Canter Bridge

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House and Garden is a big, beautiful, in-your-face collection of colors and designs for the well-heeled reader without children in diapers or other unstylish impediments to the concept of home as castle.

For many of us, that’s not a bad idea, just one that belongs to a stage of life that may or may not become reality. In the meantime, I find value in House and Garden as a source of ideas for my much more lived-in-home, complete with two teenagers, two dogs, one cat, one very large fish, and mud flecked with things both mundane and unspeakable that gets tracked in from the backyard where dogs, humans, and wild birds run wild.

The creative articles are squeezed in among luxury and near-luxury advertisements that are themselves a sort of art form.

I respect the genre for its high standards, and also because I see what magazines like this one mean to a high-end spec home builder friend of mine, whose mind is always alert to architectural, design, and decorative ideas that percolate and then emerge in the shape of stunning homes that leave me breathless, admiring, and ready to retreat to my little home in the Heartland with its dog tracks and teenager debris.