Sara Ruffin Costello

The authors wrote this book to help teach you how to "read" a room. As such, this is a book that has significantly more pictures than text (not a bad thing, in this case).

The authors go through each of the major rooms in the home. Each chapter contains several examples and breaks down what makes that room work. They talk about the important considerations for choosing the major pieces for that room and give a number of tips, all illustrated. I can almost guarantee that you won't like show more everything in this book, but there is enough variety that you are likely to find inspiration somewhere.

This book contains a rather unique feature; the authors show you how to mix and match different styles. Some books will tell you to only pair traditional pieces or modern pieces; never mix them. This book has a "mix and match" section for each chapter that explores how you can unify stylistically different pieces to make for a more interesting interior.

This book will not teach you how to decorate, but it will provide inspiration and help you understand what you like and dislike. I am definitely looking at things differently after reading it. show less

This book is gorgeous and inspiring. However, the tips seem a bit out of reach for the average person. Having an already spectacular apartment or house seems to be the key. Yet, I'm still a sucker for the fabulous photos.

I'm in the process of buying a house and this was the first decorating book I picked up at the library, somewhat at random. So I can't speak to how original the material is, just how helpful. After finishing this, I'm quite sad that the magazine (Domino) is no more. I would have subscribed. The photos are lovely, of course. The furniture is not totally out of reach for the average person. The case studies and the mix-and-match ideas were particularly helpful. There's one section where a room show more has the same furniture arranged three different ways, depending on the focus; I would have loved to see that done many more times with additional rooms. It would have been nice to have more than one page worth of help on determining your own style; I still have no idea there. Nice resources list in the back. show less

This book was pretty disappointing. I was hoping for some ideas for decorating small spaces on a budget. What this book is good at is showing you what rich people do to decorate their humongous homes. The tiny section on decorating small rooms shows rooms that are bigger than my current apartment. That said, a few of the pictures gave me some ideas so it's not all wasted.