor died and the couple were able to marry, the habit stuck, reinforced by Mill’s belief that men should subjugate themselves to women’s will – in order to compensate for the historical injustices they had suffered.

It’s hard to see why Phyllis Rose included the similarly well-known case of Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine Hogarth, except as she concludes “he provides a fine example of how not to end a marriage”. Their early life together is a portrait of his energy and bonhomie; then comes his disenchantment and the separation. But of the twelve remaining years secretly engaged with Ellen Ternan – nothing is made. Dickens took such rigorous pains to conceal his tracks, there’s still no hard evidence on the degree of their intimacy – though it’s almost impossible to escape the conclusion that it was complete.

Rose makes the case that George Eliot, a woman blessed with high intelligence but not good looks, was forthright and enterprising enough to seek out what she says every normal woman wants – a man to love and be loved by. The man in question was George Henry Lewes, married though separated from his wife. But because his wife had three children by his friend Thornton Hunt, all of them were regarded as scandalous libertines by society at the time. Eliot lived with Lewes happily ‘outside the law’ for twenty-four years, then when he died she married her financial adviser, who was twenty years younger than her.

The strangest case of all is the Carlyles – of whom it was said that the best thing about their being married to each other was that only two people were miserable, not four. In another apparently sexless union, Mrs Carlyle, Jane Welsh, devoted herself to promoting his ‘greatness’ and was treated dreadfully in return. Confiding her unhappiness to a diary which he edited after she died, Thomas Carlyle spent the rest of his life afterwards eaten up by remorse because of the unhappiness he had engendered.

There are plenty of unusual arrangements here, but no easy solutions. Fortunately for us, separation and divorce are much easier in the twenty-first century. But Phyllis Rose wants us to reconsider these examples of Victorian challenges to orthodoxy and view them sympathetically – even when the cost in some cases seemed to be personal happiness and sexual fulfilment.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives, London: Vintage, 1994, pp.320, ISBN: 0099308711

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Paris Interiors

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interior design French capital city style

This is another of the very stylish and amazingly good value photographic studies from Taschen Books. It features fifty imaginatively conceived apartments and houses, the homes of prominent people such as Isabelle Adjani, Helena Christensen, and Christian and Francoise Lacroix. What then characterises the Parisian interior? Well, there are lots of elegant nineteenth century apartment buildings; rooms with high ceilings and tall windows reaching almost to the floor; marble staircases with wrought-iron banisters; light, pale colours; touches of art-nouveau; and polished wooden or tiled floors (rarely carpets). However, it’s not all tradition.

Paris Interiors There’s an apartment fashioned from an old warehouses, one with a vegetable garden on the roof, and another coaxed out of just two or three modest rooms. That’s another of the many good things about these books. They go beyond mere coffee table glamour by incorporating examples which demonstrate flair on a budget.

If you want to pick up some living tips from these pages, be prepared to use rooms for different purposes than they were originally intended. Bedrooms do not always need to be above living quarters. There are even examples of people putting buildings to different uses: there’s an excellent example of a stylish home on a Parisian barge, and another created from a converted attic.

Most of the owners (or occupants) whose homes are depicted tend to be fashion designers, couturiers, and visual consultants of one kind or another. In fact my favourite was an ultra minimalist art deco penthouse designed and owned by parfumier Thierry Mugler.

Two other things come through very strongly. First – lots of them offset whatever their taste and decorative arrangements with classical columns supporting a bust. No problems there: I’m a big fan of those myself. But second – many of them have rooms which are so piled up with books they look like auction rooms, ready for the bargain clearance sale. A few art books might look OK, but too many just looks very untidy – as if the owner has simply not yet tackled the issue of storage.

The other weakness here (which might simply reflect the taste of the author) is that rather a lot of the examples chosen are interesting for gimmicky reasons rather than for their good aesthetics. Rooms stuffed full of giant sized golliwogs or flea-market tat might be unusual, but they can easily make their owners look rather foolish.

But these are minor quibbles. Anyone interested in interior design will find something to stimulate their imagination here. Paris is still one of the most stylish cities in the world, and not just Capital of the Nineteenth Century as Walter Benjamin described it.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Lisa Lovett-Smith, Paris Interiors, London: Taschen, 2007, p.320, ISBN 3822838055

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Talk to the Hand

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The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life (or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door)

Lynne Truss must surely be one of the next participants lined up ready for the TV show Grumpy Old Women – in which celebrity ladies of a certain age ventilate their pet grievances. First she was grumpy about failures of punctuation in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and now in Talk to the Hand she is being grumpy about modern manners – or lack of them. Fortunately, her grumpiness is served up with generous helpings of witty exposition, well dramatised anecdote, and self-deprecating humour.

