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Matt & Shari: Real Decorating For Real People
Really good tips and techniques from America's favorite designers. It's real decorating for real people - all in one magnificent volume.
192 pages, Paperback
First published November 12, 2004
8 people want to read
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February 24, 2015
This is a great home decorating resource - particularly for the beginner. The book is well designed and tackles each room type as a separate project. I like the "What is Right" and "What is Wrong" approach. After evaluating a room the authors provide a list of suggested changes and then walk through each of them step-by-step. The Before and After pictures illustrate the difference these changes make and are important to the reader's ability to understand the impact of small adjustments.
The book takes readers through the design process from planning, complete with sketches, through execution. In addition to this, the book also trains on the basics. For example, painting white walls to some other color is an overarching theme of all the "fixes," so it is appropriate that there is an article on the tools and techniques for painting. The authors share details on how to stock a home toolkit, including descriptions for those tools that are lesser known. At the end of the book there is a shopping list that will help readers identify items that caught their eye.
The shortcoming of this book, in my opinion, is that all of the rooms pictured in the examples are huge. It is not easy to scale the suggestions back to work in smaller rooms. Most people have rooms of varying sizes, some smaller and some larger. Including suggestions with scalability ideas would help this book appeal to a larger audience.
The book takes readers through the design process from planning, complete with sketches, through execution. In addition to this, the book also trains on the basics. For example, painting white walls to some other color is an overarching theme of all the "fixes," so it is appropriate that there is an article on the tools and techniques for painting. The authors share details on how to stock a home toolkit, including descriptions for those tools that are lesser known. At the end of the book there is a shopping list that will help readers identify items that caught their eye.
The shortcoming of this book, in my opinion, is that all of the rooms pictured in the examples are huge. It is not easy to scale the suggestions back to work in smaller rooms. Most people have rooms of varying sizes, some smaller and some larger. Including suggestions with scalability ideas would help this book appeal to a larger audience.
Displaying 1 of 1 review