Pageturner - Egyptian Palaces And Villas

The Age

Wednesday August 30, 2006

BEVERLEY JOHANSON

BOOK REVIEW: Egyptian Palaces and Villas, By Shirley Johnston with Sherif Sonbol

Published by Abrams, Hardcover; RRP $90

SOME interiors books are manuals for living. Flick the pages and there are ideas aplenty that we plunder to improve our humble abodes. Then there are the books that take us to other lands and other ways of living and it's more about fantasising than borrowing, but still we pluck a bit here for the house and an idea or two for the garden. Then there is another level entirely - strictly for dreamers - impossible to duplicate. The buildings are so exotic, the lives so other-worldly and the trappings so splendid that it's all delicious fantasy and voyeurism.

This is the case with Shirley Johnston's book, which looks at significant Egyptian buildings of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Built by pashas, khedives (the Turkish viceroys in Egypt until early last century) and kings, they vary widely in style, richly borrowing from Arabic, Magreb and European influences. But all these houses in the land of the Nile are lavish - a forest of gold columns shaped like palm trees, wall upon wall of intricate Turkish tiles, Italianate gilding richer than any Venetian palazzo. One proud owner, an Ottoman ruler, wanted a swimming pool and built "an enormous nymphaeum - a marble basin enclosed by frescoed galleries, with elegant kiosks in each corner, and large enough for tiny wooden rowboats and marble fountains".

With each is a story as interesting as the building - of power plays, intrigue, lost loves, curses, domesticity and building techniques.