Modern Originals: At Home with Midcentury European Designers

Great gift for the collector

Great book - so many inspiring images!

This book gives a lot of the ideas and reflection of the designs. Going with the flow it comes naturally and merging with every existed design. However, this content is not very systematically oriented. subjectively it lights the inspiration through story telling. You can also feel the peace and elegance form his sharing. A large amount of pictures are provided inside of the book to express his impression with less word than expected.

For a coffee table book (and this is nothing more than that), most photos are disappointingly small, and somehow the whole book feels a little dark and poky - just like many of the interiors featured. I agree with the previous reviewer who says the only good picture is the one on the cover. This book is a very useful resource if you want to see how mid-century, lived-in homes really looked, instead of the many, and often rubbish, 21st century reinterpretations. But it lacks almost any information and so this book is useless if you expect to learn anything about the designers and architects whose homes are shown. It feels like the author couldn't be bothered and expected us to just go google the names. Nor could the author be bothered to add any explanatory text to pages after pages of photos. Also, I would have expected to see the homes of at least some of the super influential architects of the era, for example Erno Goldfinger, but no. So for me, this book was a waste of money.

It must have been a fascinating book to produce & gives some homely context to the design names we know. However, if you’re looking for a sourcebook of the Mid Century style you may feel shortchanged