Pilot Issue Review – 30 Beautiful Homes

30 Beautiful Homes is dubbed “The magazine you’ve always wanted.” Naturally, this depends on what it is you’ve always wanted to do. On the one hand, you may wish to spend, if you have it, vast amounts of money converting and creating one of these ‘beautiful homes’ and filling it with all manner of antique nicknacks or austere modern designs. In this case you will probably feature in, rather than read, 30 Beautiful Homes.

Front Cover – 30 Beautiful Homes On the other hand, and much more likely, is that you live in quite an ordinary home and you may or may not wish to look at other people’s wonderful creations. Rather than cater for those people who might want practical and economical advice on how to make their houses a little more beautiful (as I expected), 30 Beautiful Homes appears to be designed for those who simply wish to look dreamily at others’ homes. It is the household equivalent of a holiday magazine filled with palm-lined, sun-drenched Caribbean beaches: definitely fun to look at but difficult to attain.

Editor, Sally O’Sullivan, talks about how readers are fascinated by other people’s homes and how they love to see real homes and hear what the owners have to say about them. To be fair though, none of the featured homes is real; from a farmhouse with a detached barn and Wendy house in Surrey to a gothic Victorian vicarage in rural Derbyshire, these are the places that most only dream about living in. That said, many of them are actually beautiful and amazing to look at it. The title’s only concession to practicality is a section at the end of each of the featured homes called “Good Ideas” which features good, if often fairly expensive, ideas.

The magazine is lavished with pictures and of interiors and exteriors throughout, and is presented as a glossy perfect-bound priced at £2.30.