This accessible and richly illustrated Guide to period styles for interiors presents a canonical history of interior design styles since the Baroque era. The second edition comes ten years since Judith Gura published The Abrams' guide to period styles for interiors (2005) and features several new chapters on modernist office interiors, Asian styles, and 21st-century design. The format has been reorganized into five parts corresponding to the centuries covered, broken down into chapters treating major styles, with further subsections on shorter-lived styles (e.g. the Palladian Style as a subsection of the chapter on Early Georgian Style). The second edition features a new chronology of design periods in the appendix, as well as mostly new images, including both overall views of exemplary interiors and close-ups of individual furnishings and textile patterns.
Gura is a design historian and professor at the New York School of Interior Design, specializing in 20th-century interiors, Scandinavian design, and women designers. Her publications over the past decade include Interior landmarks: treasures of New York (2015) with Kate Wood, Design after modernism: furniture and interiors 1970–2010 (2012), and Sourcebook of Scandinavian furniture: designs for the twenty-first century (2007). Gura is also known in the field for her two-volume work New York interior design, 1935–1985 (2008), and A history of interior design (2000), co-authored with John Pile and now in its fourth edition. She has contributed to exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, among other institutions, and she serves as a contributing editor to Art + Auction magazine.
Each of the 31 chapters presents a succinct historical overview—usually three pages organized into three parts: period, style, and furniture—outlining key events and ideas illustrated by the products of only the most iconic designers. Several pages of images follow the text, and a concluding “Style Markers” box synthesizes the characteristics (i.e. mood, colours, scale, textiles, and motifs) of each period with a few keywords. Gura gives the most attention to 20th-century design, devoting about a third of the book to modern and postmodern styles. While the preface to the second edition boasts new material on design of the Far East, the volume remains intently focused on design history in Europe and America. The new version contains a token subsection on “Styles of the exotic East,” which dedicates merely two pages of text and a few pages of images to Egyptian, Chinese, and Japanese interior design in the context of their influence on the Aesthetic movement in the 19th century.
The strength and value of this guide for a reference collection can be found in all its supplementary materials—over four hundred colour images, a bibliography topically organized by style, and a useful glossary of terms. Since courses dedicated to the decorative arts and interior design typically are found only in graduate programs of study, this book fulfils a need for an undergraduate-level introduction to the field, most appropriate for such programs as the History of Decorative Arts BA and Interior Design BFA programs at the New York School of Interior Design.
While The guide to period styles for interiors may be too elementary to serve as the assigned text for a course in interior design history, it is an essential reference handbook for libraries serving an interior design curriculum and likely will prove valuable to institutions offering courses in any aspect of architectural history and design history. For those libraries already holding the now decade-old first edition, the addition of contemporary material and the visual makeover of the latest version render it worth updating one's collection.