Talk to the HandShe rails against people who don’t say ‘Thank you’ when you hold open a door for them – but goes further by analysing the reasons for our social expectations and our reactions to them when thwarted. The same is true for people who let their children run amok in other people’s houses – and are affronted if you don’t share share their self-indulgent view of them.

Fortunately, her own expectations in righting these situations are self-limited:

This book has quite a modest double aim: first, to mourn, without much mature perspective or academic rigour, the apparent collapse of civility in all areas of our dealings with strangers; then to locate a tiny flame of hope in the rubble and fan it madly with a big hat.

She’s against being prescriptive or proscriptive, and has a basic position that can be summed up as “Remember you are with other people; show some consideration.” Her chief bêtes noirs are (fairly predictably) automated telephone call services, shop assistants who don’t pay attention, and most things to do with information technology (‘There’s a WEBSITE for people with INTERNET ADDICTION’ [!])

Strangely enough, she is quite tolerant of people using mobile phones in public places and saying asinine things such as “I’m on the train. We’re just leaving Euston/Manchester/Bristol”. But I was glad to see that she secretly wished physical pain (as I do) to kids who skateboard or cycle on the pavement.

She’s good at cataloguing the language of insolence and contempt in sloppy service expressions – as when the waiter plonks down your main course with “There you go” and when you say “Thank you” replies with “No problems”.

She’s at her weakest when she makes the case for respect, and takes the Armistice Day memorial service as an example which ought to tug at all of our emotional coat tails. But she has lost none of her skill for switching deftly into the persona of the person she’s writing about – conjuring up their vocabulary and tone of voice with her well-attuned ear for speech and language patterns.

Of course what constitutes good manners changes with time. Nobody but a complete oaf would spit in public these days – yet I can remember when “No spitting” was a standard injunction on all public transport, even after the war. The second world war, that is.

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© Roy Johnson 2009

Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand, London: Profile Books, 2006, pp.240, ISBN: 1861979797

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The New Spaniards

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culture and society in post-Franco Spain

It’s easy to forget that only a few decades ago Spain was an under-developed country with a fascist dictator. Tourists were arrested for wearing shorts, and outside major cities many villages didn’t have electricity or street lighting. Today, Spain is one of the biggest, the most democratic, and technologically advanced countries in Europe. John Hooper’s book The New Spaniards is all about the social, political, and cultural consequences of this very rapid development during the last four decades.

The New Spaniards As he observes, it’s possible to see this reflected in a typical family gathering of three generations. The grandparents, reflecting a poorer agricultural past, will be short and dark; their children, beneficiaries of the post-Franco boom, and raised on a Mediterranean diet, will be tall and slim; but the grandchildren, victims of current prosperity, might well be overweight.

The first part of the book is a detailed political history of Spain following the death of Franco. His rule had held Spain in a fossilized state since the end of the Civil War in 1940. The aftermath was, unsurprisingly, a sweeping away of the old, corrupt, and backward-looking practices – to be replaced by an essentially socialist government dominated by one party.

Equally unsurprising was the fact that people who had been excluded from public life for a generation, when they came back in contact with it, feathered their own nests. Post 1980 Spain has a long history of local graft, corruption, kick-backs, and ‘influence’ which make it seem closer to the world of Italian Mafiosi than the rest of Europe. And I have to say that this sort of thing still continues in the part of Andalucia where I live part of the time.

He deals with all the features of Spanish society which outsiders find surprising and puzzling – such as the church, for instance. It’s been disestablished since 1986, yet the state supports it with public funding. Its membership has decreased since the advent of democracy, yet many Spaniards consider themselves Christians, and the slightly dubious Opus Dei organisation has its greatest numbers and influence there.

On sexual mores, the country has passed from being against topless sunbathing in the 1970s to accepting gay marriages thirty years later. The birth rate is declining, more women are working, and adult children are living at home as the family unit, which is seen as the bulwark against unemployment and the harsh economic climate of the 2000s.

