The nineteenth century saw huge changes in design and technology that meant that a middle-class home looked very different by the time Queen Victoria died in 1901 to how it had at her accession in 1837. This book looks at the social history of rooms in the Victorian home and at how, thanks to industrialised mass production, people were empowered to make choices about how to decorate their homes. Numerous exterior and interior styles were available as Victorian architects and designers grappled towards a new decorative language by testing the best from the past. This meant that families could choose to live in an Italianate villa, a semi-detached Gothic or a Queen Anne terraced home. From the 1870s, the Arts and Crafts Movement rejected consumption for consumption's sake and gave us a brand of interior design still relevant and appreciated today.

Ferry has an enviable grasp of the big picture, which she illustrates throughout with details likely to be new to most readers. This is a compact yet surprisingly commodious and very appealing introduction to the subject. Ferry has done much to make us appreciate the design legacy of the Victorians -and also to encourage us to preserve that legacy wherever we can. --The Victorian Web

Kathryn Ferry graduated from Cambridge University in 2004 with a PhD in Architectural History. Until 2007 she worked as Senior Architectural Adviser to the Victorian Society, campaigning for the preservation of nineteenth century buildings. She has written for national magazines and newspapers on Owen Jones, the Victorian architect and designer, whom she studied for her thesis, as well as on beach huts. She has also published several academic articles and regularly lectures on the above subjects.