Review: Decorate

I rarely pick up a new interior design book. When I saw that Holly Becker of decor8 was publishing an interior design book, Decorate, it quickly made it to my must have list.

I've only had the book for a few days, but so far, it has not disappointed. Holly has quotes from various people sprinkled throughout the book. One of my favorites is from Carrie McCarthy:

"When you intentionally decorate the look and feel of your space,
you become more genuinely yourself,
more at home in your skin and in your space."

Decorate is full of tips for how you can make your space - whether owned or rented - a reflection of you. She covers space planning which I've always done, carefully measuring living spaces and transferring the dimensions to graph paper where I positioned and repositioned my furniture until the space was just right. But she offers other design tricks that I hadn't tried. One such trick that Holly recommends is to create a mood board for your room and live with it for awhile.

That's definitely something I'm going to try with our living room, now that our bedroom is almost done. She also suggests if going bold with color and a little hesitant, to choose a neutral color for large pieces of furniture and accent with color.

If you had visited any of my apartments, you'd know that I love pillows of all shapes and sizes. In the photo above, I especially love how the pillows are stacked next to the couch. I also like how fresh and organic the colors appear. (We have lots of neutrals in our apartment at the moment, with the exception of one brilliantly colored painting in the bathroom.)

There's lots more inspiration in Decorate than I've highlighted here (some more of my favorite ideas from the book are on Flickr) so you should definitely consider picking up a copy for yourself.

If you're wondering where today's regularly scheduled Retro Kitchen is, check back tomorrow; I got sidetracked last night with my new book. This week's Retro Kitchen will be all about cookies!

Credits: All images taken by Eden Hensley Silverstein for Recipes for the Good Life.