Victoria Alexander: Home

Pale pink pervades the home of Victoria Alexander:  it colors plates and cups, it tinges the walls and the frames of the woodblock prints that hang on the ancient walls, it comes through the windows, a distillation of the very colors found in Australian sunsets.

Writer, passionate cook, refined photographer, Victoria Alexander together with Love Books, a small but intriguing publishing house in Sidney, gives us a book steeped in pink, starting with the color of the cover.  After a cup of tea sipped in her company, she leads us through Home: a fresh account of what she terms an anthropological pilgrimage through the home, and through houses:  from the tribal tents of Kenya through the colorful constructions of Ethiopia, by way of the blossoms put out to dry in a Japanese house and the slatted balconies of old Stockholm.

Dedicated to those who cheerfully color outside the lines, writes Victoria in the epigraph to this book, wrapped in a coarse cloth with a debossed title, and printed on uncoated paper of a delicate pink shade.  The edge of the pages, printed digitally, repeat the title along with the adjective “sweet.”

Home! Home!
 Sweet, sweet home!
 There’s no place like home
 There’s no place like home!

So goes the popular song.  And with that ditty in mind, the author describes with words and illustrates with her own photos the houses in which she would love to live, the cocoons, the nests which we would love to inhabit.