Customer Reviews

New Spaces, Old World Charm (Elements of Living)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

My wife and I are in the process of redecorating our house and a friend slipped this gem under our Christmas tree and thank god he did. Let me say we are using Ms Sample indirectly to redecorate our place. Her writing, ideas and images have provided the direction we needed to get started and the blueprint to design our dream interior. This book is gorgeous, the writing superb and the ideas are genius. It's a welcome addition to anyone's library no matter what shape their house or apartment is in. Be careful though, we had friends over for the holidays and they tried to swipe it. Highest recommendation.

I purchased this book in the hopes that it would assist in my transforming a newly-contructed house into a charming, old-style home. Without a doubt, it did! Sample's guide offers a variety of styles, all of which are inspiring. I particularly enjoy the featured designers sources listed after each home (especially my favorite, Elissa Cullman's Revival Chic) and the trade tips that accompany each chapter. I find Sample's book to be inspirational yet practical, user-friendly and concise, and beautifully photographed. It has a permanent home on my coffee table.

I have ordered several books from Amazon over the years based on reader reviews and I did so in this case as well. I took the time from my busy life to make sure no one else made the same folly. In the first chapter you will find an "Updated Colonial" living room with purple walls, matching purple crown molding, purple accents, purple painted fireplace mantel, and once again the exact same purple painted on the book shelves. I feel confident that this room would be a perfect fit for Willy Wonka's Verucca Salt. The foyer continues with vertical stripes of dark and light purple contrasted with the black and white race flag checks painted onto what could have been lovely hard wood floors. The designers state that they were giving the client what they wanted, yet their picture with her wearing a purple shirt and he a purple bowtie really makes me wonder if those poor homeowner folks are secretly living in agony, but think it must be nice since it's in a decorating book Their dinning room is lovely for a circus performer who likes to bring work home. Once again, the designers pay no attention to distinguishing between the beautiful crafted moldings, trim, and windows, and they painted the entire thing a screaming blue-green with fuchsia curtains and pink fabric on the seats. There is no sense of scale and symmetry as two separate pictures in this chapter are hung without regard for the lines of the molding, and without regard to scale. They might take some lessons from Susan Sargent if they want to continue design. If only one chapter was like this, I could have kept the book instead of it being the first and only book I have ever returned to Amazon.

No, all the chapters are not that bad, but maybe due to such a poor lead, they really don't inspire. I don't know what style the author was attempting to profile, since it seems to bounce between old style colonial and minimalist urban and there is no common theme tying in all the chapters.

It's a pass.

What a great design book! This book is replete with gorgeous pictures of interiors, of an array of styles; however,it also comes with the added value of having the sources for the items in each of those pictures.

One of the best design books of this season!

This wonderful book has it all.It is loaded with beautiful images,fabulous designers and a wonderful resource section that is invaluable for anyone renovating an existing prewar or postwar home.
Ann Sample is a wonderful writer and this is a book that will do a lot more then sit on my coffee table. I carry it with me as I am currently renovating our 1920's house and have used many of the resources thus far even though I am not a licensed designer.
This is really a great book.

Too much space is not a problem for me but maintaining a classic style for my home is, or was before I found this book. Ms. Sample's book didn't overwhelm me as many of the other design books I looked at did with impractical ideas. While it is beautiful enough to suffice as a coffee table book, my original copy is dog-eared and highlighted throughout with ideas and suggestions I was able to use and customize for my own needs. Highly recommended for anyone with classic, old world style!

I have to concur with S. McCoy who dissed the purple house, I mean blue house. Yes, it was not purple but the color was in overkill. Remember Barney, the purple dinosaur? Well this is the Barney of houses.

On the show Top Designer which airs on Bravo TV, interior design hopefuls are presented with various design challenges. One show asks contestants to pick a color and their challenge was to design around that color. If memory serves me correctly, every student literally designed spaces much like the Barney in this book. Most of the judges harshly critiqued the contestants for literally taking the color challenge and overdoing it.

This book is so so. If you ocassionally pick up a copy of some of the high end mags like Architectural Digest, Traditional Homes, etc., most have resource guides in the back that you could access. This is nothing new.

Also, the designers in New Spaces seem to have conflicting design philosophies. To wallpaper or not, that is the question. To have clean spaces or bric-a-brac. To have the lived in look or a showcase home.

I think the best advice for me came from Ann Leconey, on page 131. Under the header "Use Architectural Shells," she basically set the stage for a well designed room by first, as she puts it," designing the interior architectural shell." According to Leconey you start by choosing the wall finishes, followed by the window treatment, and finish with the flooring.

According to her, you are then ready to move forward with your color scheme, fabric, etc. At least she gave me something that I could work with.

I love New Spaces, Old World Charm. The homes featured have given my husband and I great ideas, and we think the resources chapters are terrific. We just moved into a new home and as we remodel it, we are referring to the book on a daily basis. We like how the sources range from high-end to budget given that there are items we want to spend a lot of money on and others that aren't as important to us and we are looking for attractive product at medium to low price points. Each chapter gives a selection of sources ranging from very expensive to medium priced to budget. So far all of the retailers we have bought product from have websites which is really helpful becasue we have been able to review products from home.

The author says that the sources listed in the book were told to her by the featured designers. It's great to learn where top designers shop and also see that even though their clients generally have very large budgets, they know where to find a good bargain. I also like how the author lists tips on how to buy to the trade product without hiring an interior designer. She lists stores that sell trade only directly to customers and buying services that will buy trade only for you for a small fee.

I highly recommend New Spaces, Old World Charm. It offers so much more than your typical coffee table book!

New Spaces, Old World Charm is a combination of classic interior design 'coffee table book', how-to guide and resource reference. It's rare to find so much useful information in one product. I especially like how it features top designers' work and demonstrates how to achieve their looks. I also find the resource chapters, which offer an extensive listing of up-to-date interior design sources--both high-end and budget, extremely helpful. My husband and I are planning to remodel and add-on to our 1860s home. New Spaces, Old World Charm is inspirational, beautiful, and at the same time very educational and useful, and I would recommend it to anyone planning or simply dreaming about a renovation.

The idea of the book, how to create rich architectural interest for typical new construction, is an excellent subject. But this book only goes so far in achieving its goal, mainly because of the lack of addressing the architectural elements. And the approach taken is questionable. A diverse group of interior designers each present examples of their work in a chapter, teamed with a collection of commercial resources related to a particular theme. The uneasy part comes when the designers often come across as having paid to be included in the presentation. And the vendors, though a valid source of quality goods, are surely advertisers. Though not a bad publication if considered a hard bound handbook, the pricing is way out of line as most readers would not consider it a design book in the general sense. It is best as an attractive advertising directory.