Cottage Style (Better Homes & Gardens) [Hardcover]

Better Homes and Gardens Books (Author)

Book Description

Series: Better Homes & Gardens | Publication Date: March 1998

Breaks one of the hottest categories of decorating into doable increments with chapters on furnishings, fabrics, floor coverings, window treatments, and choosing and arranging accessories.

Ideas include whole-room schemes, as well as dozens of small ideas readers can adapt to warm—and charm—their homes.

Covers the range of styles from rustic to refined.

Helps readers find ideas and adapt them to create the cottage-style of their dreams, no matter where they live.

"Finding Your Style" tip boxes throughout the book move readers from inspiration to action.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The cottage, as defined in Cottage Style, is "a usually small vacation home"; however, both books show how cottage style can be used for a permanent home as well. Tolpin covers the history of cottages as they evolved from serfs' homes in England to the Cape Cod style in the United States and on into the 20th century. The main purpose is to show how contemporary architects, using modern design techniques, have developed the cottage style for contemporary living. Architects, interior designers, and students will find this book especially useful for its last chapter on designing a cottage home. Amateurs, meanwhile, will find Cottage Style a more accessible volume for personal home design. As usual, the publisher provides numerous photographs to illustrate how to create a cottage look, with examples of window treatments, flooring, and wall coverings, as well as individual examples of various cottage styles from beach house to mountain cabin for every room of the home.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: Better Homes and Gardens; 1st edition (March 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 069620777X
• ISBN-13: 978-0696207778
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 9.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #622,069 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a find, September 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Cottage Style (Better Homes & Gardens) (Hardcover)

All we want is a cozy, comfortable, inviting home. Nothing formal or pretentious or for show. This book was on my neighbor's coffee table, and I fell in love with it right away and ordered my own copy. Now that it's fall, this book is giving me more than a winter's worth of decorating ideas to make our home comfortable. I like that this book is not limiting my sense of style but helping me to come up with my own style by showing so many varied cottage style looks. The pictures of what I can tell are actual homes are beautiful, and the writing explains how to decorate instead of just describing what is in the pictures. There are lots of tips on arranging collections and furniture, choosing fabrics, and so forth. This book is great as a dream book, and I ooh and ahh over page after page. But when I stop to read, I get information to help me take ideas from those pictures and do them my own way in our home. I'll use this classic book often and for years. A wonderful buy. Good for Christmas gifts...

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully charming, unpretentious, and helpful, May 22, 2000

By 

M. Pass - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cottage Style (Better Homes & Gardens) (Hardcover)

Where we live, a lot of people have second homes. That isn't possible for us right now, but this book, Cottage Style, is helping me give our suburban house that weekend-house look. At first, I thought cottage style was just one decorating look, but it isn't. It includes LOTS of looks (farmhouse, Adirondack, and so on) with one thing in common: giving any home that "getaway feeling," as the author explains. The book is just great. I'm planning right now on how to turn our family room into the northwoods "cabin" that my husband and I have always wanted. Another winner from the Better Homes and Gardens people.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I never put this romantic book away, February 19, 2002

By 

M.D. Roettger (Clayton, MO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cottage Style (Better Homes & Gardens) (Hardcover)

This book stays on my coffee table because I use it all the time. It has changed my life because I've used it to cozy up every room in our home. It's made me fall in love with my home. I love the ideas that are shown in the pictures but really like the simple tips that the writer has emphasized which let me add romantic cottage touches to what I already own. I looked at other cottage books but they seemed too much about architecture or about rooms from Europe that don't look like my suburban home. This book has shown me that I can have a cottage wherever I live.