Customer Reviews

Bunny Williams' Scrapbook for Living

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Like other reviewers, I love Bunny Williams. She is one of the best interior designers out there...a respite from retro-chic, domino style. However, this book was a big disappointment. The photography is jarring and haphazard. I know it was meant to represent a scrapbook, but the small squares were a big distraction. She does provide some good hints...but these are available in her other books. I do not think this book is worth the investment and am wondering who was her advisor on layout. Still a fan, though! (Just not of the book...)

Bunny Williams creates beautiful spaces and has previously published a wonderful book (Point of View) which I highly recommend. I was intrigued when I saw she had published another book "Scrapbook for Living." After spending time reading it I found a lot of good information and helpful guidance that could have been put in a much smaller book. What I found so bothersome were the pages dedicated to what I call a "maze-montage" of the same photograph which left me with a headache. The art direction of photography has fallen short from her earlier publishing endeavor.

Bravo Bunny--I have read "Scrapbook For Living" and my head is spinning with obtainable information.This book must be put next to your bed and not just flipped through-it must be read. It is not just a coffeetable book but a textbook.It goes quickly but has infinite information that all of us are hungry for.
Bunny shares her knowledge like no one else. Whether it is her lecture at a function or her beautiful books-starting with one of my favorites,"On Garden Style", she gives concrete information that we can all use-not just information that we can only dream about.Her knowledge is based on tried and true facts. This book is proof of that."Scrapbook For Living" is not written by someone being "coy" that gives you part of the information you need and you have to figure out the rest.It is written by someone trying to help every reader achieve their dream home no matter what the size or location.
I love the photography in this book. It is interesting and unique as it should be. It catches the attention and holds it through the last page.
I can hardly wait to rearrange my linen closet using her suggestions-Brilliant

As much as I respect Bunny Williams as a designer/decorator, this book was a joke. The cover looks promising, but photos of her interiors might as well have been left out, as the "collage" motif presented throughout the book would have been much more effective had she used 1 or 2 good photos instead of 20 or so pics of this corner or that chair leg. The photos didn't even have much to do with the content of the book. Nothing that would inspire. The advice for how to live in one's home, such as making sure you have a box of tissue next to a guest bed or using a large vase for an umbrella stand by the door, might be applicable for an 18 year old living on his/her own for the first time, but for those already familiar with basic house necessities (such as using a basket to store wood by the fireplace, another pearl of wisdom I paid $40 for) this was worthless. You're better off getting a copy of The Domino Book of Decorating.

How many of us would love to follow around a favorite aunt in her home who happens to be one of the U.S.'s premier interior designers--like Bunny--while she drops her design pearls of wisdom for us to catch and record? That's what the experience of reading this book feels like. Since Bunny can't adopt all of us, she compiled the precious design insights that over 30 years of designing and living in beautiful rooms has taught her.

In SCRAPBOOK FOR LIVING, Bunny's emphasis is on living: how to create rooms that are beautiful AND livable. If you've seen rooms decorated by Bunny Williams--especially her own homes--you know they combine style with livability. They're homey. They're rooms where dogs are allowed on the furniture--but they still look great in magazines. Bunny shares the inside details of how she accomplishes this.

Bunny stresses function in this book--how to make rooms work in an attractive way. There's tips for every room--from mudrooms, to living rooms and libraries, to project rooms, to bedrooms and baths. Covering A to Z design topics such as selecting chairs to bringing a home to life with flowers, scents, art and fireplaces, Bunny teaches the essentials of comfort. It's the gems she shares along the way--any place you want a window and don't have one, put a mirror--that make this book invaluable. Another favorite tip is take a camera with you and photograph what you love for your own design scrapbooks. It's intriguing to read what inspires Bunny, including her nine favorite design books and design resources. Bunny says when she sees a home full of books, she knows the owners are likely to be interesting. This book's pictures are MORE about illustrating the ideas in it--less about seeing all the beautiful rooms she has decorated.

What I loved about this book is it provides a personal look at how a top designer, savvy entrepreneur, wife, mother, dog-lover who loves to travel, entertain, read, and learn lives in her homes. What are her priorities in combining beauty and function?

In writing classes, you learn the ABCD elements of fiction books: Action, Background, Character and Dialogue. There's a fifth element in books, I've realized, and that's the personality/character of the author which can't help but leak through. Likable, nice authors write likable books which touch your heart. You hear people who have met Bunny say how darn likable she is; reading her books is heart-warming. You can almost hear her: "honey, after polishing the silver, keep it in an airtight bag...my favorite fragrances for rooms are....you can use the seating fabric in a room to create a matching dog-bed the dogs will want to be on...." Priceless and personal tidbits for well-lived and well-loved lives & homes fill this scrapbook for living.

Ii adore Bunny Williams! but, bought this book and was so disappointed, I sent it back. Thought most of the photography, especially the filler repeated over and over again snapshots, not to Bunny's top notch design ethic.

