Bungalow Details: Interior

by Jane Powell

Book Overview

In this follow-up to the popular Bungalow Details: Exterior, Jane Powell and Linda Svendsen go inside the bungalow, to identify and explain the wonderful details that make a bungalow authentic, from... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1586853058
• ISBN13: 9781586853051
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith Publishers
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 2.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 8.9" x 10.3"

Customer Reviews

Jane Powell rocks!

There are several good books on Arts & Crafts and Bungalow homes, but I love Jane Powell's books. I have almost all of them.

funny and useful

I loved the author's sense of humor... very candid about what IS acceptable for a truely historically accurate home... although my 1914 home was remodeled by not-so-accurate "carpenters." I loved the pictures (so many rooms that look like mine!). Great for ideas, but remember this is not a DIY book. Just a pretty picture book.

A conversation with one who understands

The reader might well develop a relationship with this book. Jane Powell takes you on an in-depth tour of the American bungalow. As she talks, her writing is conversational, the details are often interrupted with a pun, other humor, or an outburst revealing her biases. Readers who are looking for an academic study should go elsewhere. This is an enjoyable light-hearted "Open House" without a salesperson but rather a builder-decorator-owner. Powell knows this subject from being there and having done that. Behind her puns you find a seriousness based on an emotional bonding with bungalows. If the reader is thinking about rehabbing a bungalow this book is a necessity. If the reader has rehabbed a house meet a friend.

Bungalow Details:Interior

If you are interested in restoration this is a WONDERFUL book! Both of my daughters have purchased homes built around 1920-1927. They are using this book as their bible!

A New Genre?

In her Bungalow books Jane Powell has come close to inventing a new genre: the architectural book that is actually fun to read. The latest (Bungalow Details:Interior)is no exception. The illustrations by Linda Svendsen are stellar, as always, but sometimes I think they distract from the best part: Ms. Powell's writing. Jane Powell manages to combine extraordinary erudition with a real sense of fun, two things that virtually never go together. Her knowledge is encyclopedic, her humor unending, her love of puns totally scandalous. She is also wise, with a real sense of what should and should not be done with old houses and the resources they represent. The writings in her Bungalow (and Linoleum) books deserve to be excerpted and presented in a smaller, less expensive edition: the Sayings of Chairman Jane, if you will, devoid of distracting pictures. I highly recommend this and all of her books.