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Title: At Home in Bali
ISBN: 0789204673
Author:
Made Wijaya
Publicate Date: 2000-04
Publish: 2000-04
List Price: $50.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $30.65
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $23.50
Amazon Merchant Price: $35.71
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| Customer Review: |
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1: At Home in Bali
This book has given me many great ideas as we are redoing our outdoor area in Perth, Western Australia & we love the Balinese gardens & building styles.
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2: At Home in Bali
Australian-born landscape designer and architect Made Wijaya (ne Michael White), resident on Bali since 1973, takes us on a private, guided color photo tour of twenty-four exquisite dream dwellings of the rich and famous. This lush pictorial essay displays the diversity, romance, and mystery of Balinese architecture: gorgeous bamboo and coconut wood barn houses, traditional rice storage bungalows, sumptuous estate grounds, water buffalo hide canopies, extravagant plunge pools, modern beachfront compounds hidden away in pandanus thickets, and royal water palaces. The reader's memory fills in the exotic, background atmosphere of dimly lit, shadowy courtyards; languid open-air pavilions; lava stone shrine silhouettes; the night time tinkle of village gamelan music through the thick foliage--and the sweet Asian smell of heat, flowers, and fire.
The concept of "home" in Bali is the "buana alit," a "small world," or microcosm of the greater world outside: lavish photo after photo transports us inside houses set like precious jewels in sculpted rice fields, rural villages, and isolated mountain eyries. This is where lucky strangers in paradise (painters, anthropologists, celebrities, rock stars, socialites, film makers, architects) have selectively carved out their own individual piece of an island paradise. Wijaya reminds us that the foreigners who came to Bali and fell in love with it designed these magnificent retreats as an extension of and as "an homage to that love." Photographer Ginanneschi uses a crisp, telling juxtaposition of interspliced color and black and white imagery to depict the contrasting spheres of east and west, and of native-born Balinese and their adopted, reborn-as-Balinese neighbors. The exceptional residences of the expatriates are recorded in brilliant splashy color while the everyday lives of the local people are shot in hazy, almost sepia-tone black and white. These muted snapshots capture the busy communal essence of Balinese life: readers are left to marvel at the sea of faces, families, and communities, and the elaborate pageantry of village markets, rituals, and religious ceremonies. For all their splendor and opulence, the glossy Architectural Digest showplaces appear deserted and surreal--compellingly isolated from the vibrant, teeming life swirling all around them. At Home in Bali has great appeal for devotees of fine homes and gardens and architecture buffs (note the Javanese, South Indian, Chinese, Dutch, and Portuguese styles and influences). Tourists to Bali will treasure this book as a special keepsake of the natural (and manmade) beauty they have savored during their eye-opening sojourn to the center of the archipelago.
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3: low quality photography
I agree with Mr. Chiu in one of the previous reviews. I was expecting great photography in this type of book, but instead the book is filled with small, grainy, blury pictures. A much better 'Coffee Table' book is 'Tropical Asian Style', in my opinion.
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4: beautifully photographed book
I would like to comment on a previous review, on this fine book, as a photographer i am happy to see Isabella Giananneschi work as different from the usual "sharp" "crispy" and predictable images, hers is very expressive and for someone who lives for 6 months in a year in Bali, she was able to capture the mood of the place beautifully. I also believed that she should be credited for bringing her work to a higher level of sophistication.this book is a must buy and 5 stars to the photographer and the author for thier efforts!
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5: Disappointed
First my complaints.For what I consider to be a coffee table book, the quality of the photographs (on average 1-2 per page), was incredibly poor. They were simply very blurry and not sharp at all. The book also doesn't quite know whether it wants to be a book on architecture, interior design or Bali society gossip column. I especially hated the constant name dropping on "so and so" used to be the life of the Bali party scene and how extravagant the parties were (well, I guess that has gone away definitely since the Bali bombings). I don't mind a short blurbs on the owners, but enough is enough. Now to the good points. The author is a well known and accomplished landscape architect in Bali, so he obviosly knows what he is talking about and what the owner was trying to accomplish in creating these wonderful houses. But I think you can get the same thing from other recent books by the same author, which has much sharper and clearer photos.
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