The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors - Hardcover

Praise for The Memory Palace

"Architect Hollis (The Secret Lives of Buildings) dazzles and dizzies the reader in this cultural history of interiors...Like the interiors he's celebrating, Hollis's book is a meeting place of ideas, history, objects, and personal interpretation...the results are deeply satisfying."--Publishers Weekly

"Eloquent and evocative evidence of the evanescence of all."--Kirkus

The rooms we live in are always more than just four walls. As we decorate these spaces and fill them with objects and friends, they shape our lives and become the backdrop to our sense of self. One day, the houses will be gone, but even then, traces of the stories and the memories they contained will remain. In this dazzling work of imaginative re-construction, Edward Hollis takes us to the sites of five great spaces now lost to history and pieces together the fragments he finds there to re-create their vanished chambers.

From Rome’s palatine to the old Palace of Westmisnter and the Petit Trianon at Versailles, and from the sets of the MGM studios in Hollywood to the pavilions of the Crystal Palace and his own grandmother’s sitting room, The Memory Palace is a glittering treasure trove of luminous forgotten places and the people who, for a short time, made them their home.