By Jennifer Sergent
Scripps Howard News Service
The steep price ($75), the title words "global design" and the dictionary-like thickness had me approaching The Way We Live: An Ultimate Treasury for Global Design Inspiration with a healthy dose of skepticism.
But almost three hours later, I groggily ripped myself away from the photographs and text like someone who just pulled an all-nighter to finish a novel. I was sucked in.
Stafford Cliff uses photographs of homes and interiors around the word to make this central point: "We have seen many differences, but we have also discovered an amazing number of similarities ... a compendium of possibilities."
He compares photographs of an "urban block" in Luxor, Egypt, with an 18th-century clapboard home in Massachusetts. The shape and proportions are nearly the same. Whether it's Kenya, Bangkok, Paris or Santiago, it's comforting to see patterns in the architecture.
What's different in each case, though, is the personality of the homeowner and his culture, whether it's through the color scheme, the ceramics collection or the funky light fixture.
The Way We Live is inspirational in the proper sense: It doesn't showcase homes and interiors that are inaccessible to anybody but the very rich; rather, it jars the imagination into thinking beyond the Crate & Barrel catalogue.
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