The novels below formed the majority of my research in writing this book. They don’t represent the entire output of each author, nor are they in some cases an author’s best-known work, but they were for me important touchstones in conceiving the decorating philosophies of each chapter. Think of this reading list as a jumping-off point—whether you’re old friends with these literary classics or meeting them for the first time, hopefully you’ll be inspired to travel even deeper into these stylish and unforgettable literary worlds.
For the following authors, home sweet home is a place where the furniture’s a bit faded, the crockery is chipped, and a cheerful domesticity reigns over all.
The March house in Little Women is untidy in a way that enhances its beauty, with books crammed into the recesses, flowers trailing around the windows, and sewing projects scattered on the dining room table. Here, tidying up is done not to impress but to make guests feel more comfortable—plumping pillows, sweeping floors, and sliding the sofa into the warm afternoon light.
Austen heroines are plucky go-getters who usually have more dreams than cash, and the cottages, parsonages, and manor houses they inhabit embody these same optimistic qualities. When it comes to interior design, pretty trumps perfect, small trumps big, and friendliness trumps formality. As a character in Sense and Sensibility puts it, “I advise everybody who is going to build, to build a cottage.”
In a Dickens novel, a snug home with a crackling fire and a hot supper on the table is the epitome of domestic bliss. Over and over, he reminds us that what matters aren’t material possessions but rooms filled with a wealth of cheerfulness and no pretensions to being anything swankier than “an easy dressing-gown or pair of slippers.”
George Eliot was a bit of a slacker when it came to domesticity and housekeeping: in Middlemarch, she writes cheerfully of a table covered with the remains of a family meal. And when it comes to furnishings, she has a distinct appreciation for jugs with broken handles and carpets with colors that have been subdued by time.
Elizabeth Gaskell was the household goddess of her day. Her novels are filled with decorating tips for nineteenth-century cottage life, from gathering fallen petals for rose potpourri to the glories of faded chintz to the scented pleasures of an apple studded with cloves.
Open Grahame’s cult classic to any page and you tumble headlong into descriptions of cozy kitchens and bright fires and oatmeal porridge and kettles on the boil. The world may be full of peril, but what emboldens the animals on their adventures is the knowledge that whatever happens, home sweet home is waiting—safe, reassuring, and familiar.
In her semiautobiographical novel, Thompson gives a fascinating account of rural life in a nineteenth-century English village. It’s a homey place, one where the kitchens have handmade rag rugs, the floors are flagstone, the candles are beeswax, and there’s always a pot of geraniums on the windowsill.
Though he wrote numerous novels about the rich and famous, Trollope also dug deep into the lives of the humble and unknown to reveal the simple joys of English village life. In Orley Farm, for example, he tells us that too much handsome furniture can overpower a room, worn furnishings make one feel more alive, and pretty doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with fashionable. Who can argue with that?
These authors believe an elegant home emanates order and harmony, and that traditions and rituals are a gracious way of keeping the past rooted in the present.
Loving, Green’s novel about domestic servants in a stately country home, is straight out of Downton Abbey land. Its pages teem with fascinating glimpses into a world in which bed linens are aired daily, picnic sandwiches are wrapped in white paper and string, and personal stationery comes with matching colored blotting paper.
In James’s novel A London Life, the characters endure their fair share of trials, but the home they live in is built to withstand disappointment, full of fresh flowers, crisp chintz, quaint maps, and shells in glass cases. Domesticity is the accumulation of little details; they may not seem like much on their own, but all together they can bring contentment.
Buddenbrooks is the story of a German family in transition, and Mann’s interiors echo the state of their souls. As the novel progresses, the rooms change from being unyieldingly stiff and formal to being decorated with an eye to art and comfort with worldly influences, low-slung sofas, gentle curves, and light colors.
In this semiautobiographical novel, Mitford portrays an upper-class lifestyle as eccentric as it is traditional. At fictional Alconleigh, gold-fringed curtains and rose-covered china live peaceably with heads of beasts on walls, rock collections, and “telegrams announcing casualties in battle.” It’s all a bit kooky, but that’s what makes the home so brilliantly personal.
