Guest Blogger
Our friend Ivette lives near Washington, D.C. She has wonderful décor ideas and is a super DIY renovator who is
amazing with a paintbrush. She and her husband, Joel, are currently hard at work creating a family room in their basement and adding a guest bath. Ivette also collects design books as a hobby and summarized every single volume on her shelves for us! Those reviews can be found on our Home Decorating Books page where you also will find updates. Here are her latest additions.
Country Living Cottage Style. By Marie Proeller Hueston. Hearst Books, 2003. ISBN: 978-1-58816-567-1.
While filled with lots of great photographs of cottage rooms, the text is very basic and there really isn’t much new here. Still, this is a terrific cottage primer style and the designs vary from rustic cottage to more modern cottage. It’s all briefly touched on here.
English Country Style. By Mary Gilliat. Shuckburgh, Reynolds, Ltd. 1986. ISBN: 0-316-31382-3.
This book proves that true English Country style doesn’t look dated. All these rooms are classically beautiful and timeless. The text is very detailed and instructive. Most of the rooms are the more formal English Country style, but all is seen here. If you are a fan of this style, you owe it to yourself to search out a copy of this book, which unfortunately is out of print.
Inspired Interiors. By Suzanne Kasler. Rizzoli, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8478-3220-0.
This is an exquisite design book with such large-format pictures that you feel like you’re almost in the room. The spaces are exquisite, very much in Kasler’s modern traditional style. The narrative and captions are instructive, not just descriptive, and filled with interesting design insights and techniques.
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Perfect English Cottage. By Ros Byam Shaw. Ryland Peters Small, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-84597-902-1.
Like all of Shaw’s books, this is a winner. There is beautiful photography of mostly humble English cottages decorated almost entirely by their owners. The narrative is rich with the histories of the houses and the owners as well as jam-packed with great decorating ideas.
Style and Substance, The Best of Elle Décor. By Margaret Russell. Filipacchi Publishing, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-933231-60-0.
The pictures in this book are fabulous and varied, filled with myriad design ideas. The narrative, which is mostly captions for the pictures, falls woefully short though, being more descriptive of the picture than the design concepts behind the rooms. So, this is a great book for browsing and gathering new ideas, but you’ll need to know how to implement them yourself, and you’ll also need to figure out why they work in the first place.
The Tailored Interior. By Thad Hayes. Rizzoli, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8478-3081-7.
A beautifully photographed book filled with Hayes’ lovely, understatedly modern rooms. Absolute eye candy, but I wish there had been more narrative and what little there is had been more descriptive of the thought process that went into designing the rooms. The book is disappointing in that respect, but the rooms and pictures make up for it to some extent.