Vintage Style: Creating a Complete Look for Your Home
by Cath Kidston

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Book Reviews of Vintage Style: Creating a Complete Look for Your Home

Book Review: love,love,loved it
Summary: 5 Stars

Summary of Vintage Style: Creating a Complete Look for Your Home

Kidston's original love of this style stems from the patterns and fabrics she grew up with. When she started her own design shop as an adult, she realized that these same fabrics hadn't lost any of their freshness and comfort, and she began designing around the patterns and items she found at thrift shops and flea markets. Her vintage style consists largely of rose prints in chintz fabric as well as comfortable linen and ticking. Lavish details abound--velvet curtains, tassels, and bobble fringe, for instance.

Liberal in her use of color, Kidston often recommends mixing clashing colors for a vibrant feeling in the room. Her walls are usually painted white, and color is added with fabrics, furniture, and accessories, which makes it easy and inexpensive to change the color scheme if you get tired of the old one.

Resourceful decorating ideas include the use of old scraps of patterned fabrics and striped linens, ribbon, and haberdashery flowers to create padded clothes hangers, ironing board covers, and stitch lavender sachets--all of which would make excellent homemade gifts as well. Kidston is practical about her flea-market finds--she never buys anything she can't use. But as she points out, there are lots of unusual uses for items you already own--you just need to use a little ingenuity. A chipped china cup becomes a laundry detergent scoop; old curtains are turned into tablecloths. There's something very refreshing about such resourcefulness in an age of disposable items. Kidston's Vintage Style is all about cheerful, well-worn rooms that are as comfortable as they are pretty. --Kris Law

Style Books

• Professional & Technical > Architecture > Interior Design
• Arts & Photography > Decorative Arts
• Home & Garden > Crafts & Hobbies > Decorating
• Textile Arts
• Interior Design > Style