United States Eventing Association

On The Bookshelf

Equestrian Style: Home Design, Couture, and Collections from the Eclectic to the Elegant
by Vicky Moon (Clarkson Potter 2008)

Equestrian Style is having horses on the wall as well as in the barn. Although the book covers an array of artistic objects, Moon's ultimate fascination is with the people who collect equestrian-inspired china or knit sweaters in racing colors. She interviews a man who makes custom polo mallets, "Each mallet costs about $120. Professional players order ten to twenty at a time for each season in Wellington, Florida, and Argentina." Moon visits a Hollywood celebrity child whose playroom is wall-to-wall horses: Pony Club from ELC in Great Britain, jumpers from Schleich in Germany, and American Girl.

Although the book visits homes and barns from the East Coast to California, from Saratoga Springs to Florida, the soul of the book is the Virginia/Maryland hunt country. One California woman leaves her 3,800 square-foot home and event production company in Los Angeles to ride each year in the Upperville Colt and Horse Show.
The oversized book is half pictures and half text. The 450 photos range in size from double-page spreads of intensively decorated interiors to an inset of a driving apron. The text is impressive in range and in the immense amount of detail: foxhunting, sculpture, racing, collectible books, side-saddle, the care of silver, hydrotherapy, needlepoint, equine air travel, French Country Pierre Deux Ile de France yellow-and-blue wallpaper, riding academies in historic New York City, and how to make a proper Kentucky Burgoo. Moon mentions two eventing Olympians but no actual mud-and-gallop eventing appears, aside from Clayton Fredericks jumping into the Head of the Lake in the section on the Kentucky Horse Park.

All of Moon's books do an excellent job of meeting their announced goals. You will know about a wide variety of Equestrian Style when you arrive at Further Reading on page 252. But at what price? I wonder about the validity of the lifestyle Moon covers so well. On one hand, there is the desire to surround oneself with beauty. On the other hand, doesn't a well-framed print of Stubbs' A Grey Hunter with Groom and Greyhound offer the same visual information as the original painting, a variation of which hangs in the Tate. Does a pair of $995 chocolate brown calfskin Manolo Blahnik paddock boots protect your feet any better than the ordinary model? Where does the quest for beauty cross into materialism and vanity? The people in this book are strangers, so I can't know their moral choices. But I can worry about them. As Saint Francis said, "Riches prick us with a thousand troubles in getting them, as many cares in preserving them, and yet more anxiety in spending them, and with grief in losing them." Or, do our possessions "Keep us from caring for ourselves, our relationships, and our environment."?[Northwest Earth Institute] Or am I just jealous?
For further investigation of the effect of money on the soul, check out Acquired Tastes by Peter Mayle (Bantam 1992). It's his best book, regardless of the attention that other one received.

Other books by Moon:
The Middleburg Mystique: A Peek Inside the Gates of Middleburg Virginia
(Capital Books 2001, Eventing USA 2003 #3) Town & Country puts on Wellies.
The Private Passion of Jackie Kennedy Onassis: Portrait of a Rider(Collins Design 2005, Eventing USA 2005 #5) As labeled.
A Sunday Horse: A Year on the Grand Prix Jumper Circuit (Capital 2004, Eventing USA 2005 #3) Life and shopping with the hunter/jumpers.
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