Real Life Decorating: Your Life, Your Style, Your Home (Better Homes and Gardens(R))
Friendly decorating guide with broad appeal
Decorating ideas and tips for real people?whatever their lifestyles, life stages, and budgets.
Tours 10 real-life homes coast to coast and offers practical advice from homeowners.
Customer Review: Great Resource
There are so many decorating books out there that you can spend a fortune buying them. My mode of operatus is to check the book out of the library and if it is a "keeper" I purchase it. I am ordering this book today. Even though not all the styles are like mine, the glorious pictures and variety of decorating options represented definitely provide a great jumping off point. I would actually have given this book a 4.5 stars if that option was available, but felt it was better than 4 stars.
The book addresses several "styles" of decor and includes the actual homeowners and their comments about their decorating tastes. The pictures are beautiful and each section includes "real life lessons." These "lessons" are tips and secrets for incorporating each type of style into your decor. My one complaint - I do think there was often too much of the homeowner's "stories" and would prefer more tips and lessons. One great things included is the Sources & Resources section in the back of the book.
Customer Review: Limited in style, but has useful tips
Here are what I think are the pluses and minuses of this book: Pluses: The "style primer" section gives tips on color and paint, proportion and scale, furniture and floor plans, art and arranging, patterns and fabric, accessories and collections, lighting and lamps, storage and display, and sources and resources. This section alone will probably be worth the cost of the book to most people. Most of these tips can be generalized to different styles. Also the tips at the end of each case study can be useful to many people. Minuses: However, the case studies themselves leave something to be desired. Even though the book supposedly shows the homes of a cross section of people, the style is the same through out the book. What I call "modern country." It has a country feel, but more choices of color than traditional country and some unusual eye catching design-elements. If your style is modern country, or if you like a wide variety of styles and want a book representative of this type of style for your book colletion, like I did, then you will enjoy this book. Everyone else might want to pass.