Texas Made/Texas Modern: The House and the Land

If you enjoy leafing through Architectural Digest, you will very much enjoy Texas Made Texas Modern by Helen Thompson. The book is of similar high-end design, produced on heavy, glossy paper stock. It features nineteen Texas homes, each one with a half-plus page of text describing the house and the owners, offering comments and quotes by the architects, and often providing stories by the owners. Some eight photographs follow the text showing both exterior and interior, each with a good explanatory caption. They are all beautiful, grand, and unique and speak to the wealth of the owners. The architectural firms or architects are named, as well as the landscape architect and interior designer. Each structure is given a title that relates to its location, like Cliff Hanger, Remembrance of the Past, or Barn Dance. Both interiors and exteriors are modern, as the book title suggests, and with a few exceptions, void of people. They don’t look quite lived-in, though the space suggests that inhabitants are left to the readers’ imagination. There is a minimum of objects that belong to those occupying these houses, and whatever there is, is carefully and strategically placed to suggest someone just left the armchair for a moment.