Biedermeier to Bauhaus

A study of the interior design styles original to Germany. The reader is taken on a tour of German interiors from the 16th to the early-20th centuries, through Rococco summer palaces, elegant middle-class Biedermeier villas and simple rural retreats to the functional forms of the Bauhaus.

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Biedermeier to Bauhaus will delight anyone interested in interior design. Tracing the evolution of these and other eclectic European styles from their roots in the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, it reveals a creative decorative tradition that has been admired and imitated the world over.
Given access to private houses - cottages, palaces, town houses, artist's studios, and rural retreats throughout Germany and Austria - many of which have never been photographed before, author Sigrid Sangl presents gilded wood-paneled parlors and richly colored seventeenth-century textiles; exuberant Baroque stucco work; eighteenth-century Rococo fantasies from castles and summer palaces; the intense reds and bright blues of the Classical revival; Biedermeier living rooms with elegant ebonized tables and chairs; romantic neo-Gothic tracery; the ornamental curves of Jugendstil - the German counterpart of Art Nouveau - and the pure functionalism of the Bauhaus. Spanning the Baltic to the Alps and Dusseldorf to Dresden, these astonishingly varied and authentic interiors are seen as different strands of a complex but characteristic decorative heritage.
With an informative, accessible text and specially commissioned photographs by photographers Barbara and Rene Stoeltie, Biedermeier to Bauhaus is an unparalleled source book for contemporary interiors.