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fireplaces, furniture, paint and wall treatments, lighting, cafés and tabletops, flea markets, and collecting, Baird answers this question with a resounding yes. She spent every summer for many years in a region of France, but one year she and her family decided to stay in Paris for an entire year. They found an apartment in the seventh near her favorite Paris café, Bar de la Croix Rouge, which she refers to as “completely typical by French standards and outrageous by American” (it has fourteen-foot ceilings and eight fireplaces). She decorated her Paris apartment the way the French do: if you see something you really like, you buy it first and figure out where to put it later. The chapter on flea markets is particularly useful for anyone interested in buying items that require shipping—the transiteur (shipper), she notes, is as essential to the flea market as the vendors, and he or she will pick up your merchandise, pack, ship, insure, clear customs, and deliver. Baird wisely warns that bringing Paris home “is not as simple as adding lace curtains or provincial pottery to your décor. It is something much more subtle and much more personal. It has to do with the philosophy of European living and many characteristics.” By turning these pages readers embark on a stroll through Paris identifying both the tangible and intangible gems that may be brought home.

And a duo of titles published by Clarkson Potter from French style specialist Linda Dannenberg:

French Country Kitchens: Authentic French Kitchen Design from Simple to Spectacular, with photographs by Guy Bouchet (2008). When she thinks back on all the hundreds of homes she’s visited in France over the last twenty-five years, Dannenberg says, it’s almost always the kitchens she remembers most clearly and with the most affection. In these pages readers glimpse several kitchens in Paris and its surrounding regions as well as in other parts of France. These include Patricia Wells’s kitchen in her Provençal home, Chanteduc, and the kitchen of Michel Biehn, owner of La Maison Biehn, a renowned shop specializing in Provençal quilts, antiques, and tabletop items in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Among the most distinctive characteristics of the French country kitchens Dannenberg visits “is the acknowledgment of the past in some way, either as inspiration or to respect the kitchen’s ‘old bones’—the walls, the beams, the floors, the volumes—or to use old vintage elements, cooking tools, or art, even in a very contemporary kitchen design.” For nearly every kitchen featured there is an accompanying recipe that is representative of the region and was prepared in the kitchen. “It may be one humble, functional room,” notes Dannenberg, “but the French country kitchen reveals all you need to know about the art and joy of living in France.”

Pierre Deux’s Paris Country: A Style and Source Book of the Île-de-France, with Pierre Levec and Pierre Moulin, and photographs by Guy Bouchet (1991). This book appeared a few years after the groundbreaking and hugely successful Pierre Deux’s French Country, and it is as essential to Paris and the Île-de-France as its sister volume is to Provence. In addition to the design and decorating tips there is useful information for visitors. (Though some of the restaurant and hotel information may be outdated, these details may be researched online, as is the case for the shops, antique fairs, museums, and festivals.)

Readers who may be traveling on to Provence will want to read New French Country: A Style and Source Book (2004), in which Dannenberg picks up where she left off with Pierre Deux’s French Country more than twenty years ago, with homes, gardens, fabrics, furniture, pottery, architectural elements, decorative accents, and an excellent directory of French country sources in Provence.

The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—And the Modern Home Began, Joan DeJean (Bloomsbury, 2009). Though not the same kind of book as the others here, this is de rigueur reading about the fundamental ideas about homes and homelife in what the author calls the