40 Projects for Building Your Backyard Homestead: A Hands-On, Step-By-Step Sustainable-Living Guide

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Provides details on how to build more than 40 projects--sheds, feeders, fences, and other structures--to enhance readers' sustainable living.

Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic Treasure Hunting & Decorating Guide

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Shabby Chic Interiors--My Rooms, Treasures, and Trinkets, an eclectic book of quirky inspiration, falls into chapters according to location, and begins with Rachel's breathtaking Los Angeles residence. Next, we enter into a photographer's minimalist mountain-top home in the Hollywood hills before heading to the coast and a beautiful Malibu beach cottage. A truly bohemian hideout in southern California is next on the journey, followed by a peek at celebrity homes, including the house that once belonged to Marilyn Monroe. With rooms combining flea-market finds and objects of pure functionality--an elegant French mirror reflecting a painting, a bejeweled metallic candle holder sitting by a cluster of willow-patterned china, a single faded velvet pillow lounging under the twinkle of a vintage chandelier--this book celebrates all that is wonderfully Shabby Chic

House Beautiful Color: The Perfect Shade for Every Room

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"House Beautiful Colors for Your Home" presented 300 colors--each with a color swatch, manufacturer, and name or number of the paint--that were designers' favorites and provided a helpful guide to paint color for the home. Here, "House Beautiful" contributor Cregan ("House Beautiful Blue") offers even more information about how interior designers who have been featured in "House Beautiful" tackle color, presenting more than 400 color photographs of professionally designed interiors and gardens. Cregan includes comparisons of how a particular color is used in contemporary vs. traditional styles and its use for walls and as an accent in various rooms of the home. There is also a section in which designers describe how they employed a specific hue as they decorated a room, along with examples of various color schemes.
Library Journal (10/01/2013)

Orla Kiely Home

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Internationally renowned designer Orla Kiely describes her career as 'a journey in pattern and color'. Her distinctive palette and graphic and stylized motifs in clean repeat constructions, have won her devoted fans across the world, and have helped to turn what began as a small British business designing bags, into a global fashion, accessories and homeware brand.
Following the success of her first book, Pattern, Home opens the door on Orla's own house for the first time, and offers inspirational insights into using pattern and color, mixing old and new and turning a house into a liveable home. The book ends with series of beautifully photographed case studies of some of the mid-century modern homes she most admires.
'I have always been inspired by architecture and interiors so the move into furniture and homewares was completely natural', Orla says. 'To me, the home is where we can truly express our style and personality, where we can be playful'.

Real Homes: Inspiration Beyond Style

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"Real homes" are a reflection of their owners' personalities and interests rather than a homage to current trends. In her perceptive photographs, Solvi dos Santos shows a range of living spaces that satisfy fundamental needs but are also private works of beauty and self-expression.This collection of homes, from a warehouse in Paris to a converted church in the Hudson Valley to a farmhouse in Ibiza, reveal spaces that are original, functional, and aesthetically pleasing. Mixing materials, periods, and styles--country comfort with contemporary, traditional finishes with sleek and modern materials--the spaces communicate an effortless effect and a sense of everyday living. With hundreds of beautiful photographs accompanied by texts by Phyllis Richardson, the book will appeal to everyone who is seeking inspiration to create a home that springs from one's personal history and taste.

Landscaping: How to Use Plants, Structures & Surfaces to Transform Your Yard

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"HomeSkills: Landscaping" offers a complete look at every aspect of landscaping, from early design to project execution. First, you'll gain an overview of the many options at your disposal, featuring popular DIY products that are readily available and affordable. You'll learn which yard elements will best fit your home landscape. Flagstone patio, vinyl fence, healthy row of perfectly situated arbor vitae--no matter which direction you take, this hardworking book covers all the essential skills you need to make it happen. Planting shrubs and trees, sand-setting interlocking pavers, laying out fences and stone walls . . . you'll learn the best techniques for creating all of the beautiful planted and built elements that define any successful home landscape.

To Eat: A Country Life

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At their home in North Hill, Vt., Eck and Winterrowd (who died in 2010, when this book was in progress) nurtured a seven-acre garden, reveling in its bounty and embracing harmony with nature. These elegant reflections on gardening and the vegetables and fruits they grow, harvest, and eat over four seasons offer a joyous celebration of our connection to food and the Earth. Writing about our attitude toward what we eat, for example, they observe that "we misuse our food. We treat it as a mere necessity when it is in fact an enormous pleasure... A simple cabbage or broccoli or cauliflower is, however you prepare it, goodness and pleasure, and what else ought we to seek in our lives?" About blueberries, they have the following to say: "Blueberries have every virtue. They are handsomely shaped, with dark sinuous twigging and foliage that in autumn turns a brilliant red." And on the artistic side of gardening, they write, "If gardening has a purpose, it is to engender plenitude, a delicious human fantasy that want is banished... the Eden of our imaginations, here and now." Gardeners and cooks should have a copy of this book, beautifully illustrated by Bobbi Angell and with recipes by Beatrice Tosti de Valminuta, in their kitchens, next to their garden tools, or on their nightstands. Publishers Weekly (04/08/2013)

From the Ground Up: A Food Grower's Education in Life, Love, and the Movement That's Changing the Nation

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Following a restless childhood and adolescence in the affluent Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Nolan and her boyfriend set off for the Southwest as soon as she graduated from high school in 1987, ultimately landing at the Zendik Farm, a hippie commune. Nolan spent over a decade in this idiosyncratically controlled environment in which free love was encouraged, but close relationships weren't. She and her young daughter (whom she had with a friend at the commune) ultimately left the nomadic commune, returning home to live with her parents and to nurse her wounds and figure out her next steps. Realizing that her organic gardening skills could be useful, Nolan established the Organic Gardner, a company whose aim is to teach clients how to grow organic vegetables in their own gardens. The concept caught on, and she soon found herself with a rapidly growing company. The narrative thread about her experiences as an organic entrepreneur is told in conjunction with the stories of her courtship with a fellow Zendik resident whom she eventually married, her creation of the 5,000 sq. ft. Edible Gardens at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, and her efforts to repair her fractured relationship with her immediate family. These episodes, along with flashbacks to the commune, make for a disjointed read, but Nolan's enthusiasm for bettering the world is charming and infectious.
Publishers Weekly (05/06/2013)