Escapism to my dreams with interior design. [Home Story by Tina Schneider-Rading]

I'm in the right headspace at the moment to be reading interior design books. That's something I realized only as I read Home Story, but it's true nonetheless. I'm at a point in my life where I take comfort in daydreams of a place of my own, so seeing how others around the world (and in this case Germany) individualize the spaces they call home was really interesting. Mostly unfamiliar with the world of German interior design, there were some terms and places I had to research as I read along, giving me an unplanned history lesson on Germany through its arts movements and geography.

Home Story, translated and originally published in German as Best of Interior: Die Wohntrens 2018, is a collection in pictures of the entries, winners, and contestants of the Best of Interior Design competition. The original German edition, published back in 2018, showcased the results of the 2017 competition so unfortunately some of the styles and trends here might be a little outdated. How interesting that I read the 2019 published English edition that's a translation of a 2018 book that focuses on a 2017 competition right as we're about to enter 2020? But style and art are timeless and always appreciable so that matters little.

I enjoyed retreated into a shifting dream home landscape as each chapter provided new ideas. And several of those ideas I will keep with my on a mental list of innovative uses of space. The division of chapters and the formatting of each one flowed logically and made for an interesting art book. However, and this will likely be the case for other pictorial books I read in eBook format, this is probably best enjoyed and digested as a physical copy. The blurbs on the histories and outlooks of the respective designers were entertaining but the captions for the picture were often too simple and unnecessary. Not that that means a thing, this book has already been published.

For me the best things about this book were the new ideas it gave me and it's function as an introduction into the world of German design. This was less a detailed laying out of the tenets of German design sense as I'd expected and more a scrapbook of what selected designers might do in specific spaces, which again was not bad but just not what I expected. I'm giving this a 4 star rating because of how I enjoyed the book but I don't know that I'd recommend this. It would be a nice coffee table book, or a gift for someone with a penchant for interior design and architecture, or even just art at large.


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