Vita Sackville-West grew up at Knole House, a “calendar” home in Kent with 365 rooms, fifty-two staircases, twelve entrances, and seven courtyards, and her novel The Edwardians is a love letter to her years there. House traditions like personal stationery, bed sheets threaded with satin ribbons, and nightly turndown service testify to the kind of refined hospitality that anticipated every desire.
If you seek dandified decorating tips for your home, look no further than Vanity Fair. From trays glittering with glass decanters to sideboards heaving with silver salvers and cruet stands, Thackeray’s rooms are as dazzling as his prose.
An intimate of London’s Bright Young Things, Waugh had access to a glittering and privileged world. In Brideshead Revisited, the Marchmain estate is modeled on real-life Madresfield Court, an aesthetic wonderland of painted parlors, brocade walls, ormolu furniture, and gilt mirrors.
For insight into the characters in a Wharton novel, take a good close look at their homes. Overcrowded brownstones denote stuffy, ponderous Victorian ways of thinking, while houses with pale walls and simple classical accents are code for freshness and modernity. Wharton was so passionate about interior design that she wrote a book about it called The Decoration of Houses, still in print today.
For these authors, beauty equals simplicity and there is no home so comfortable as the one in harmony with nature.
For Brontë, beauty lay in the unadorned. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff’s manor house is a monument to unpretentiousness with stone floors, hand-carved furniture, and plenty of earthenware. Style inspiration comes from the wild moors surrounding them: the less a home is suffocated in layers of lacquer, the more room the soul has to breathe.
Cather believed in the innate superiority of function over form. To her, possessions were to be valued not for their appearance but for their purpose. In a Cather novel, the floorboards are creaky, the steps are wobbly, and the carpets are worn—but everything performs just fine.
Stella Gibbons wrote with her tongue planted firmly in her cheek. Cold Comfort Farm is a comic riff on the testosterone-rich rural worlds of D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and others, but beneath all the parody are key characteristics of rustic style. Cameo appearances by twig brushes, old seashells, trestle tables, raftered ceilings, and checked tablecloths should all be duly noted.
In the fictional English landscape of Wessex, Thomas Hardy found his spiritual home. The Return of the Native offers constant reminders that inspiration starts with the earth. Even a description of brown soil becomes a gentle dig at materialism—if the ground doesn’t need more than one layer to clothe itself, Hardy intimates, then why do we?
Sarah Orne Jewett was a New England writer who advocated living a simple, self-reliant life. In her best-loved novel, she poignantly records the slowly dying traditions of a small Maine fishing town where residents brew herbs to make medicinal compounds, braid straw mats out of island rushes, and embroider their patchwork quilts with loving stitches.
D. H. Lawrence loathed the dehumanizing effects of big industry and believed man’s saving grace was his connection with nature. Resist the allure of the new and shiny, he tells us. There is no home so comfortable as the one in harmony with nature, and fancy silver spoons don’t make a meal taste more delicious.
There’s a profundity in the way the heroine of Anne of Green Gables sees her world because her notion of luxury is so achingly uncomplicated. It’s as simple as a blue jug full of apple blossom branches and as heartfelt as a table laid with ferns and wild roses. To Montgomery, it’s accents like these that transform a house into a home.
Thoreau thought that the more furniture you had in your home, the poorer you were in spirit. In Walden, he champions houses built for plain living and high thinking: the less fancy they are, the more room there is for thought to take flight. As long as you have space to think, a house can be small and still feel as extravagant as a palace.
For these authors, home is a place where glamour and exuberance collide, where clean lines reign, and where everything is arranged for maximum reflection.
Michael Arlen’s cult Jazz Age novel The Green Hat is a delicious foray into the importance of laid-back chic. His heroine, Iris Storm, is the archetype for the philosophy that anything worth doing is worth doing stylishly. This means opening your letters with a black ebony paper knife, and drinking vintage brandy out of a gargantuan glass that reaches up to your eyebrows.
