Customer Reviews

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

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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!

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.

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.

Good book with nice pics showing various bedroom styles. I didn't use every idea, or copy any of the rooms exactly - that's not our style - but we did get some good ideas that we incorporated into our rooms.