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Apartment Therapy's Big Book Of Small, Cool Spaces (2010)

by Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan(Favorite Author)

3.75 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0307464601 (ISBN13: 9780307464606)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Potter Style

review 1: i'm not a big reader of home-decorating books/magazines (lucky enough to have a partner with pretty good design sense, and i do ok!), but i saw this while wandering the library and thought it would be fun to have a quick glance through. no big breakthrough ideas for me, as most of the best ideas were more practical if you owned your apartment and/or had a decent chunk of change to spend on renovations, but it was still cool to see some of things people were doing (i do love seeing inside other people's small city apartments!) and incorporate that into our thinking when we feel like changing things up, or when an inevitable move comes...
review 2: You can tell when I'm planning yet another move when 1) I start watching HGTV and 2) I start reading design books.I ... morehave a love/hate relationship with these books. I love reading them because the photography is always so fun and beautiful, and I like to fantasize about what these people's lives are like.But I also hate them because they're never actually useful for uncool, uncreative, unrich people like me. Of all the families featured in this book, almost all were creative types (architects, artists, designers, etc.); half live in Los Angeles, and the other half live in New York (mostly Brooklyn). And they all live in tiny spaces for various reasons, none of which is that they're poor.I read these books for ideas on how to spiff up a teeny tiny rental apartment on a teeny tiny budget (the reason I have a teeny tiny rental apartment to begin with). So I can't exactly go knocking down walls to "open up the flow." I can't build a structure that is loft bedroom on top, child's bedroom inside, storage all around, and plop it into my ginormous industrial loft. I can't just decide to add a second floor to my apartment with 18-foot ceilings. I can't buy the apartment next door and make it into a bedroom.This book is just cheating! It's like those home-improvement shows where the guest designers just happen to find a complete set of furniture in the basement along with beautiful original artwork. Oh, and these matching lamps? They were just lying in the street! Eff you! less

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