John Hooper explains the astonishingly murky finances of the National lottery, and throws in the amazing fact that the Spaniards spend/lose more on gambling each week than they do on fresh milk, fruit, and vegetables.

That’s one of his strengths – bringing sociological data to life with striking examples. Against this, he has a slightly annoying habit of looping back historically into the nineteenth century. The idea is to show how certain political conditions have originated, which is understandable, but it produces the unfortunate effect of a book in which the narrative is going backwards.

He’s much more lively and interesting when he deals with contemporary life, such as why Basques, Catalan, and Galicians feel so keen on independence, why bullfighting is still tolerated in a country with strong support for animal rights (not dissimilar from fox-hunting in the UK) and how the Spaniards feel about the influx of second home owners who bring mixed blessings to the country.

There’s plenty of detail on the Spanish royal family which I could have done without, but his chapters on the press and the extraordinary explosion of modern art and architecture really bring alive the sense of renewal and positive exploration of new ideas which anyone who visits the country regularly cannot fail to register.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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John Hooper, The New Spaniards, London: Penguin, second revised edition, 2006, pp.480, ISBN 0141016094

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Tricia Guild Pattern

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interior design and furnishing with style and colour

Tricia Guild is an interior designer and the brand name behind a successful company which features a vivid array of fabrics and furnishings – all of which feature striking colours, bold pattern, and luxurious textures. To live with this style you have to be confident enough to choose wallpapers with huge floral designs, curtains which are multi-coloured and decorated with magnificent swags, and be prepared to upholster your three piece suites with fabrics which grab you by the lapels. You need to put turquoise silk next to hot red damask, and if you want to achieve some of the effects illustrated here your house needs to be spotlessly clean and full of marble.

Tricia Guild PatternOrnate gold mirrors, and fresh-cut flowers which offset the decor in every room would be a help too. She is inspired by fabrics, techniques, motifs and designs from all over the world and from every period of history – brocades and damasks from the Far East; the rich history of botanical illustration and flower painting; checks, plaids and stripes from northern Europe; vibrant ethnic prints from India and Central America; painterly designs from Chinese and European porcelain; the bold abstracts and geometric patterns of contemporary painters.

Not that it’s all entirely in-your-face colour and bold pattern. She also has some subtle and restrained examples of ticking used to create a cool, contemporary atmosphere. But those are the exception. Most of the book is filled with hot, passionate colours, and rich textures emphasised by extreme close-up photographs. There’s a whole chapter on the use of flowers in fabric patterns – tulips, poppies, roses, and chrysanthemums.

I feel a bit sorry for the people who supply the text for these books. They are competing for the reader’s attention against overwhelming odds. The visuals drown out everything. And yet Elspeth Thompson has some interesting things to say about the nature of pattern and she offers thoughtful analyses of the interiors illustrated in the examples shown.

Many of the pages are like Howard Hodgkin paintings. It’s difficult not to be seduced by the visual texture of it all. My recipe for these interior design style books is to look at the overall effect, then choose one element on each page which you could incorporate into your own home. It could be the colour scheme, the positioning of furniture, the lighting, or (in this case) the use of patterned fabrics to breathe life into a room.

The book itself is a bibliographic reflection of this torrid style. It’s printed on thick paper, with occasional translucent inserts, beautifully photographed and illustrated – and has a cover jacket that’s like flock wallpaper from an Indian restaurant.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Tricia Guild and Elspeth Thompson, Pattern, London: Quadrille, 2006, pp.208, ISBN: 1844003264

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Uncommon Arrangements

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married life in London literary circles 1900-1939

Most people know about the strange personal relationships which existed amongst the Bloomsbury Group, of whom it was said that they were a “a circle of friends who lived in squares and loved in triangles.” But the truth is that many other people in the artistic and literary circles of the period 1910-1930 were making what might politely be called ‘experiments in living’, or less politely, ‘having your cake and halfpenny as well’. In Uncommon Arrangements Katy Roiphe takes six examples of marriages and partnerships which were tested almost to the limit. These people were consciously overthrowing the restraints they felt Victorian and Edwardian mores were placing upon personal liberty – particularly the right to have sex with whoever one chose.

