Rating: 
Summary: A textbook for scale and porportion
Review: Rose Tarlow's home is filled with Museum quality furniture however, the principals she espouses can be used by everyone. If you are starting your first home this book is wonderful, she discusses furniture placement, how to make a small room look larger and good ideas for using color. Some of the rooms are filled with many shades and others are serenely absent of much color. I have decorated many homes and found Ms. Tarlow's book filled with good ideas. I find myself going back and rereading portions of this book, especially when I'm faced with a decorating dilemma.
Rating:
Summary: Tarlow's Aesthetic Wisdom
Review: The Private House is a brilliantly insightful investigation into the complexities of site specific understatement. The reader is indeed fortunate to be able to utilize this all-access pass into Rose Tarlow's rarefied world of rationally sublime intentional imperfection.Exquisite photographs document a number of her projects that have never been previously revealed before. Best of all is Ms. Tarlow's straightforward exposition, which elucidates both her core design principles and philosophy of living. Equally valuable are numerous tips that will enable the reader to successfully execute their own projects. I am confident that the Private House is destined to be heralded as a classic tome in its field.
Rating:
Summary: Personal, Beautiful, and Enlightening
Review: This book is minimally instructional. It's filled with the author's memories of the small things that make life interesting--but they don't make the book interesting. This is really a poorly-organized memoir, and not a book on design. The "tips" that the author shares are fairly common knowledge, and it's not worth slogging through yet another paragraph on the joys of a finding a scrap of exquisite fabric in a shop in Paris after a lovely little lunch at an out-of-the-way cafe, and how lovely it looked in Mr. Insert-Name-Here's quaint chateau. Rose Tarlow should have just written her autobiography and not tried to disguise it as a design book. Two stars for the fact that it wasn't completely false advertising.
Rating: 
Summary: it should be "MY Private House"
Review: This book is minimally instructional. It's filled with the author's memories of the small things that make life interesting--but they don't make the book interesting. This is really a poorly-organized memoir, and not a book on design. The "tips" that the author shares are fairly common knowledge, and it's not worth slogging through yet another paragraph on the joys of a finding a scrap of exquisite fabric in a shop in Paris after a lovely little lunch at an out-of-the-way cafe, and how lovely it looked in Mr. Insert-Name-Here's quaint chateau. Rose Tarlow should have just written her autobiography and not tried to disguise it as a design book. Two stars for the fact that it wasn't completely false advertising.
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