Customer Reviews

Nell Hill's Feather Your Nest: It's All in the Details

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I bought this book for myself, fell in love with it and got one for
my best friend for her birthday, then she fell in love with it too!
It has great staging ideas that will really inspire you to layer
your home for a wonderful look! I do home staging and store display and the author does a great job showing the novice how to do both! I would recommend this book to everyone who needs fresh ideas for decorating!

I love all of the Nell Hill books because Garrity shows how to reuse what you have in decorating. There are many other books on the same topic but if you look through her books you can see and learn. The photos are inspiring. I can roam through my house and move my loved possessions around and feel like I have redecorated without the "heavy lifting" of painting and furniture arrangement. Feather Your Nest is another great installment.

If you like lots of "stuff" around you, you'll love this book. I found myself running around the house trying new ideas I read about/saw in "Feather Your Nest"....as I read! If you're a big collector and want it displayed/around you, (I love the "warm" feeling it gives me!), you can really utilize the ideas shown here. By the way, try to visit Nell Hill's in Atchison, Kansas..... like visiting these beautiful books all over again.

I have purchased all of the Nell Hill's books that are currently available and this may be my favorite. I pre-ordered this book sight-unseen before it was published, and was not disappointed. Like Ms. Garrity's other books, this one is filled with beautiful photos and detailed descriptions of vignettes found throughout the homes. I especially liked that in this volume several different homes are featured so that you get a nice variety of styles and tastes, but all with the signature Nell Hill's "feel" that comes from the artful layering and clever and sometimes unexpected use of accessories.

I was very excited to get this book, as I have loved the Nell Hill's books from the beginning. It is more of the same sumptuous decor that we've all seen and obviously appreciate, otherwise we wouldn't continue to purchase these books. The photographs are beautiful, some new ideas here, but would love to see more of them.

I received my first Mary Carol Garrity book last week and finished it in just a few days. I savored looking at the exquisite photos and am already going back and looking at them a second and third time. Love it!!! Quite inspirational to me, as I've already started shopping for some of her classic "looks".

Nell Hill is the author's grandmother and the author's inspiration.
So with this in mind, Nell Hill must have had GREAT TASTE, as does her grandaughter Mary Carol, because her classic decorating style is timeless!

Anyhow,this book is the latest decorating book by Mary C. Garrity,which concerns accessorizing your home.

I own several other books by this author, and the photographs are stunning, as usual. (To an every-day decorator like me, photos can tell a thousand words).

This book takes the reader through the homes of 3-4 of Mary Carol's friends. All three of Mary's friends use the "NELL HILL" decorating style. As I stated above, the "NELL HILL" Decorating style is "classic". In other words, the ideas are not trendy or minimalist, but rather, the ideas are those that are often seen in magazines such as TRADITIONAL HOMES or VERANDA magazines (but NOT in magazines such as DOMINO).

For those readers that collect decorating books or read many decorating magazines, this FEATHER YOUR NEST book will seem easy to read and apply. However, for a beginning decorator, this book will seem a bit over-the-top and fussy & hard to duplicate. The reason I say this is because the ideas may seem "expensive" to a decorator on a budget, or to a beginner that is not used to decorating with lots of antiques,or fragile collectible glass, or old estate silver, and such.

Even for those readers that are used to reading decorating books such as this one, they will find the photos helpful, because they show HOW to display collections and accessories.

The photos are also helpful in showing how colors can be mixed together when using a more "classic style" (eg: muted tans and ivories, burgundies and shades of greens, navy blues and shades of yellows and reds, etc). Although many readers may already be using many of the techniques mentioned as sub-categories in this book (eg: using old books as risers, candlesticks for height,etc), I think that seeing the ideas in various photos will inspire even the most advanced designer.

The only reason that I gave this book 4 stars and not five is because this book is limited to basically three homes (and not all rooms in those three homes are photographed). Therefore, I wish the author had included more of her friends' homes as examples.

Ms Garrity does it again! I have every book she has published and never tire of returning to each of them again and again to inspire my own decorating ideas.

During the summer, I was hosting a luncheon for a friend who was moving away and would be feathering her nest in a new setting. I gave the book, along with "Feathering My Nest" by Beth Moore as my gifts to her. The book became the theme for the luncheon and for the gifts that others shared with her that day. We used various birds and nests as table decorations and it was very fun.

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Probably I'm not the typical or intended reader for Mary Carol Garrity's series of Nell Hill's books (her series and her stores named for her grandmother), since I am male, have very little experience with interior design or decor, and certainly don't have armloads of home-decor magazines to feel guilty about not having read.

The photos in this book -- all interiors except for the occasional adjacent porch -- come not only from Mary Carol's own Kansas home but those of certain friends and collaborators. I marvel that these women, most of whom are in fields outside of design or decorating, have such ample purses, time for domestic pursuits, obliging husbands, and the ability to cast-against-grain in using pieces of furniture (for example, many a bathroom keeps its supplies in a dresser, not a cabinet). Mary Carol's dictum that good china and silver should be admired, not hid away in a hutch, is well illustrated here, though I marvel at the utter perfection in the matching of blue and raspberry tones in the willoware and related chinoiserie.

But there are many good and useful things to find in FEATHER YOUR NEST, too. Perhaps the most liberating is Mary Carol's encouragement to go with what we love, and what looks good to us. Don't get me wrong, the design basics like how to modularize a rambling room or enhance too small of one are attended to with good sense and harmony. Beyond that, I've been freed from thinking a table next to a sofa or easy chair has to be an "end piece" or other approved work; what about antique trunks or nightstands? Why not show off the china and silver in a big old bookcase along with books? Or use antique books as risers? Maybe a rug can sub for a table runner, or a very large trunk can be a sturdy replacement for the cliched coffee table. At the other extreme, perhaps a small living room works better with no kind of coffee table at all but with a couple of drum-shaped ceramic garden stools instead.

At times, I have to admit that this novelty gets a little overwrought, as in one shot of a small foyer table that holds a family photo and also accommodates a large antique box supporting two smaller ones, stacked on up, with no horizontal work space at all available. Is there any utility in this, or is it just a Shinto ancestor shrine? On the other hand, Mary Carol's stalwart independence works in our favor. She is absolutely not a designer who steers us into themed or coordinating items from a department store. (This book doesn't even plug the many design items for sale through nellhills dot com, though it could have.) Mary Carol Garrity's pluck and energy will probably lead me to read another book in the Nell Hill series to learn from its precepts, but with a general understanding on my part that my own home-decorating efforts will not look anywhere near so coordinated, layered or sumptuous. But that's okay, too.
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