The Collected Cottage

"Anything that you love is always a good choice." ¿You're cordially invited! Step into the welcoming and elegant world of interior designer Kathryn Crisp Greeley and her charming home, Chestnut Cottage. The Collected Cottage is a richly produced volume with over 400 stunning photographs that will take readers on an intimate tour inside this lovingly curated house and its collections--and out into its glorious garden overflowing with the changing blooms of the passing seasons. You'll join Kathryn at memorable gatherings from Easter luncheons to outdoor teas to Christmas and New Year's Eve dinners and even a celebration of Winston Churchill's birthday. Exquisite and beautifully photographed tabletop inspiration pages showcase her impressive knowledge of the history of fabrics, crystal patterns, china makers, and more, while captivating original watercolors, illustrated menus, personal recipes, and tips on enjoying the simple pleasures of each season round out the treasures she offers her readers. To top it all off, Kathryn shares fascinating stories of her international travels--dining next to Margaret Thatcher in London, exploring Tuscany, and using her Southern charm to wrangle items for her collections in restaurants and shops around the world--along with historical tidbits and trivia on everything from Pimm's Cup to Christmas crackers. A trip to Kathryn Crisp Greeley's beloved Chestnut Cottage will leave lucky readers full of inspiration and dreaming of incorporating some of her timeless ideas into their own homes.

From an intimate martini party to a Thanksgiving extravaganza, Kathryn Greeley shows how to create easy, fun, and breathtaking tabletop designs that will make any occasion memorable, using your existing or new collections. Chock-full of inspired ideas for hosting high-end theme parties, The Collected Tabletop includes professional photographs of place settings and tabletop decorations; elegant, hand-painted menus; favors and floral arrangements; and simple and easy-to-prepare recipes, such as Independence Day Flag Tart, Skillet Drop Biscuits, and Goat Cheese Truffles. For each of the thirteen events described in The Collected Tabletop, Greeley details the history and significance of specific items from each collection, ranging from heirloom china and crystal to intricate art glass and colorful majolica combined with hand-thrown pottery. In this peerless resource for entertaining enthusiasts, you’ll learn how to use your own collections to define your personal hosting style.

Perfect English Cottage explores 18 inspirational homes that celebrate the best of cottage style in the English countryside. Perfect English Cottage explores 18 inspirational homes that celebrate the best of cottage style in the English countryside. The book explores the decorating and design solutions that make the cottages as attractive inside as out, as well as practical and comfortable to live in. Bestselling author Ros Byam Shaw takes a fresh look at this perennially appealing style, which she divides into five chapters: Character, Holiday, Romance, Simplicity, and Elegance. The featured homes are incredibly varied, from a tiny house with exposed beams to a pared-down Georgian gem, to a picture-perfect cottage with roses over the door—and plenty more adorning the interior. Each section ends with a Get The Look page devoted to ideas for recreating the style in your own home.

Revisit the fourth novel in bestselling author Sheila Roberts’ adored Life in Icicle Falls series How to Change Your Life… Can a book change your life? Yes, when it’s Simplicity, Muriel Sterling’s guide to plain living. In fact, it inspires Jen Heath to leave her stressful, overcommitted life in Seattle and move to Icicle Falls, where she rents a lovely little cottage on Juniper Ridge. And where she can enjoy simple pleasures—like joining the local book club—and complicated ones, like falling in love with her sexy landlord, Garrett Armstrong. Her sister Toni is ready for a change, too. She has a teenage daughter who’s constantly texting her friends, a husband who’s more involved with his computer than he is with her, and a son who’s consumed by video games. Toni wants her family to grow closer—to return to a simpler way of life. Other women in town, like Stacy Thomas, are also inspired to unload their excess stuff and some of the extra responsibilities they’ve taken on. But as they all discover, sometimes life simply happens. It doesn’t always happen simply! Originally published in 2014

Sir George Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, a collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. William Wordsworth described Beaumont’s friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and this edition reveals that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworth’s mature poetry), the letters collected here chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that – in influence, creativity, and affection – rivals Wordsworth’s more famous exchange with Coleridge at Nether Stowey in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one another’s work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize.