Plenty of eye candy to drool over and a nice variety of photos from over-the-top high-end rooms to simple log cabins, especially for those who are more interested in "period inspired" than "period accurate". (For that, get Jane Powell's book "Bungalow Bathrooms".) However, it suffers in the editing department. The book is a conglomeration of short articles by a bunch of different authors rather than a single author's work. Typos and misused homonyms disrupted the flow of reading. Some factual errors were particularly irritating: for instance, "It marks a period of 'balloon construction', which implies that moldings and other architectural elements would no longer be molded into place individually or carved one by one. Rather they would come in strips and be shipped from factories in bulk." I'd like some of what that contributor was smoking, because it was apparently pretty good stuff - balloon construction referred to a specific style of FRAMING a house, it has nothing to do with the moldings. If you want information on the history of household sanitation and on residential construction of the Victorian era, read something else, this one's primarily for the pictures.