Interior Alchemy: Secrets to Creating Expressive Ambience

by Rebecca Purcell, Kathy Walton

Here are tricks for creating cutting-edge interior design from tile original style setter at New York's trendsetting ABC Carpet & Home. The recent issue of Metropolitan Home magazine featured a New York apartment furnished with beautiful finds scavenged from flea markets. America has developed a yen for the vintage. Whether covering an entire wall with a salon-style arrangement of pictures creating the "attic" look; throwing together a grand canopied bed faked with gilded molding and draperies to evoke thc "exotic"; or choosing to go "spare" by displaying carefully selected objects, including old tools, glass boxes, or botanical prints, style setter Rebecca Purcell shows how anyone can create expressive rooms that make a statement. Full-color photographs in each chapter show how these fabulous styles were produced in different homes. Chapters include do-it-yourself projects for finishing touches, including tassels, aging fabrics and metals, valances and draperies, wall washing and stenciling, picture matting, and more.

Genres: Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 8, 1998

Reviews

[merlin513 · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a dedicated flea market thrifter from an early age (& I’m not young) but my homes have looked ‘nothing‘ like these.

While the author scoffs at Victoriana that’s exactly the vibe I get from the displays in the book. Everything feels very much like a New Orleans pied-a-terre that’s been inhabited by the same hoarding bored immortal since the 1800’s.

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book after finding out that a friend whose decorating I adore cites it as one of her greatest inspirations. I found it to be extremely inspiring in parts, and extremely uninspiring in others. While waiting for the book to arrive from inter-library loan, I read through the reviews on Amazon. One of them mentioned a chapter in which the author converted an old chicken house into an extremely rustic getaway from the hustle and bustle of the "big house." The rustic house? Has what appears to be *mold* growing on the walls. The author called it "rain damage from a leaking roof" but...even if it's not mold, it looks entirely unhealthy. There's a difference between "rustic" and "rusted out" and that chapter was awful.

I also hated the chapter about the explorer style (at least that's what I think it was called). The home owners had taken hundreds of stuffed taxadermy animals and scattered them around on the walls and shelves, plus put various animals their cat had literally dragged in, into formaldehyde jars. (a final straw? Seeing a claw in a jar that used to be full of pickles...um...ew??)

The interiors were mostly so very dark that they gave me a headache to even look at. The style tidbits were inspirational, however, and the tips about wall finishes, creating mood, etc were quite helpful.

Just...brace yourself for an uneven ride, and enjoy.