Uncommon ArrangementsHer examples include H.G.Wells whose wife Jane tolerated his long string of mistresses, including Rebecca West, the one featured here. Katherine Mansfield gave as good as she got from her faithless husband John Middleton Murry. The feisty Elizabeth von Armin (Katherine Mansfield’s cousin) clung masochistically to Earl Russell, even whilst he treated her with disdain and physical violence. Vanessa Bell lived with her lover Duncan Grant, who was a homosexual. Una Troubridge performed a slavish role as wife and helpmeet to her lesbian ‘husband’ Radcliffe Hall, whilst Hall (who called herself ‘John’) enjoyed a nine year affair with a young Russian Evguenia Souline.

The examples might reflect only the author’s tastes and enthusiasms, but in all of them the men come out worst as monsters of egoism, opportunism, double standards, and worse.

H.G. Wells treated his wife like a doormat, pleading that she could not meet his sexual needs, and all the time protesting that he loved her dearly. John Middleton Murry left his wife Katherine Mansfield on her own when she was suffering a terminal illness, and wrote endless letters saying how much he missed her. And Earl Russell (Bertrand Russell’s brother) engaged not one mistress alongside his marriage, but two. The same was true of Philip Morrell, who announced to his wife Ottoline that both his mistresses were pregnant, in the hope she would help him out of an embarrassing scrape – which she did.

The one exception she explores is Vanessa Bell, who managed to keep her husband Clive Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and her ex-lover Roger Fry co-existing as friends together under the same roof without any overt friction.

Katy Roiphe reveals the facts and recreates dramatic episodes of these people’s lives in a successful journalistic manner, but when it comes time to analyse contradictory behaviour she often retreats behind rhetorical questions. Why did X tolerate this? Why did Y never leave him/her?

Her evidence for these accounts comes from what they left behind in letters and diaries. This is a slightly risky procedure, because what they said needs to be placed in its context. The motivation for saying something needs to be taken into account, and contradictions with other evidence noted.

But there’s a more obvious and serious weakness in her approach: it’s that she fails to recognise the legal and economic basis of marriage, and (to quote Frederick Engels) its relationship to the family, private property, and the state. She is more interested in comparing these social pioneers with the plight of contemporary relationships. As she rightly observes

Marriage is perpetually interesting; it is the novel that most of us are living in.

Of course, as Victoria Glendenning has observed, “physical fidelity was not greatly valued in the marriages of the British upper classes” – which is true, so long as the all-important conventions of inheritance are not disturbed. The niceties and social concerns of who couples with whom are something of a smokescreen; they are the superstructure of which concern for preserving inherited capital are the base. And as soon as we look at the economic foundations of these relationships, many of the mysteries evaporate immediately.

Jane Wells tolerated her husband’s flagrant infidelities because he was rich and kept her in economic security. Elizabeth von Armin kept the receipts for items she purchased for her own home, so as to be able to prove ownership in the event of a dispute with her husband Earl Russell – a dispute which did eventually take place in the courts of law.

Una Troubridge clung to her humiliating position as Radcliffe Hall’s lesbian ‘wife’ for nine years, and was rewarded by being made Solo Executrix to Hall’s will – whereupon she took economic revenge on her former rival.

In fact these cases of strange arrangements could have been made more acutely with other examples. She could have included Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville West, as well as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, both of whose marriages tolerated sexual plurality (though Virginia’s tolerance was never tested) as well as the most extraordinary union between Dora Carrington and Ralph Partridge, who lived together with the man they both loved, Lytton Strachey.

It might be that the solution found by Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackvill-West was easier to tolerate. They both had lovers of the same sex. Does this leave people less existentially threatened? (to sound for a moment like Katie Roiphe). But when Vita ‘eloped’ with Violet Trefusis, Nicolson and Dennis Trefusis chartered an airplane and flew across the Channel to bring them back.

This book raises a number of contentious issues which are still of interest today. Ho does one reconcile the desire for sexual freedom with the comforts and protection of pair-bonded monogamy? Can women ever have the same sort of freedoms as men unless they have economic independence?

It’s a readable and very stimulating narrative, but it lacks a serious theoretical underpinning – though she does in the end show that many of her chosen examples, no matter how radical they appeared to be on the surface, were at a structural level clinging to the Victorian conventions they thought they were rebelling against. After all, the Bloomsbury radicals were still summoned to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner by bells rung by servants at fixed times throughout the day.

