In a world that is obsessed with luxury, critical luxury studies is a rapidly emerging field. This is the first book to explore the interplay between the real and imaginary realms of luxury, considering the most significant developments in the theories and practices of luxurious places and spaces over the last fifty years.
Providing a critical approach to contemporary interpretations of luxury, the book interrogates the distinction between real places and imaginary spaces. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars, it features a range of case studies which take the reader from the Rolls-Royce Ghost Black Badge to expressions of sensuality in the 1970s domestic interior, and global conceptions of fine wine and art.
The Third Realm of Luxury considers the interplay between luxury and space in both the past and the present, examining the abstract conception of excess and exoticism, as well as the real locations of the home, hotel, apartment, and palace. Full of original research, it is a key contribution to the study of consumption, design, fashion, and architecture.

Joanne Roberts is Professor in Arts and Cultural Management and co-director of the Winchester Luxury Research Group at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK.
John Armitage is Professor of Media Arts and co-director of the Winchester Luxury Research Group at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
1 The third realm of luxury: Conceptualizing the connections between real places and imaginary spaces
Joanne Roberts and John Armitage
2 Being luxurious: On the Rolls-Royce Ghost Black Badge and beyond
John Armitage
3 The architecture of authoritarian luxury
Mark Featherstone
4 Inhabiting luxury spaces
Verena Andermatt Conley
5 A touch of the exotic: Sensuality as luxury in the 1970s' domestic interior
Jo Turney
6 The emptying of the interior: Luxury, space, and the hotel effect in contemporary life
Peter McNeil
7 "The Collective": Luxury in lounge space
Samuel Austin and Adam Sharr
8 "The third realm of luxury" as I experienced it in the legacies of Getty and the Rockefellers: Elite enclosure, "as far as the eye can see . . ."
George E. Marcus
9 Secret spaces of luxury: Ignorance, free ports, and art
Joanne Roberts
10 Of space and time in California wine
Ian Malcolm Taplin
Notes
References
Index