Mlinaric on Decorating, by Mirabel Cecil and David Mlinaric
I wish this book weren’t so heavy. It is full of such good things that I wanted to carry it around so that at every spare moment I could have another wallow in David Mlinaric’s beautiful world. In the end I compromised and spent hours with it at the dining-room table, where I discovered the rather encouraging information, as I looked at the paint peeling from my Doric columns, that he, the man I had always thought of as the great high priest of the perfect interior, was in fact the begetter of the decorating style known as ‘shabby-chic’. That was at the beginning of his designing career, when England was emerging from austerity, hedge-funds had scarcely been invented and owners of crumbling old houses weren’t sure whether to prop them up or tear them down.
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