The eyes gaze, the mind clears, endorphins are released, the muscles relax, blood travels hot and fast, a gentle caress blows and a shiver runs head to toe... And at that moment an abstraction takes place as the senses are replenished. Surrender and defeat. It is joy, pleasure and rapture.

Such is the power of beauty, a word traded perhaps with an excess of informality but whose echo and consequence are of great and serious importance, tantamount to our happiness and to our general feeling of plenitude. The truth is simple, beauty brings us together because it mirrors in each one the emotions and sensations that belong to all.

Beauty is a prize bestowed upon the discerning eye, and while its formula can be less or more diluted, canonical or not, it can be found everywhere from the purest untouched shapes of nature to the most accomplished products of the human artifice.

This class of beauty particularly, to which we drive closely at Scala Regia, the one that man incessantly created in the millennia past, finds abundant repertory in the great objects amassed in museums, pride and memory of Men; in the houses and palaces built, in the clothes and embellishments that we don and in the objects of the daily life that we all gather, with zeal and criteria of choice, in the houses we inhabit and in the collections that we assemble. All of these resonate with our Hedonic Hotstops and make our lives happier and more fulfilled.

It has been the task of this publication for its past ten issues to introduce moments of contemplative pause, appeasement even, to the routines of those who read us. To crop, as superficially as it can only be, from the rich and dense maze of the beauties of this world — veritably an unending web of themes and subjects — and to bring such crops, groomed to splendour, proud and high, to the attention of those who take interest in what we do. At each new volume, we do it with renewed enthusiasm, and even if we do not expect to appeal to all, we certainly hope to captivate a few. A single drop in an ocean, this issue aims to be a shared satisfaction from all who made it to all who will read it.

Fantastically illustrated, this volume is both evocative and inspirational, focusing on different ways of living in a house and on things one does at home. Surely, the chosen approach departs from the idealisation of factual reality and from the elevation of common habits, although there is no denial about alternative ways of ‘living in a house’ and less praiseworthy habits. Above the idealisation of reality, the approach stems from a certain ambition: the aspiration to a life that is both aesthetic and aestheticising. We have thus theorised about the present subject matter through our usual prism, which is abundantly classical in taste. And since this publication acts, after all, as a visual diary, then the examples here collected are often from times and centuries past, but are nevertheless expected to appeal to today’s eyes and resonate with a variety of readers. If the merits of the written word and of the thoughts here scattered throughout are equally considered, this Carnet has become perhaps the most philosophical of all. The team would gladly have doubled the number of pages — as always — to include countless more examples and more styles, but this would have made the work excessively time-consuming. Each picture is carefully fine-tuned, and each page is cerebrally positioned within the ensemble in a sur-mesure editorial job. Notwithstanding, with the belief that readers have come to expect this from Scala Regia publications, we wish all of you many reading hours in good spirits.