In many vocations—legislator and sausage-maker come to mind—the ordeal of creation is best kept a secret. We’d rather get the finished product and move on. Not so with architect Bobby McAlpine, who writes about his work so eloquently he might be mistaken for a poet with a drafting table.
In Poetry of Place, the followup to his best-selling The Home Within Us, McAlpine walks us through 20 homes, describing them in terms both personal and personified: An exotic Florida beach house is the “mysterious personage at the dinner table.” A cozy English-style home is imagined as a “Br’er Rabbit of a house.” A welcoming neighborhood residence is “warm with big pockets, like a favorite winter coat you can’t wait to get back into.” A Spanish Colonial house on a hill has the “broad-stroke thinking of a maverick rancher.” In Poetry of Place, there’s broad-stroke thinking on every page.
Poetry of Place: The New Architecture and Interiors of McAlpine (Rizzoli New York, 2017)