Extremely disappointing! I had to put it aside less than half way through. I felt bombarded with too many duplicate photos.

Check out pages 64 - 66, 130, 212....definitely not enough relevant content to support the need for so many duplicate

pictures. One or two pictures to support each "concept" or idea would have been sufficient. For $40.00, less would have

been best. No new ideas...reminded me of high school.....trying to stretch 40 words of content into a 300 word

composition..... "...where' the beef?"

.

I knew I had to have this book. I own her others, and after all, it's Bunny Williams! She is amazing, I'd buy her grocery list if it was available! I read the reviews and took a look at it in the bookstore...and waited... for the price to lower a bit. I am happy to say I now own it and do love it. Yes, the pictures are small and they run together without any borders to separate them. But the main issue I have is the repetitive pictures used!! This was, sadly, a huge oversight! All's forgiven, Bunny, but buyer... be sure before you buy.

I would return this book had I not pawed through it, hoping that it would get better. It is almost of no use whatsoever to anyone with the most basic sense of design and most minimal knowledge of housekeeping. There's actually very little text -- half a dozen sentences float on a blank white page mostly, across from which are montages composed of tiny snapshots stuck together in mosaic form. Most puzzling is when the same two pictures are repeated over and over again in a small 9 x 9 grid, making for serious visual confusion and hideous effect.

The pictures themselves are for one, mostly very small, and also strangely irrelevant to the reader -- I can't figure out why most of the shots were chosen. A close-up snapshot of boardgames without any sense of their context or how they're being stored in the chapter on playrooms is totally pointless, as is the close-up photo of billard balls with the background out of focus.

If you are hoping for a beautiful picture book, as I was, you will be disappointed. If you're hoping for interesting, useful or amusing text, you'll be yet more disappointed.

I loved, loved, loved An Affair with a House and have re-read it at least 25 times (no kidding...I even reviewed it for Amazon) and so was very eager to receive my copy of Scrapbook. Made a cup of tea, lit a fire and settled in for a long, glorious read. I anticipated studying every photo, reading every word and having a wonderful 'conversation' with the delightful Bunny Williams.

Well. To my great disappointment, our Bunny was led astray by poor art direction and an absolutely miserable approach to the photography in this book. I was so surprised --and dismayed-- that I spent another hour really examining what it was that fell so short, and came to a clear conclusion: The copy's great, but the art direction and approach to photography are just awful.

This book was not inexpensive to produce; there are scads of color photographs, it's not a small or short book, and there is no scrimping on paper quality, binding or other production details. To my relief, Bunny's actual tips were very interesting and helpful-- very Bunny-worthy -- and the text is written crisply and engagingly. The tips are organized interestingly and are to the point. However, the layout and design stick to a very rigid format of mostly tiny photos on the right hand side and text on the left side. On every. Single. Page.

But far more disconcerting than the overall very uninspired art direction and layout were the actual shots. The very essence of such a book! Rejecting the use of full page photos except in rare exception, the book consists of page after page of tiny, cluttered, often awkwardly composed or poorly lit --or worse, irrelevant-- photos on almost every right hand page of the relentlessly boring format. Using the 12-tiny-photo-gimmick on page after page was a huge mistake. They are not separated by a pin line or grid from each other, so one has to stare carefully to even determine where one ends and the adjacent one begins. Worse, they often are not related clearly to the 'tips' featured on the opposite page, or are contradictory to the text. For example, one 'tip' is to cease stocking plastic water bottles and use tap filtered water stored in lovely glass containers in the fridge, instead. Yet the incredibly chaotic photos directly across from this text show shot after shot of various refrigerators' contents containing stack after stack of....you guessed it: plastic water bottles.

To add insult to injury, these teeny tiny photos are often repeated randomly in the relentless grid format, wasting even more valuable real estate. The visual experience is exhausting as your eye has nowhere to rest, and the chaotic approach is so unsatisfying after a few pages.

In all, I found Bunny's text to be terrific: real, helpful, and useful, although a bit more 'basic' than I'd love to hear from her. Indeed, I put the book down and scrutinized my guest rooms carefully before returning to finish it. One bit of sloppy editing was that that some of the tips were repeated in different sections. But the art direction was just uninspired and amateurish. The photos were somewhat self-indulgent on the part of the photographer-- tiny and cluttered, too many repeats, poorly lit to be so small, and of odd and uninteresting angles. Do we really need to see 12 different sets of stairs in tiny little photos? Or, oddly cropped shots of plain white fabric lampshades?

As is true with displays of food, textiles and almost anything else we love to savor visually-- large, lush photos, with glorious composition, lighting and detail are what make a design and decorating lifestyle book. For her next effort, I hope Bunny insists on a more skilled and commercial art director, and lets the photographer (Amy Archer) snap for someone else! I look forward to her next effort and hope she will apply her wonderful visual sense to it and not be led astray by a substandard publishing team. (Psst! Is the team who produced An Affair still around? Find them, they knew what they were doing!)