Animal House Style: Designing a Home to Share with Your Pets [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)

by Julia Szabo (Author), Mary Tyler Moore (Contributor)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Is your apartment decor decided by a yellow Lab? Does kitty call the shots in interior design? Finally, stylish solutions for living with pets. Animal House Style is the first decorating book to offer practical advice from pet owners on how to select high-performance furnishings for maximum human, canine, feline, and other animal comfort. It also features how to keep your pet-friendly interiors looking their best and other vital information rarely found in design magazines or books. This chic, trend-conscious book is sure to inspire pet lovers across the country to make every animal house a beautiful house.

About the Author
Julia Szabo writes the "Pets" column for the Sunday New York Post and wrote the "Truth in Decorating" column for Elle Decor for three years. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, House Beautiful, and Travel & Leisure. She shares her home with five rescued pit bulls and several rescued cats.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Bulfinch; 1st edition (September 20, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0821227556
• ISBN-13: 978-0821227558
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 9.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #735,912 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Pretty, Not Practical., April 30, 2004

By	P. Rudnicki "cynderela23" (Norfolk Virginia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Animal House Style is one beautiful coffee table book. But truely, it is only a coffee table book. It has beautiful pictures of pets on beautiful designer furniture. But not the greatest advice for caring for a home with pets.

Let's get real here, I have a yellow lab that loves to lounge on my dark gray couch. The advice the author gives for removing pet hair from your couch is to get a strong vacuum cleaner! Um yeah, I would have never thought of that without reading this book! Or you can use a roll of tape to remove pet hair from your clothes! Hmmm, that is truely a new idea!

You can tell that Julia Szabo is a true animal lover, and she does have an amazing sense of style. But most of the home decor is way over my price range, like the Gucci bet she got her pit bull. It probebly cost more than my bed! Animal House Style does make you more aware of animal sensativity to house cleaning chemicals and what are good alternatives to your Clorox cleaners. But that is about the only practical advice this book has to offer.

If you are looking for a book with some really cute dog picks Animal House Style is a great pick. But if you are looking for viable solutions to living with pets, don't get this book.

44 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's About Time, April 13, 2002

By	Kay "keepitsimple" (Rochester, New York United States) - See all my reviews

Here's my take on some of the negitive comments made about this book - it may seem idealistic, but to me it's about raising the rep of "pet owner" to a new level, a higher standard. Working in an animal shelter as I do, I have seen what the author describes about abandoned animals and how easily they are discarded for frivolous reasons. I think a book like this is very needed not only to prove to people that owning a pet doen't mean being a dirty slob but it also reminds pet owners that they need to work out problems and try to think of creative solutions to issues they may encounter with their pets before they give up on a very special member of the family or resort to mutilating their animal (cat declawing).
Not all of us can afford designer furniture, that's true, but I have enjoyed seeing the photos of these animals and their loving owners who are showing the world that Fluffy or Spot have just as much right to sit on that million dollar couch as they do. I have seen sloppy pet owners and I think we all need to be reminded that we have a responibility to keep things on a higher level for the health of the animal as well as the impression we give to others.
Any book like this that promotes adoptiong animals from shelters and giving them good, loving, healthy and above all PERMANENT homes is truly invaluble.

47 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Stylish Read for fashion followers, December 27, 2002

By	A. M. Thomas (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I should imagine this book is a great hit with the NYC apartment upper income bracket, who have pets as fashion accessories and treat them like animated teddy bears. (Most of the resource references are also in NY). Not that it's not a pleasant read, it's a stylish and entertaining book. It made me feel better about having slip covers on my furniture. The author got of the point at times and did the usual mini-lectures on pets put in shelters and toxic cleaners like the rest of us don't get it, but being politically correct is not the same undertanding the needs of real animals or the people living with them on a daily basis. The author may do work in "rescue" as she claims, but so can anyone. I don't think she understand the needs of real pets living real lives and probably none of the people who love this book do either. The author didn't offer anything I didn't know or hadn't tried (and didn't work). And some of the materials she raves about as coverings, were trashed by my two dogs in one afternoon. White slip covers ("you can wash them") Yeah, about 3 times a day to keep them white if you have a pet who gets on the sofa. Nice glossy coffee table book though.