For well over twenty-five years, Metropolitan Home magazine has celebrated--and reported on its pages--creative homeowners, artists, decorators, architects, knowing that sensitive home design takes more than just a good eye. It also requires a good inner ear, tuned to the landscape and to the true voice of the house. Listening to the urban beat, for example, designer Carl D'Aquino ran movie theater carpet, dancing with pattern, up a five-story stair in a New York townhouse. In Texas, architects Ted Flato and David Lake crafted a house from a vast metal toolshed, a typical outbuilding in those parts. And in Philadelphia, Glen Senk and Keith Johnson decorated largely with restraint, keeping their historic house unrenovated and pristine--though they weren't above aging an army green wall with a coat of black shoe polish.
 
The thirty-nine houses presented here are packed with design lessons. Each is a mix of inspiration and evocation, imagination and expertise. And each is highly adaptable for houses and apartments in other parts of the country.
 
To lay these design lessons bare, American Style features dozens of Metropolitan Home magazine's trademark "What the Pros Know" boxes, which spell out the small but vital arts of the design trade: how to paint "ruined" walls, apply silver leaf to a cabinet, specify a heat-efficient fireplace, or adapt a Miami home's tropical-fruit palette to Northern cities with less brazen light.
 
American Style aims at a balance: a home that expresses both the character of its occupant as well as its own unique niche on this earth . . . a home that achieves pride of place.      
 
Metropolitan Home, since its inception as Apartment Life, has become the recognized authority on home design and how we live today. Notable both for its friend-to-friend voice and real-life ideas, it has chronicled our life in city, town, and country for well over twenty-five years.