Extreme Home Decor
Categories: In the News , Home & Gardening
I've yet to find the perfect home-decor book (good-looking house without money or time investment) in the budget-decor department, so I decided to go the other way. In Dictator Style, English writer Peter York has compiled photographs of the interiors and exteriors of homes owned by notorious dictators, including Hitler, Tito, Ceaucescu, Idi Amin, and Saddam Hussein.
While admitting that some (though not all) of Slobodan Milosevic's rooms have that certain je ne sais quoi, York condemns most of the despots on grounds of bad taste--everything is too big, and they tend to put up photos and paintings of themselves all over the place. Idi Amin had tacky shag carpeting, and no one knows what the scary devices in the Ceaucescus' bathroom (p. 57) are.
I found one of Saddam Hussein's hideaways particularly interesting; it reminded me a lot of the basement prison where Natascha Kampusch was held for eight years. There's a filthy stove, a grill (usually a bad idea in a basement prison), a container that once would have held 30 eggs (which should have been refrigerated), water bottles, toilet paper, four bars of soap, the kind of Nescafe you don't buy if Taster's Choice is available, and a bottle of Peach Snapple. You have to wonder if the Nescafe and Snapple people paid for product placement. Only for a second, though. According to the Snapple Web site, Snapple is not sold in Iraq. It is, however, sold in Kuwait, so perhaps the bottle was a souvenir.
The library has hundreds of inspirational books for those (including non-dictators) interested in indulging their own decorating tastes. These are just a few that caught my eye:
- Experimental Architecture: Houses (Universe, 2004)
- ArchiLab's Futurehouse: Radical Experiments in Living Space (Thames & Hudson, 2002)
- XTreme Houses (Smith, 2002)
- Abode a la Mode: 44 Projects for Hip Home Decor (Sterling Pub., 2005)
- Glue Gun Decor: How to Dress Up Your Home--From Pillows and Curtains to Sofas and Lampshades (McEvoy, 2005)
- Houses for Individualists [videorecording] (Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1993)
