AROUND HOME : Metropolitan Places, TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELIZABETH HEYERT (Viking Penguin Inc.; 1989)

HERE ARE 32 homes with sigh! quality: Sigh!--Rudolph Nureyev’s candlelit apartment in Paris with its tapestries and silver. Sigh!--Bette Midler’s simple, painterly mansion with its floral-print, slipcovered chairs and porch swing. Sigh!--Bernard Nevill’s (he’s professor of textiles at the Royal College of Art in London) beautiful, chaotic studio with its casual mounds of flowers, Turkish runners and accumulated furniture--a charismatic place that looks very much like a still-life painting. Elizabeth Heyert photographs interiors for magazines such as Architectural Digest and Town and Country. Selecting residences in eight capital cities in styles ranging from ornate to ultramodern, she covers just about every aesthetic in contemporary home design.

($40.)