Book description
For six years,
House & Garden
editor-in-chief Dominique Browning has written a monthly column that
weaves together personal stories and tips about home decorating,
gardening, and raising children with universal themes of domestic life.
In Around the House and in the Garden,
Browning adapts and expands these well-loved pieces, adding dozens of
new essays, to create an insightful and moving narrative about the
solace and sense of self that can be found through tending one's home.
From bedrooms and bathrooms to gardens and trees, from the
importance of a couch in the kitchen to the spiritual role of a grand
piano, Around the House and in the Garden reveals the intimate
relationship between home and self. Browning illustrates the ways her
domestic needs, instincts, and arrangements have reflected major
changes in her family life. Considering her own divorce, she focuses
on how grief inhabits a room: "When I was divorced my sense of
home fell apart. And so, too, did my house." Eventually,
attention to her home helped to mend her heart, and the attention to
her heart helped her to tend her home.
Brimming with warmth, knowledge, and the useful decorating and
gardening tips that have made House & Garden a favorite for
one hundred years, Around the House and in the Garden is a book
for anyone who has ever felt the need to reinvent a life or a space,
who has ever fallen in love with the idea of home -- the place where
we reinvent ourselves, "the place where we have the final word
about what goes where,...what feels comfortable, what is
life-enhancing...a place that gives us strength to go out and embrace
the world."
Jay McInerney author of Bright Lights, Big City
and Bacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar Anyone who has
ever owned a house, planted a bulb, or lost a lover should read this
book -- a collection of pensées that form a striking, imaginative
whole, like the rooms of a well-loved and thoughtfully decorated home.
Dominique Browning has written a beautiful, haunting, and inspiring
book.
Dominique Browning has been the editor-in-chief of
House & Garden since 1995. She was previously the editor
of Mirabella, an assistant managing editor of Newsweek,
and the executive editor of Texas Monthly. She lives in New
York with her two teenage sons.
