Joan Kohn's It's Your Bed and Bath: Hundreds of Beautiful Design Ideas [Hardcover]

Joan Kohn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2004

Joan Kohn shares hundreds of tips, personal insights, and ideas for renovating or designing the bed and bath in this essential and inspirational guide.Every successful bedroom and bathroom design is a unique reflection of personal taste, lifestyle, budget, and dreams. In this comprehensive and beautiful guide, Joan Kohn, host of HGTVs Bed and Bath Design, inspires and encourages readers to make the best possible decisions among the myriad of design choices that are available today. Part one, Design Essentials, prepares the reader for the design process by addressing such considerations as budget, style, assessment of the existing bedroom and bathroom, and working with a design team. Part two, The Five Building Blocks of Bed and Bath Design, covers function, space, floor plans, style, and personal touch. Armed with the knowledge provided in part one, readers will learn how to confront the critical design choices that will turn their dream into a reality. Richly illustrated with 240 full-color photographs of inspirational bedrooms and bathrooms by top designers, JOAN KOHNS ITS YOUR BED AND BATH provides all of the necessary information for creating functional and beautiful personal spaces that you and your family will enjoy for many years to come.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kohn, who hosts, writes and produces HGTV's Kitchen Design and Bed and Bath Design, presents intelligent, organic design ideas for our most intimate rooms. She urges would-be room renovators to let their own personality shine through, whether choosing traditional or contemporary designs or some combination thereof. Inspiration, she suggests, can be found anywhere: in architecture, magazine photos, television and even music. According to Kohn, a favorite piece of fabric, a souvenir from a favorite vacation or the color of your eyes could be the starting point of a great design idea. The design of any room, she says, should consider its context within the home, the property, the neighborhood and the region. She provides tricks for maximizing function while maintaining beauty, instructions on how to choose and work with a design team, and tips for budgeting resources and surviving the construction process. Lists and questionnaires help readers organize their ideas and assess design needs. However, the book will best serve amateur designers while they're in the conceptualization/visualization stage of their renovation. There are no hands-on projects here, as Kohn seems to assume a hired team will do the actual manual labor. Of course, the book's real attraction is its 240 envy-inspiring photos of bedrooms and bathrooms by top designers, with summaries of how use of line, texture, color and light enhanced each room's design.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Joan Kohn is the host of several Home and Gardens Television series and specials. She lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. She is the author of Joan Kohn's It's Your Kitchen.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Bulfinch (September 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0821228315
• ISBN-13: 978-0821228319
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 0.8 x 10.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #319,976 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great design resource, October 20, 2004

By 

Bell "fairandbalanced" (London, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Joan Kohn's It's Your Bed and Bath: Hundreds of Beautiful Design Ideas (Hardcover)

This book gave me plenty of great ideas for remodelling one of our bathrooms. I liked the up-to-date, grown-up and upscale designs that cover a range of different styles from modern to classic and from country to metropolitan. The design advice was very logically laid out and made a lot of sense. There wasn't just superficial blabber regarding "beauty" etc. but a lot of good, practical, in-depth pointers as to how to get a project started and completed. I haven't come across a better book than this for this subject!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars How not to write a bathroom book, September 17, 2007

By 

Anabel (Ardmore, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Joan Kohn's It's Your Bed and Bath: Hundreds of Beautiful Design Ideas (Hardcover)

This book is worth reviewing only because it's so sadly typical of many bathroom remodeling books currently on the market. Written in a breathy, ecstatic, inspirational style more appropriate to the spiritual uplift than the home remodeling literature, it's short on information, sources and resources and materials or manufacturing credits. The taste level of the lavish photo spreads varies from the sublime to the ridiculous; but in either case, even if you saw something you thought you might want to use in these pages and wanted to put a name to it, track down sources and prices ranges and assess its pluses or minuses for the particular installation you had in mind, you'd be totally out of luck. For example, if the picture you're interested in appears in the countertops chapter, don't expect Ms. Kohn to make life easy for you and identify the wall or floor materials in the same picture, including the elements that might originally have caught your eye.
This book reiterates the usual design and materials platitudes ("Balance is the key to beauty as well as budget!"; and: "A discarded Warning sign can take on new meaning and become a work of art..") providing unnecessary and maddeningly useless filler for both the pretty and the not so pretty photographs.
I've read a lot of bathroom design books in the course of planning my next bathroom makeover. They run the gamut from bad to outstanding, and Ms. Kohn's is certainly not the worst; but it's so highly typical of the genre that I think it's worth both the time and trouble it's taken to write this, admittedly, jaundiced review, in hopes that future publishers might take note and current consumers proceed with caution.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad...But not inspiring, January 5, 2005

By 

MAds (Italy) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Joan Kohn's It's Your Bed and Bath: Hundreds of Beautiful Design Ideas (Hardcover)

Well, this would be a great book for my mom or grandmother, but as a young homeowner I am a bit dissapointed in the dated styles. Generally good advice and lay-out, but not inspiring. In fact there is on bathroom in there that I seriously have nightmares about!!!! I havent finished reading through yet, but so far it hasnt gotten any better.