Excerpt from Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

PRESENT

Sunlight floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-coloured floorboards and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monster shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face-down on the seat. The red of that magazine cover, the plant's brilliant green, the petrol blue of the upholstery and the pale ochre floor stand out against the white walls, their chalky tone picked up again in the pale rug that just creeps into the frame.

The next picture is of the building's exterior, an Art Nouveau apartment block with acanthus leaf and citrus fruit cornices. The white render is all but invisible under layers of fluorescent graffiti, tattered posters and peeling paint. On the first floor, you can scarcely make out the stucco gables beneath the grime. The combination of turn-of-the-century luxury and raw modern grittiness lends a feeling of freedom and decadence, with a hint of eroticism. Some of the windows are boarded up with faded chipboard, but in others there are plants and string lights. An ivy cascades from a balcony onto the street below.

The kitchen is fitted out with glossy white subway tiles, a chunky wooden worktop, a double butler's sink. Open shelves are lined with blue and white enamel dishes and mason jars filled with rice, grains, coffee, spices. Cast iron pans and olive wood ladles hang from a wall-mounted steel bar. Out on display on the worktop are a brushed steel kettle, a Japanese teapot and a bright red blender. The windowsill is filled with herbs growing in terracotta pots: basil, mint, chives, but also marjoram, winter savory, coriander, dill. Pushed against one wall is an antique marble-top pastry table and salvaged school chairs. They are lit by an accordion wall-light mounted between a botanical lithograph of an araucaria and a reproduction print of a British wartime poster.

Next, the living room, where a jungle of low-maintenance, luxuriant plants shelter in the nook of the bay window: the lush monstera stretching its shiny leaves towards the outside world, a fiddle-leaf fig almost touching the ceiling from its huge faux-concrete pot, trailing ivies and hanging peperomia on display across two wall shelves, and string of pearls and Chinese money plants whose tangled foliage reaches all the way to the floor. In one corner, arranged on a collection of stools and upturned boxes, is a miniature forest of alocasias, giant euphorbias, weeping figs, downy-stemmed philodendrons, strelitzias and dieffenbachias. Through the French window you can make out a balcony with two chairs around a small table, a porcelain ashtray and some string lights.

The reverse perspective shows the rest of the room: a low sofa and Danish curved mahogany armchair upholstered in petrol blue textured cotton; a herringbone tweed blanket; an exposed lightbulb with a twiddly filament hanging from a midnight blue fabric cable; a black metal side table with past issues of Monocle and the New Yorker stacked beside a brass candle holder and a glass bowl filled with fruit. Next, a rolltop wooden sideboard displaying spider plant cuttings in glass jars of water, an avocado seed just starting to sprout, and a vinyl record player; two floor-standing speakers connected to an amplifier on a low wall shelf; above that, an LP collection with a few prized pieces facing outwards (a limited edition In Rainbows, a first edition Kraftwerk); a dracaena casting a shadow like a spindly hand; a Primavera Sound poster.

Tying it all together is a sandy-coloured Berber rug with a fine geometric pattern. On either side of the room there are facing double doors, stripped but with the odd streak of pistachio paint still visible. The doors are closed, which gives the modest space a cosy, homely, almost stuffy feel. It is a room for low-lit, hushed conversations on winter evenings. But in the following picture, those same four doors, now wide open, offer a view of the connecting rooms, and the perspective is lengthened again by the line of the hardwood floorboards.

Excerpted from Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico. Copyright © 2022 by Vincenzo Latronico. Excerpted by permission of New York Review Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.