Charleston Style Then & Now

From its earliest days as a burgeoning colonial port blending European, Caribbean, and Asian influences, Charleston has maintained a unique brand of southern cosmopolitanism. Charleston Style, Then and Now, a condensed edition of the bestselling Charleston Style: Past and Present, traces the city's allure through its exquisite and sometimes eccentric architecture, decorative arts, and garden designs, which express a wide range of European and American styles, including Georgian, Federal, Chinese, Chippendale, Gothic and Greek Revival, Queen Anne, Eastlake, and more. Author Susan Sully explores Charleston as a medium through which this spectrum of styles becomes transmuted into a distinctive regional mode.

Sully's Charleston is a place where antique and modern, fantasy and reality, playfully intersect. During Charleston's ascendance as one of America's wealthiest cities, its most privileged citizens acquired sophisticated, even decadent, tastes that continue to infuse their homes and gardens. After the Civil War, hardship, pride, and nostalgia shaped an aesthetic in which peeling gilt and tattered lace became badges of honor. Thanks to one of the earliest and most energetic American preservationist movements, the past extends into the present in Charleston, and the city's spaces reveal its complex spirit.

Charleston Style, Then and Now features fourteen residences ranging from archetypally gracious antebellum mansions to cottage-like dependencies to the iconic Charleston "single houses," with their sweeping piazzas, high ceilings, and tall windows. Also featured are some of the city's most charming gardens, inspired by the formal and picturesque landscape designs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe as well as by the exotic gardens of Japan. With rich color photography by John Blais and a delightful foreword by acclaimed novelist Josephine Humphreys, Charleston Style, Then and Now delivers an evocative portrait of this fascinating city.

Ever since Charleston first gained a reputation as a bastion of southern living in a modern metropolitan setting, its style and grace have been clear to all visitors to this unique city. Charleston's roots go all the way back to its days as a powerful colonial port, and Charleston Past and Present represents the finest residences from the early seventeenth century to more modern times, as well as their histories.

This newly formatted edition maps the city's charm through its exquisite and sometimes eccentric architecture, decorative arts, and garden designs, featuring full color photography by John Blais of nineteen southern homes and estates. With a delightful foreword by acclaimed novelist Josephine Humphreys, it is the essential coffee-table book for the thousands who visit Charleston each year.

Susan Sully is the author of several style books, including Charleston Style: Past and Present and Savannah Style: Mystery and Manners, both with Rizzoli. She is a frequent contributor to national and international magazines on the subject of regional style and cuisine.

John Blais is a New York-based photographer whose work has appeared in publications for Historic Charleston Foundation and in such magazines as Colonial Homes and This Old House.

Josephine Humphreys is a Charleston-based novelist whose works include Dreams of Sleep, Rich in Love, and The Fireman's Fair. She is a former Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Prize.