Beloved interior designer Phoebe Howard shares her style secrets for creating truly pretty rooms filled with grace and charm The design world’s favorite Mrs. is back, with tried and true décor “rules” and classic strategies for creating pretty, charming, and timeless interiors. Celebrating warm, welcoming style, each chapter explores the color palettes, fabrics, and special little grace notes that make a room pretty. As always, Mrs. Howard delivers a range of inspiring examples, from pretty rooms in townhouses, beach houses, and country escapes to pretty-meets-grand-style in estates and manors. She also presents how-to-get-the-look advice, including favorite color combinations, fabric patterns, furnishings, and accessories that instantly transform a space. The majority of the projects have never been published, creating an irresistible guide for all who dream of having the signature Mrs. Howard look: interiors filled with light, easy elegance and pretty details.

Offers step-by-step tutorials to guide readers through the design process and provides a photo gallery of finished examples by professional designers.

In her first book, the South’s most inviting designer explores her principles for creating a beautiful home rich with comfort and warmth. Barbara Westbrook has been designing classically inspired homes full of Southern charm and a European touch for more than twenty years. A native of Virginia, Westbrook grew up accompanying her mother to antique shops and was introduced by her to Virginia’s rich architectural legacy. With a design vocabulary that ranges from casual American to formal English to French modern, Westbrook’s homes share a welcoming elegance, whether it is a country cottage or a penthouse apartment. In Gracious Rooms, she sets out her principles for creating a house rich with both polish and patina. Walking the reader through a dozen stunning homes—light-filled lake retreats, contemporary houses, and historic mansions—Westbrook shares her accessible, appealing ideas. From the judicious use of symmetry to the importance of including natural elements in a room, utilizing color to unify spaces within a house, and setting a mood with materials, Gracious Rooms is rich with advice and inspiration.

"Pretty and proper style is about decorating once... for a lifetime. It is about the creation of timeless, tailored interiors rotted firmly in English tradtion. The rules of this style are like a secret code that has been whispered from other to daughter over generations. These secrets have always been inherited -- until now" -- cover, page 4.

In The French Room, best-selling author and interior designer Betty Lou Phillips explains the age-wisdom and fervent beliefs that have long defined French decorating and reveals the principles behind designing the perfect French room. With more than 150 awe-inspiring photographs, Tres French also shares secrets on the ways color solves irksome design problems without moving walls or making other structural improvements, addresses the art of hanging art and dressing salon windows, then moves into the French kitchen and bed chamber to explore those unique cultures. Betty Lou Phillips is the author of the award-winning Villa Decor, plus Inspirations from France and Italy, The French Connection, Secrets of French Design, Unmistakably French, French Influences, French by Design, and Provencal Interiors. A professional member of the American Society of Interior Designers, her work has appeared in Southern Accents, Traditional Home, Decorating, Bedroom & Bath, Window & Wall, Paint Decor, and more. Additionally, she has appeared on the Christopher Lowell Show and the Oprah Winfrey Show. She lives in Dallas, Texas.

Interior designer and decorative arts historian Thomas Jayne takes on the redoubtable Edith Wharton and her co-author Ogden Codman, whose 1897 book The Decoration of Houses is acknowledged as the Bible of American interior design. Wharton and Codman advocated for classical simplicity and balance, replacing the excesses of the Gilded Age. In Jayne’s view, “The Decoration of Houses is the level-headed, indispensable book on the subject. It is not an overstatement to say that it is the most important decorating book ever written.” How much of Wharton and Codman’s advice and how many of their principles are still applicable today? In Classical Principles for Modern Design, Jayne argues that Wharton and Codman’s fundamental ideas about the proportion and planning of space create the most harmonious and livable interiors, whether traditional or contemporary. His authoritative and engaging text traces contemporary ideas about design elements and furnishing rooms back to Wharton and Codman and shows where his design approach coincides and where it diverges from their views. The book follows the chapter organization of The Decoration of Houses—chapters on walls, doors, windows and curtains, ceilings and floors, etc.—and adds important new perspectives on the design of kitchens and the use of color, both major subjects that Wharton and Codman did not address. Drawing on his own work at Jayne Design Studio, Jayne has selected elegant, traditional interiors that demonstrate these principles. Projects range from a restoration of historic eighteenth-century public rooms in Crichel House in Dorset, England, to a mountain retreat in the wilds of Montana to an array of luxurious New York City apartments and country houses in the Hudson Valley. Captured in lush photographs by Don Freeman and others, all speak to Thomas Jayne’s commitment to the primacy of function, quality, and simplicity, derived from the ancient tradition of classical design. As he says, “Tradition is not about what was. Tradition is now.”

A wish-book come true! In Nell Hill's Rooms We Love, decorating maven Mary Carol Garrity coaches readers on how to affordably decorate rooms they will fall in love with. Named "One of America's hottest little retailers" by Fortune magazine, Mary Carol Garrity's mini empire of three decor stores are a Midwest regional phenomenon and have become landmarks in the decorating world. In Nell Hill's Rooms We Love, we will see Mary Carol apply her Nell Hill’s principles of design to new challenges. Even though design styles and trends have changed significantly since Nell Hill's Style at Home, Mary Carol’s first book ten years ago, the rules that guide her approach to decorating have not. In this book, we will rediscover those principles at work in four very different houses, in addition to her own home. In the book, we will visit rooms inspired by the needs of each homeowner and will see how they transformed their rooms using Mary Carol’s inspiration and “tricks of the trade.” We will observe: • A century-old English Tudor in a city neighborhood, reinvented for empty nesters • A suburban tear-down that was rebuilt for a growing family • A home in the country, newly built but with an old soul • A sweeping country manor with one-of-a kind rooms While traveling through these homes, Mary Carol will construct the process and provide readers with the blueprint she uses for discovering personal styles. We hope you will be inspired by these rooms and will come away with creative energy to make your rooms beautiful, functional, colorful, and comfortable. Mary Carol Garrity and her staff at Nell Hill’s work with thousands of customers each year to help them bring their homes to life. Mary Carol’s passion is to work with homeowners to make the rooms in their houses beautiful, colorful, functional, and special. In Nell Hill’s Rooms We Love, Mary Carol shares some of her favorite decorating solutions, showing her readers inside the homes of the clients she has worked with to help them bring their dreams to life. In this new book, Mary Carol deconstructs the process that helps her work with the myriad of decorating challenges from her customers. It is a big order to think about redoing a room in a house, committing to a paint color or wallpaper, dozens of yards of fabric, new upholstery, area rugs that you will be living with for a while, and the investment of dollars and time spent on the makeover. Mary Carol demystifies the process by showing us through rooms she loves and calling out details that go into making the room successful. Mary Carol defines success in decorating by working with customers to identify their own personal style. While the stores of Nell Hill’s are packed full of great room settings, tableaus, and both big and little surprises, Mary Carol believes that people have a personal style that is uniquely their own. Her goal is to help you discover your own style by offering some guiding principles for your decisions. Mary Carol’s Guiding Principles • Mary Carol believes that your style comes from mixing old with new, showcasing your keepsake treasures as well as your newly discovered surprises. • And she believes in comfort—providing spaces where you can sit down with a book and get cozy or where your guests will find a special amenity waiting just for them. • Mary Carol believes that a beautiful room always offers an unexpected delight. • She encourages you to bring the outdoors inside, using garden structures year-round in seasonal decorating.