COUNTRY LIVING HOUSEHOLD WISDOM

by Susy Smith (Foreword), Stephanie Donaldson (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.95

  Country Living: Household Wisdom guides the reader through the home, stopping off in each area to offer advice, tips, traditional recipes and stylish tricks that will help keep good order and create pleasant surroundings. The aim of the book is to offer the reader a useful and attractive work of reference that can be dipped into as the need arises. Scattered through the book will be tip boxes with quick tricks to instantly create a sense of old-fashioned order in a room.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $35.56

  Peace, comfort, natural, relaxed, sensual - words inextricably associated with country style that perhaps explains why this style of decorating is still so popular. Intrinsic in country style is a certain nostalgia for a bygone age, but The Country Home shows how we can reinterpret past styles for today's living. Hence there are classic country kitchens and family sitting rooms, bedrooms with quilted eiderdowns and chintz curtains, Victorian-styled bathrooms and flagstone halls, eccentric Irish cottages and cool New England clap board homes. Get the look sections show how to create the paint effects or curtain treatments required to achieve the look, plus practical tips on colour, fabrics, storage and lighting.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $4.35

  The image of a country garden, with unruly flowers growing where they seed amongst the fruit and vegetables, honeysuckle, roses and wisteria scrambling over walls, has always been in part a reality and in part a decorative myth. What is certain is that the garden has had an enormous influence upon the designs inside the country house, which have developed into a whole style of decoration. This book celebrates the country garden as it appears inside the home, in natural arrangements of garden flowers as the inspiration for fabrics such as chintz and for painted ceramics, in the colours used to decorate walls and furniture and in numerous decorative accessories. Traditional fabrics use naturalistic patterns drawn from the garden, of peonies, roses and tulips, for example; kitchen curtains even depict the produce of the vegetable plot. The cups and saucers and plates in everyday use are brightly painted with the nasturtiums or poppies growing outside; and even furniture is decorated with stylized garden flowers. The country home's most important accessories are gathered straight from the garden - vases full of lilac or blue cornflowers, bowls of ripening fruit or dried pot pourri, smooth pebbles or textured branches used as ornamentation. Country garden style is at home with the natural world, in harmony with its colours, forms and textures, and a decorative reflection of its beauties.