Jigsaw, Sybille Bedford’s novelized memoir about her teenage years in the South of France, is bursting with chic details of streamlined Mediterranean style. Life is simple, sublime, and all about the sophisticated efficiency of whitewashed rooms, tile floors, interesting art, and investing in a few key high-quality items. As she puts it, “[There is] cleanliness to the degree where it becomes an aesthetic element.”
Fitzgerald’s sensibilities are exquisitely attuned to details that charm and elevate. In The Great Gatsby, a rose-colored room is bookended by gleaming white French doors and pale curtains, and a party becomes otherworldly when a white garden shimmers with moonlight. Descriptions like this make us attentive to the smallest of moments and expand our appreciation for what glamour can be.
Hand-stamped pigskin luggage, a crystal globe match holder, a white room with a black paneled screen emblazoned with golden cranes—these are just a few of the modish accents Ford Madox Ford describes for us in The Good Soldier, his novel about star-crossed European dilettantes. In this world, every decorative object should elicit a gasp; otherwise, why bother?
In Hemingway’s European novels, a handful of tantalizing nouns conjure up an entire atmosphere. Marble-topped café tables and nickel martini shakers evoke the chic world of The Sun Also Rises, and zinc bars, wicker chairs, and carafes of cheap white wine depict the artistic milieu of A Moveable Feast. Hemingway’s design creed is simple: if it’s sincere and if it’s straightforward, then it’s good.
Most of the time Molly Keane wrote novels about the foibles of Irish aristocrats; in Devoted Ladies, however, she zeroes in on London’s Bright Young Things and it’s difficult to say which dazzles more, the characters or the homes they live in. Silver curtains, shiny mirrors, square bathtubs, and geometric fabrics are all gleaming symbols of confidence writ large.
As an expat in the South of France, W. Somerset Maugham was an intimate observer of the jet-set life. In addition, his decorator wife, Syrie, was a champion of the all-white room. Descriptions of pickled furniture, pale silk, and gleaming silver reverberate throughout The Razor’s Edge and are emblematic of this fresh, forward-thinking sensibility.
Before fashionistas, there were “modernistas”: design-obsessed sophisticates who lived in a perpetual fever for the next great find. In Nichols’s novel Crazy Pavements, they reside in apartments with pale furniture, black walls, silver ceilings, and bathtubs “apparently quarried from a single block of marble.” Here, color is wielded with a careful hand—the wrong tint can be enough to bring on a nervous reaction.
These authors believe homes should be filled with art, ideas, and people, and if they’re a bit chaotic, well, that’s exactly why they’re so wildly welcoming.
Blanch was an inveterate traveler, and her rhapsodic account of four nineteenth-century women globetrotters has an authenticity that comes from personal experience. The Wilder Shores of Love is filled with details of far Eastern life à la bédouine, a beguiling world with hanging lamps, embroidered tents, and rooftop soirees on cushion-spread terraces.
Dinesen fled the trappings of civilization to live according to the dictates of her own heart. In Out of Africa, her farm is filled with all the things she loves—history, color, and exoticism. African textiles rub shoulders with English armchairs, Arab antiques, and Danish glass to create a bohemian home that emphasizes friendship and global harmony.
Du Maurier’s novel Trilby is about the artistic free spirits who gave la vie bohème its name. Set in fin-de-siecle Paris, their ateliers are designed for the dual pursuit of creativity and pleasure. To that end, sofas are built for three people minimum, walls are decorated with chalk caricatures, and exotic knickknacks, rugs, and textiles are strewn everywhere.
Durrell’s trilogy (the other two books are Birds, Beasts and Relatives, and Fauna and Family) is a rhapsodic testament to the charms of disorder. When an English family decamps to a flowery pink villa on a remote Greek island, the furniture is ragtag, colored lanterns hang everywhere, and for dinner parties, murals on brown paper double as tablecloths. With a combination of carelessness and nonchalance, they pull it off: as one character puts it in My Family and Other Animals, “Here in Corfu…anything can happen.”
