House Beautiful Think Small: Make the Most of Every Square Foot

If you are a small home devotee and looking for ideas and styles suitable for a small space, this book helps you to think small. An array of styles are featured in spaces as diverse as a New York City studio to a Palm Beach maisonette to an upstate cottage, to a Brooklyn bachelor pad. Many of the homes are designers' own spaces.Top designers offer tips on how to decorate a small space. Some favorites:* "limit your number of gestures." Susan Ferrier* "Leave some breathing room." Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan* "One wild print all over the place enlarges a small space, makes it feel cohesive, and adds a big wow factor." Amanda Nisbet* "A tightly edited palette is important to make all the patterns work together." Krista Ewart* "...bring in a few overscale elements because these are the bold moves that make a room." Nick Olsen* "I always like dark color in a small room because it makes it look bigger." Mario BuattaSome designers recommend going dark in a small room, some suggest use a jewel tone color and some claim light walls are great. This book features small rooms with all of these so the viewer can decide which they prefer. Or, you may want a light, sunny bedroom and a dark library-study or the opposite. It definitely demonstrates that small has enough space to be very chic. Love Bill Brockschmidt's totally original 640 square foot mini-loft in mustard olive with turquoise accents and Zach Motl's studio in plaid of navy and gray.As designer Maureen Footer noted - her apartment is featured in here, too - "We have these great examples of living stylishly in small spaces: Stanley Barrows, Van Day Truex, Billy Baldwin - they had it an art form. They had these jewel boxes that they redecorated every three or four years, and the space became a laboratory for their ideas."What's great about a small space is you can more easily redecorate it more often as you use it as a style laboratory for your taste. This book provides chic examples of many ways to do so. 5 stars if you are new to House Beautiful magazine making these rooms fresh and inspiring to you.

Seeing small rooms I always felt one should always look for small furniture to make the room look bigger, here it gives it a cozy home feeling in some of the rooms. The 4 stars as some of the colors just didn't seem right for the areas they were in, but it could be my older generation also. Saw a lot of good ideas in here that are usable in decorating my own home.

Getting new ideas

Beautiful pictures that have been featured in House Beautiful magazines. I would have given it 5 stars except I have already seen most of the pictures.

This book had quite good written advice, but pictures were inadequate. The rooms pictured were cluttered (way too many pillows, folks) and didn't show many new or clever storage ideas. I suspect the writer took pictures of small rooms from House Beautiful files without analyzing whether or not they illustrated the principles outlined in the text. Also, I hated that impractical coffee table on the cover. Every time someone brushed against that rusty iron, it would come off on the white rug or sofa - or both.

Very well done. Beautiful pictures. Design advice that was right on point and accessible to all. I refer to this book now anytime I plan to make a big purchase for my home. I highly recommend this book.

It was very interesting. Beautiful photos.

Interesting and informative. Many pictures.

Anyone who wants to inject some 'ooomph' into their home and make it a little distinctive from the norm is going to love this book.Full of style ideas featuring every 'theme' you can think of - pale colour palette, riot of colour, rustic, contemporary - you name it, this book's got ideas for it! An ideal gift for a new - or first time - home owner who's not too sure of which style direction to take their home in.If I had one itsy-bitsy niggle - I would have liked if - in what we have got to know as 'typical House Beautiful style' - the book would have actually featured the person/couple/family to whom each picture belonged but then, I suppose it would have become a book triple its current size, simply to get all the information in. That's the only thing that would've made it 5* for me, but if that doesn't matter to you - yes, it's a 5* book.

loved it, great ideas

This small, wonderful, colourful book is crammed with great ideas! Reading House Beautiful Think Small is like visiting your wild, wacky and wonderful Auntie Mame -- at first you look around and think "I could never do any of this!" and then you start thinking "Why not?" And then you start strategizing ways to bring some of these great space-saving options and/or pops of colour into your own home. So intriguing: how on earth did this author persuade so many people with great taste -- some conventional, some extremely eclectic -- to allow their beautiful homes to be photographed? BTW, I bought my copy from great buy books usa . It arrived promptly, and completely lived up to its "used: like new" description.

I loved the pictures and descriptions. Seemed a bit dated, but I didn't mind. Good explanations on what works and what doesn't.