Home Design Guide [Paperback]

Barty Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 20, 1998

This is a comprehensive and practical guide to home decoration. It takes account of the needs of real people, with many budget ideas, storage possibilities, space-saving tips and troubleshooting. The first section looks at each room in turn, and tells readers all they need to know about various styles, uses of colour, handy tips, budget ideas and storage solutions. Design checklists in each chapter ensure that people don't make the wrong decisions and spend money unnecessarily. Section deals with materials and how to use them. There are also over 30 DIY projects, fully illustrated, which show how to lay woodstrip floors and wallpaper behind radiators.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Whether you're a virgin homeowner anxious to make your decorating mark or a seasoned veteran ready to remodel, designing your special home can be overwhelming to say the least. Barty Phillips's Home Design Guide will keep your enthusiasm from turning to frustration with "inspirational ideas and hard information, checklists, cheap solutions and practical projects," all expertly organized in a durable--a vinyl cover no less!--and highly attractive guide. Phillips opens with a thoughtful and informative look at the big design picture, then attacks the house room by room in section 1, concentrating on one room per chapter and offering a thorough discussion of the space's unique set of challenges and the structural and decorative options available to not only meet those challenges but create the room of your dreams. Clever budget ideas appear at the end of each chapter--"for your bedroom, try sheeting by the yard which is much cheaper than ready-made sheets and only needs hemming"--as well as design checklists chock full of small but important details--"is the bed where you can reach all sides easily for making it?" "If the room is not carpeted, is there a warm rug to put your feet on?" A chapter entitled "A Short Guide to Interior Styles" rounds out this section, offering a brief introduction to popular styles--arranged alphabetically and categorized as "historic" (with dates) and "timeless" (regional or national). Section 2, entitled "Choosing and Using," examines certain materials and the effects you can produce with them, including wood, textiles, wallpaper, and plaster moldings. Included here are straightforward projects suitable for even the novice designer. Section 3 is full of facts, including a glossary; a bibliography; an address list of useful organizations, stores, and suppliers; and a list of measurement conversions. With full-color photographs that appear throughout--a great help for visualizing the creative possibilities to be found in any "problem" room--the Home Design Guide is the perfect tool for organizing your designer dreams. --Stefanie Hargreaves

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Soma Books (May 20, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 157959008X
• ISBN-13: 978-1579590086
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,588,678 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Pretty pictures but not very well written, December 3, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Home Design Guide (Paperback)

I picked this book out of a stack of home design books because I was impressed by the color photos and because its size made me suspect I'd actually be able to carry it around and read it, unlike the numerous oversize coffee table books on the subject. Now I think I made a mistake. Phillips' book is a jumble of tips that reads as if it were written and edited by amateurs. At times repetitive, at other times maddeningly elliptical, it alternates between stating the obvious and alluding to without explaining the esoteric. Styles and concepts are referred to extensively in early chapters which are only explained in later chapters, with haphazard cross-references. The color photos seem to be an afterthought; while they do have useful captions, the main text doesn't refer to them at all. And the book entirely lacks drawings and schematic diagrams which would at times have illustrated the author's points better than photos. We are frequently urged to allow "enough" room for a certain feature, but only rarely are specific figures given suggesting how much is "enough". Only about half of the technical terminology appears in the glossary (what in the heck is an "inglenook"?). So while Phillips' "Home Design Guide" is not without value as a browsing book, it's not the systematic cover-to-cover read I had hoped it would be.