Really Rural: Authentic French Country Interiors

200 illustrations, 173 in colour

In France, just as modern taste is turning to the natural shapes and materials of country furniture, utensils and textiles, the old rural ways of life seem to be disappearing.

There are places, however, far from the big cities and the tourist trails, where they can still be found, and Marie-France Boyer has travelled far and wide to seek them out. With her sensitivity for the extraordinary in the everyday, she describes these working interiors and the people who live in them, presenting a series of wonderful photographs - most taken especially for this book of kitchens and stove corners, living rooms and bedrooms, odd souvenirs and family mementoes.

The people who follow the old country ways are now in their seventies and older. Their homes are functional and mostly very frugal. They use the utensils, baskets and smoke-blackened pots that their parents and their grandparents used before themstill calling them by their local names. Ancient family tables and long-case clocks jostle with refrigerators and televisions; plastic lace and1950s wallpaper can be seen alongside the traditional striped mattress ticking, flowery eiderdowns and old beams. Candlesticks and oil lamps, both replaced by electric light in the 1940s, still stand on mantelpieces.

A unique record of French rural life as it used to be, this book also provides information on sources for the regional pottery, enamelware, linen and furniture that can still be bought today.