But readers who don’t already know the shenanigans and the apparently ‘curious arrangements’ of this sub-group will be very entertained. This book doesn’t pretend to answer any of these questions, but it presents examples of pioneers who thought the struggle worth fighting for.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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Katie Roiphe, Uncommon Arrangements, London: Virago, 2008, pp. 343, ISBN 1844082725

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Working at Home

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combining your office with your home – elegantly

Working at Home is the second book on the interior design of home office space I have recently consulted as research for a move to new office premises. Like the first, Working Spaces, it offers a powerfully stimulating set of examples, generated by people with imagination, flair, and in some cases, courage. If the selection of examples are typical of interior design today, the cities pushing this trend are New York, London, Berlin, Barcelona, and Tokyo.

Working at Home And the fashion is for old industrial spaces preserved for their high ceilings, big room spaces, and vast windows. In each case they have been transformed by adding luxury furnishings, yet the original features have been preserved – so that there at first appears to be a tension between domestic and commercial purposes. The examples show interior design solutions for writers, artists, musicians, architects, graphic designers, a printers, business people, and a textile designer. And in most cases the usual clutter which blights commercial offices has been purged – to good effect.

It has to be said that most of the samples illustrated are examples of minimalist design – plain walls and floors, no decoration, wood in teak or beech, lots of opaque tinted green glass, polished chrome fittings, simple halogen downlighters, chairs with tubular chrome legs, and giant settees in black leather.

There are architectural plans reproduced in each case which illustrate how the overall space has been used and how the parts relate to the whole.

One of the recurring features I spotted here was floors covered in epoxy resin – which results in a hard, shiny surface which is practical and easily cleaned. Not everybody would wish to settle down for a cozy evening in such surroundings – but the results look great.

What conclusions can be drawn from the examples on display? In almost all cases there are few decorations in the rooms: no pictures or shelves or decorative brackets. The rooms, with their pale walls and clutter-free surfaces are left to speak for themselves.

You might imagine that people working in the creative industries would want to decorate every inch of their surroundings with objects which expressed their tastes and cultural values. But the opposite appears to be the case. And these might indeed be shining examples illustrating Mies van der Rohe’s mantra – Less is More.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Aurora Cuito, Working at Home, New York: Loftpublications, 2000, pp.175, ISBN 0823058700

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Working Spaces

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interior design glamour for the home office

Lots of people work from home today. In the world of an email address, a broadband connection, and a laptop on your coffee table, nobody knows you’re a consultant dog on the Internet. But if it gets more serious and you want to establish a grown-up home office, you might want to create a professional workspace. Many people start from a small study or working in a corner of the spare room, but if your business grows, I guarantee you’ll feel more professional with a proper office. Working Spaces is packed with examples of how it can be done.

Working SpacesThis book is visual proof that you don’t need to be surrounded by empty cardboard boxes and metal filing cabinets. The examples illustrated include quite small family homes which have been adapted to the demands of creating a working space within a domestic environment. They also recognise that people working from confined spaces may need to put a single area to different uses at different times. A workaday meeting room might become a weekend lounge; or an office might need to be converted to accommodate guests from time to time.

What I admire about these Taschen publications is that although they have the outer glamour of coffee table luxury, they do in fact deal with real-life examples. There are plenty of cases here of one and two-roomed apartments which have been adapted to maximise space and preserve elegance, whilst at the same time functioning as proper offices with computers, storage for box files, and desks with telephones and wastebaskets.

The photography is superb throughout; the text is in English, French, and German; and every example is accompanied by architectural plans showing the floor layout. It’s also bursting with good space-saving ideas – foldaway beds; hinged partition screens; and lots of tables, chairs and bookshelves with wheels. Another common design feature if you’ve got the courage to try it is white floors. White everything in fact.

How can you make your own working space more pleasant, more aesthetically soothing? Well, ask yourself these questions. Do you really need ugly filing cabinets immediately to hand? Why not conceal them or put the contents somewhere else? Why not have bold decorative features in your workspace, to make it more individualised and humane? Large pictures and big pots of flowers will do the trick.

Most of the owners seem to be graphic and interior designers, and architects – which might be cheating somewhat. I know a number of professional writers who operate from spaces far less elegant (and that’s putting it mildly) . But this gives an idea of what is possible, and moreover attainable without a great deal of expense.

In fact I’ll summarise it all in one tip which is guaranteed to make your own working space more stylish and effective in one quick step: Get rid of all the clutter- now!

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Simone Schleifer, Working Spaces, London: Taschen, 2005, pp.384, ISBN: 3822841862

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