Victorian Modern: A Design Bible for the Victorian Home

The ultimate design bible for the Victorian home, placing period features and 19th-century design in context and exploring how today’s designers are adapting these houses in innovative ways for contemporary lifestyles

Loved for their period character, Victorian homes aren’t always suited to modern living. Victorian Modern is the ultimate design bible to help you make sense of those inherited quirks and features, showing how artists, designers and creative homeowners are turning their own homes into contemporary showstoppers.

The book comprises seven chapters, organized according to how we use our homes: dining, cooking, entertaining, sleeping, bathing, working and transitional areas, such as hallways. Each chapter explains how the Victorians designed and decorated these spaces, before moving on to their modern interpretations. Inside are plenty of tips, tricks and inspiration for transforming your 19th-century home into a light-filled modern one, ready for the 21st century.

Combining cultural context with advice and inspiration from the homes of interior designers, architects and stylists, Victorian Modern reveals how the history and design of 19th-century homes can influence and inform our modern lifestyles and home decor in fresh and interesting ways.

About the Authors:

Jo Leevers is an interiors writer, stylist and author. She has written for World of Interiors, Homes & Gardens, Livingetc and Elle Decoration, the Telegraph and Observer newspapers, and magazines in Europe, the US and Australia.
Rachael Smith is an interiors photographer whose work appears regularly in House & Garden, World of Interiors, Elle Decoration, Homes & Gardens, Architectural Digest and magazines in Asia and Europe, and the Times, Observer and Telegraph. Her books include London Shopfronts (2021) and Dungeness: Coastal Architecture (2022).