Have you ever glimpsed a vintage mansion behind encircling hedges and wrought-iron gates and wondered: Who built that monster? What do the rooms look like? How did it survive? Were the owners happy there? If you have, you may find the answers in a lushly illustrated volume from Acanthus Press.

The small publishing house, located in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City, specializes in books on palatial homes, mainly from America’s Gilded Age (1880–1930). Its two dozen titles so far have roamed from the fusty Jacobean style through the dignified Palladian to the exotic Aztec Revival and have celebrated the sometimes undervalued contributions to American domestic architecture of such Beaux Arts specialists as John Russell Pope and Horace Trumbauer. Amid all the scholarship, the authors—who have included design writer and editor Mitchell Owens and traditionalist architects Mark Alan Hewitt and Charles Warren—offer guilty pleasures: true gossip about design patrons who were adulterers, gamblers or gold diggers, plus mouthwatering descriptions of collections of medieval carvings, Moorish tiles, Japanese lacquer and 18th-century French boiseries.

“I like to cover subjects that no one else has and bring attention to places that no one gets to see,” says Barry Cenower, the house’s founder, publisher, chief editor and supervising art director. “I want readers to be bathed in a sense of what that place was like when it was new, at its best.”

Cenower has taken a maverick approach to design publishing: His product line is narrow and consistent. In contrast, fare from his main competitors—small elite houses specializing in architecture and design—ranges widely, from esoteric studies of ancient mud huts to the latest Deconstructivist theories to vanity monographs funded by the architects themselves.

Many book buyers respond to Acanthus’s dependability, says Cynthia Conigliaro, owner of Arch­ivia Books, a design-oriented shop on New York’s Upper East Side. “Acanthus books are very satisfying,” she explains. “They’re for readers who want to sink their teeth into the whole realm of social, architectural and cultural history.”

Acanthus’s releases fall into two main categories. First, there are the overviews of urban and suburban residences—such as last month’s Great Houses of Chicago, 1871–1921, by local historic preservationists Stuart Cohen and Susan Benjamin—and resort architecture, from Pasadena to the Hamptons. Details of floor plans, wallpaper patterns and driveway plantings mingle with anecdotes about, say, Dick Cavett’s recent arduous struggle to replicate his 1880s shingled home in Montauk after a devastating fire. Then there are the monographs about early 20th-century design practitioners, such as Dwight James Baum, famed for eclectic mansion clusters in New York City’s Riverdale section and for Sarasota, Florida’s Ringling Museum. This month, Acanthus is publishing an expanded version of a 1927 tome about his work, vintage copies of which sell for more than $1,000.

Some of Cenower’s titles sound outright obscure. Have you heard of William Lawrence Bottomley (1883–1951), a New York architect who designed Georgian houses in Richmond, Virginia? No matter how arcane the subject, though, the books get widely reviewed with enthusiastic phrases like “definitive work” (London’s Sunday Times describing the historian Penny Sparke’s monograph on the interior-design pioneer Elsie de Wolfe) and “comprehensive account” (the New York Times on a four-author, two-volume study of Carrère and Hastings, best known as the architects of the New York Public Library). Last fall, when Acanthus published the historian Sam Watters’s two-volume Houses of Los Angeles, 1885–1935, the Los Angeles Times praised the set as a “riveting picture of this city’s wealthy early inhabitants.”