 old version
the book was pretty aged, and was an older version than shown in the marketplace. I would have liked to know that it was an older version. This is also more accurately described as fair condition, not good or nearly new.
 The difference between "house" and home," and the history of "comfort"
"The appearance of [the word] 'comfort' to signify a level of domestic amenity is not documented until the eighteenth century," writes author Witold Rybczynski. That's because, as he explains, until then no word was needed "to articulate an idea that previously had either not existed or had not required expression." The entire book is a historical examination of the evolution of domesticity, starting in the Middle Ages. And for the most part, it's fascinating.
What? Were people uncomfortable until the 18th century? How could someone not-care about the sense that one's home was a private retreat from the world? Apparently, that question didn't really come up because privacy was unavailable for centuries. As the author explains, "What is unexpected about medieval houses, however, is not the emptiness of furniture ... but the crush and hubbub of life within them." Houses were meeting places and business environments, and households up to 25 people were not uncommon. "Since all these people lived in one or at most two rooms, privacy was unknown," the author says.
It's a long way from that environment to today's expectations, and Rybczynski takes us from the Middle Ages to the precursors of "modern domesticity" in the homes of the 17th century Netherlands (including a new emphasis on furniture) to the evolution of the chair (such as the history of the Windsor chair) to Victorian books on architecture and household layout (I had never before considered the importance of ventilation in homes built for coal heat).
I first encountered this book when my husband's woodworking class included it on the Recommended Reading list, and I understand why. Anyone designing furniture is doing it for the user's comfort, which means one needs to understand, "What do we mean by 'comfort' anyway?" If you enjoy books that follow a particular "ingredient" (such as Nathaniel's Nutmeg: Or the True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History or Kurlansky's Salt: A World History), I expect this book will appeal to you, too.
If you had asked me about this book halfway through, I would have insisted that it was five stars. Rybczynski is opinionated, charming, and can make history come alive. But by the end... well, somewhere in there Rybczynski lost me. Maybe it's because he dispenses with my favored Arts & Crafts movement a little too hastily (sniff!). More likely, it was just that he had passed the historical era about which I was most curious (once we got to the 18th century I was pretty ho-hum about it all). I wandered away to other books and had to force myself to finish this. I don't mean to imply that the book is bad in any way; it's just a mix of 3 stars and 5 stars, and I expect its usefulness and fascination will be defined more by your own interest in these times than by his writing. Still, I'm very glad I picked up this book. If you have any interest in home design, architecture, or social evolution, it's worth the purchase price even for the marvelous first two-thirds (and probably the last part, too). It's also worthwhile for anyone who has to think about design in a larger sense, such as software user interface designers: What is it that makes someone feel satisfied with what you created? In other words, I may not love everything about this book, but what I like I REALLY like.
 interesting
Fascinating history of the home from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, with a focus on how the built domestic environment influences us and vice versa. The cultural focus is western and European.
Decent and fun, but not much more
May be of interest to househunters trying to envision what their happy home to be might want to be. It's basically a selective history of the concepts of home and comfort, related to changing forms of the family, over the last four or five hundred years. It's full of interesting factoids, probably ultimately of less significance than Rybczynski had hoped, but he's a good writer and charming (a hair too warm and fuzzy for me). It's a light, easy and pleasant read. It didn't leave me with anything of substance that stuck in my memory, but I definitely enjoyed reading it. It's the type of book you curl up with next to a fire with a skim mocha nutmeg and cinnamon whatever when you need to give your brain a break but can't quite stoop to watching American Idol. Okay, sorry - it's a much better book than that. And it's fun - and we all probably need to have a little fun now and then (in between reading all these serious books and growing our big, fat brains). But in the end it's not really substantial.
 Where the hearth is
You probably have notions about what "home" means, and those notions probably revolve around your immediate family, domestic comfort and convenience, with a dash of nostalgia. Most likely you share my sense that home has been thus for a long time, subject to the whims of fashion and demands of social hierarchy. What I learned from Witold Rybczynski is that those are very near-sighted suppositions. The modern (Western) idea of a home is very new, historically. Even the notion of "family" that occupies so much of modern political cant, and seems so central to our social organization, goes back no further than the early 18th Century. Households before that time were comprised of groups of working adults, house owners and employees and servants, plus infants. Children were farmed out as apprentices at a tender age -- even in the wealthiest households where fortunate youngsters were placed as servants to courtiers and nobles in order to learn the ropes of oligarchy. Privacy was rare. Beds were built to handle 6-8 adults and work tables often tripled as dining boards and sleeping platforms. Rybczynski artfully traces the development of the modern household, decor and furnishing, to enable a deep understanding of why we live as we do, what works and what doesn't. As an architect he reserves some of his harshest criticism for his fellows, and neatly shoots down such icons as Le Corbusier and Wright who were too hung on their brilliance to notice that things weren't working. (As I reported in my review of Stewart Brand's excellent HOW BUILDINGS LEARN, Viking, 1994, most -- if not all -- of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses leaked, badly. HOME reports that they didn't work as living quarters either.) This author's highest praise falls to the women who invented household engineering in the late 1800s, stepping into the architectural void, inventing home economics, and shaping the modern home to suit the needs of a servantless woman charged with housekeeping and child rearing. Catherine E. Beecher and Ellen Richards come in for particular commendation. Modern furniture also falls under the author's verbal axe. Designed for style instead of comfort, he describes its advent as a foolish embrace of creativity above function, and offers the detailed research in France under the Louises (Louies?), which erupted as Chippendale and Hepplewhite designs: templates which carefully noted dimensions and proportions that actually fit a human body and allowed for the constant movement necessary to ongoing comfort. The only modern chairs which come near to the standard set in those classic designs are found in the best mechanical chairs, made to be adjusted to the user's body and to flex with movement. (More often to be found in office furniture than in a home.) Altogether an illuminating look at the circumstances of our lives. For this reviewer, who spent 20 years inventing an "alternative" house from scratch, it is greatly amusing to learn that I have spent a lot of hours reinventing wheels rounded out a hundred years ago. Talk about being forced to repeat history one has failed to learn! Been there. And so it goes.
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