Cheap Chic Home Style on a Budget

Cheap Chic Home Style on a Budget

Transform your home into somewhere highly personal and individualistic with this super book by stylist Emily Chalmers. Full of cheap and cheerful ideas for brightening your home, beautifully photographed by Debi Treloar, it shows you how to turn your rooms into something extra special on a shoestring. Junk shop finds and car boot bargains; oriental exoticism from your local Chinese, Middle Eastern and Indian stores; antique shops and bric-a-brac stalls. All are wonderful sources of the sort of things you think would cost a fortune but don?t and that add a touch of class or fun to your home normally only seen in magazines. Emily highlights the best way of displaying your finds, of storing them, and utilising them as practical pieces in the home: a collection of Tunisian tea glasses make a wonderful display, especially filled with flowers from the garden; old hampers and baskets become homes to all those things you never find anywhere to put; mismatched dinner services, when based on a theme, add a quirky touch to a dinner party and become items to be treasured as well as used. Piles of fabrics, perhaps collected over the years but never used, if organised into colour or pattern become decorative features in their own right and beloved childhood toys become attractive additions to any room when suitably placed. Anyone looking for a taste of quirkiness, anyone with an eye for the unusual or the pretty, anyone looking to do up their home cheaply and effectively will find this an inspirational read.

User Ratings and Reviews

2 Stars Decorating with Dirty Shoes
I was looking for a book with inspirational pictures of rooms that would be accessible, clever and plenty of fodder for thought. THIS book has at least two pictures of dirty old shoes plopped on dirty tile or stacked onto an utilitarian steel rack as an example of “style.” Style to whom? I don’t want to decorate with shoes.

I have found books on decorating to be either stuck on some weird aesthetic — like this book’s fascination with putting everyday items on display in dirty or messy surroundings — or to be too focused on architectural detail instead of the decorating itself. The reality is that my house is of new construction and looks frighteningly like other people’s houses and it is almost devoid of the type of architectural detail lauded in such books. What am I supposed to do? Tear down a wall? That’s not decorating to me, that’s construction.

Sometimes these books can redeem themselves by offering interesting commentary that can spark good ideas, but, not in this case.

Do not waste your money unless you are interested in decorating with your worn out sneakers.

4 Stars Not one of my favorites….
The book may appeal to someone with cheap tastes but for me to many of the examples were cluttered and to ‘cute’. Or maybe I was simply looking for a book that had more style, or a book that would be more California or NYC friendly.

The initial photographs on each new chapter pages whet my appetite and made me assume that what would follow would be more of the same, but alas I would turn the page and be met with more cheap style ideas, if one can even use the word style. The books cover suggests a book that has style and a zen mode, but is far from either for me. The majority of rooms in the photographs in the book are more cluttered and cute.

5 Stars Anyone for Making Felt Out of Old Wool?
Reviewed by Carolyn Howard-Johnson, award-winning author of This is the Place

It is my belief that this book would be most useful for those decorating a first apartment, a loft, a very small house, or a second home but certainly this book will spark anyone’s imagination.

The authors offer ideas won’t bust a budget for fabrics, window treatments, storage, flooring and other materials for the home. They include suggestions for finding treasures in unlikely places and making do with inexpensive materials from places like Pottery Barn, Pier One Imports and flea markets. Resources such as these are included, and picture credits are given.

All in all, Style on a Budget will not disappoint.

(Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s first novel, This is the Place, has won eight awards.Her second book, Harkening, has won three.)

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