Skip to Main Content

Around the House and In the Garden

A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing, and Home Improvement

About The Book

For six years, House & Garden editor-in-chief Dominique Browning has written a monthly column that weaves together personal stories and tips about home decorating, gardening, and raising children with universal themes of domestic life. In Around the House and in the Garden, Browning adapts and expands these well-loved pieces, adding dozens of new essays, to create an insightful and moving narrative about the solace and sense of self that can be found through tending one's home.
From bedrooms and bathrooms to gardens and trees, from the importance of a couch in the kitchen to the spiritual role of a grand piano, Around the House and in the Garden reveals the intimate relationship between home and self. Browning illustrates the ways her domestic needs, instincts, and arrangements have reflected major changes in her family life. Considering her own divorce, she focuses on how grief inhabits a room: "When I was divorced my sense of home fell apart. And so, too, did my house." Eventually, attention to her home helped to mend her heart, and the attention to her heart helped her to tend her home.
Brimming with warmth, knowledge, and the useful decorating and gardening tips that have made House & Garden a favorite for one hundred years, Around the House and in the Garden is a book for anyone who has ever felt the need to reinvent a life or a space, who has ever fallen in love with the idea of home -- the place where we reinvent ourselves, "the place where we have the final word about what goes where,...what feels comfortable, what is life-enhancing...a place that gives us strength to go out and embrace the world."

About The Author

Dominique Browning has been the editor-in-chief of House & Garden since 1995. She was previously the editor of Mirabella, an assistant managing editor of Newsweek, and the executive editor of Texas Monthly. She lives in New York with her two teenage sons.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Scribner (May 18, 2002)
  • Length: 207 pages
  • ISBN13: 9780743229869

Browse Related Books

Raves and Reviews

The New York Times Book Review Browning has an unerring gift for capturing revelatory events.

Chicago Tribune Reinvention -- of home and self -- is at the heart of this simple yet elegant book. Browning's gift is telling her story of failed love through her feelings about household objects and daily routines, showing how her heart, her home, and her garden begin to heal.

Cheryl Mendelson, author of Home Comforts Browning describes more eloquently than anyone else how our homes shape and support and change with our lives....This is a wonderful book.

Detroit Free Press Browning's voice and style are personal, good-humored, and evocative....To paraphrase her own words, she tended the house and garden for years. In the end, she finds, the house and garden took good care of her.

Sarah Ban Breathnach, author of Simple Abundance [Browning] shares her unique and appealing blend of warmth, wit, and domestic wisdom, and the result is moving and personal as well as useful and inspiring.

Jay McInerney author of Bright Lights, Big City andBacchus and Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar Anyone who has ever owned a house, planted a bulb, or lost a lover should read this book....Beautiful, haunting, and inspiring.

Resources and Downloads

High Resolution Images

More books from this author: Dominique Browning