In his four-novel masterpiece The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell writes of a world that engages all the senses. Antique Bokhara rugs share space with Buddha statues, beaded curtains sway seductively in the hot wind, and the scent of lemon lingers over everything. It’s erotic and slightly dangerous and wholly appealing.
Katherine Mansfield abhorred the generic taste of the middle class and believed that when it came to design, you had to follow your instincts. Her stories about European bohemians are steeped in decorative details like orange lampshades, Armenian kilim cushions, and Indian print curtains; and if you need confirmation that karate-chopped pillows look stodgy, read her short story “Bliss.”
In her cult novel about a penniless English family living in a tumbledown castle, Dodie Smith conjured one of the most enchanting homes ever written about. When it comes to decorating, improvising is their modus operandi. Junk shop furniture is painted to imitate marble, curtains become tablecloths, and a henhouse door is turned into a bench. It’s quirky, off-the-wall, and utterly endearing.
Woolf believed passionately in the importance of an uncontrived life. In her novels she reminds us that beauty comes from the smallest of moments—a bunch of sweet peas in a bowl of water, billowing yellow curtains, candles, dogs, canaries. Life happens in the exhale, and the more we are able to relax, the richer and more absorbing our experiences will be.
For these authors, home is a place of drama, dreams, and living to the very edge of one’s fantasies.
Beaton was a renaissance man—photographer, writer, aesthete—and this memoir on living a stylish life is as enchanting as any novel (which is why I’ve included him). In decorating Ashcombe, his country house, he used money-saving tricks learned from his days as a set designer to create a magical retreat filled with decorative follies like circus murals and faux antiques, and embodying everything he valued: creativity, friendship, and ingenuity.
In Les Enfants Terribles, a brother and sister transform their Parisian apartment into a theatrical set piece that becomes their entire universe. Although the story ends in a Greek tragedy, the surreal dreamscape the siblings created for themselves lingers. As Cocteau puts it, “it was indubitably a masterpiece these children were creating … the masterpiece of their own being.”
When it comes to pleasure, Colette was a woman who lived to tell. Her two Chéri novels offer an exclusive glimpse into the private world of a mature courtesan and her boy-toy lover, and she writes with an attention to sensuous detail—Morocco leather, watered silk, walls painted midnight blue to show off a stark naked occupant—that brings sexy back.
D’Annunzio was a voluptuary who loved to be surrounded by beautiful things and beautiful women. In The Child of Pleasure, the rooms he describes vibrate with visual tension: a stone dressing table holds fragile glass bottles, for example, and an iron candelabra is bedecked with a delicate garland of camellias—male versus female energy at its most elemental.
Firbank’s mannered stories of European social climbers may be light on plot, but they’re heavy on design tips, like the effectiveness of a dark background for displaying artwork, wiring flowers so they don’t wilt, and painting a greenhouse an exotic shade of eau de nil. And you can’t beat his all-inclusive color philosophy: “Properly managed, nothing need ever clash.”
For pure decadence, nothing equals Against Nature. The tale of an aristocrat on an all-consuming quest for beauty, the novel has been gathering a passionate audience ever since it was published—even Dorian Gray is obsessed with it. The interiors are excessive beyond imagining, full of exotic furnishings, strange colors, and hermetically sealed scented rooms. Any design lover will be hooked.
Stamped velvet armchairs, dark painted walls, and hothouse flowers are what people mean when they talk about a Proustian world. The atmosphere conjured up in Swann’s Way is lush and evocative, and images contain an infinite number of associations—one object unlocks a memory of something else, which reminds you of something else, ad infinitum.
To Wilde, a beautifully decorated home elevated the mind and was an indication of the artistic temperament that resided within. In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, he gives us glorious visions of yellow satin, Japanese screens, lacquered walls, and dragon bowls filled with exotic flowers. Never satisfied with the ordinary, Wilde believed that an aesthetically rich life was the greatest of the arts.
