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Home Swell Home
Sex and the City meets Martha Stewart in this savvy and eclectic interior-design manifesto for high-flying chicks with nesting fantasies from the authors of the bestselling A Girl's Guide to the Good Life. In their first breakthrough style manual, fashion designer Cynthia Rowley and former New York Times Sunday Styles editor Ilene Rosenzweig showed girls-on-the-go how to navigate the world with a little swagger and a lot of grace. Now they're taking the Swell aesthetic home with this inspiring guide to creating the ultimate dream pad. With more of the friendly tone and wry wit that lit up their first book, they introduce the idea of haute dé How to make dressing up your home as exciting and accessible as buying a new Making it sexy. Trying new looks. Breaking rules. Mixing retro with modern. Changing with the seasons and your moods. Offering a blueprint for the entire creative process, the two best friends and coauthors take you from inspiration to practical execution. Tour the swell playhouse room by room and see how design daydreams inspired by movies, a Palm Springs vacation, a painting, a favorite dress, or your own personal nostalgia (for the Brady Bunch living room) can become reality. Full of the authors' own anecdotes and wisdom from a pantheon of swell style heroes, Home Swell Home has household hints, tips, and bits of history on everything you wish you'd known but never would have thought to ask. Some of the tour highlights The sixty-minute makeover for when
romantic company's coming A recipe for a four-star dining room
( logo-print slip covers) Furniture EMS to resuscitate
doomed hand-me-downs Turning the underused kitchen
into a day spa Wiring "moonlight" into your trees Create the ultimate sitcom screening room Three new uses for your coffee table "Paint" the walls with colored
fluorescent lights Get real paint out of your hair! Swinging from uptown decadence to downtown chic, Home Swell Home demystifies design, sweeps away snobbery, and shows how any house or apartment can be a place for high-style adventures. So come on in!
romantic company's coming A recipe for a four-star dining room
( logo-print slip covers) Furniture EMS to resuscitate
doomed hand-me-downs Turning the underused kitchen
into a day spa Wiring "moonlight" into your trees Create the ultimate sitcom screening room Three new uses for your coffee table "Paint" the walls with colored
fluorescent lights Get real paint out of your hair! Swinging from uptown decadence to downtown chic, Home Swell Home demystifies design, sweeps away snobbery, and shows how any house or apartment can be a place for high-style adventures. So come on in!
176 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2002
About the author
Cynthia Rowley
10 books1 followerCynthia Rowley is a Illinois native who is best known as a fashion designer.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 27, 2010
I am a girlie girl and this book is aimed at (gawd help me) my demographic. I *hated* it. It just seems like double talking nonsense. Honestly, I couldn't even read past the first few pages. I skimmed the rest of the book and found it to be pretty worthless.
January 10, 2014
I grabbed this back in 2002 because I already had the first Swell book that Rowley wrote (I should mention all three of the Swell books I have were bought at Target, because Target is a very dangerous place. I would never have bought even one of them in a regular bookstore, but somehow in Target it seemed reasonable) and had gotten a kick out of it as well as some good tips. I love interior design and at the time I picked this up I was trying to decorate a new home, so figured why not?!
Same thing applies to this as it does to the original Swell Girl's Guide. Do not read this book and try to follow everything in it. Don't even try to put together a single one of the room entirely as depicted. The point is not really to use Rowley's suggestions as a blueprint, but as a starting point. If I remember correctly, there's a section where she recommends using pegboard on the bathroom wall to organize hair dryers and curling irons and all the other ephemera that clutters up a bathroom. I would never do that, I think it would look horrid in a bathroom, I think that the width of most of the things that need storing would mean that they would take up more room on the wall than under cabinetry, I think it would be far too easy to knock things off every time I turned around, and I think that the bathroom is an area that deserves some secrets. My toiletries don't need to be hung on display for every guest to stare at while they use the bathroom. However, I have used pegboard to store kitchen items on the wall. I painted the pegboard white, outlined the pizza cutter and measuring cups and spoons and egg slicer and all the rest, then painted their silhouettes in the main colour the kitchen was decorated in. Worked very well for me, especially as there were not enough drawers in that kitchen.
It's a good book for getting people started thinking outside the box, but should not be used as a step by step plan.
Same thing applies to this as it does to the original Swell Girl's Guide. Do not read this book and try to follow everything in it. Don't even try to put together a single one of the room entirely as depicted. The point is not really to use Rowley's suggestions as a blueprint, but as a starting point. If I remember correctly, there's a section where she recommends using pegboard on the bathroom wall to organize hair dryers and curling irons and all the other ephemera that clutters up a bathroom. I would never do that, I think it would look horrid in a bathroom, I think that the width of most of the things that need storing would mean that they would take up more room on the wall than under cabinetry, I think it would be far too easy to knock things off every time I turned around, and I think that the bathroom is an area that deserves some secrets. My toiletries don't need to be hung on display for every guest to stare at while they use the bathroom. However, I have used pegboard to store kitchen items on the wall. I painted the pegboard white, outlined the pizza cutter and measuring cups and spoons and egg slicer and all the rest, then painted their silhouettes in the main colour the kitchen was decorated in. Worked very well for me, especially as there were not enough drawers in that kitchen.
It's a good book for getting people started thinking outside the box, but should not be used as a step by step plan.
July 13, 2007
Read this forever ago - and found it when cleaning under my bed this week. So fun has great fun tips. Like when having a dinner party put a scratcher lotto ticket under everyones salad plate before the meal is served. then when the salad plates are taken away, everyone is having fun before the dinner and interacting with each other.
June 9, 2008
I wish there were negative stars.
October 1, 2016
2.5 stars Cynthia and Ilene would be pleased....I did bring away maybe two or three good ideas.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews