Brooklyn Seniors

Apartment Therapy's Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces

Description

Whether you inhabit a studio or a sprawling house with one challenging space, Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, co-founder of the most popular interior design website, Apartment Therapy, will help you transform tiny into totally fabulous.
 
According to Maxwell, size constraints can actually unlock your design creativity and allow you to focus on what’s essential. In this vibrant book, he shares forty small, cool spaces that will change your thinking forever.
 
These apartments and houses demonstrate hundreds of inventive solutions for creating more space in your home, and for making it more comfortable. Leading us through entrances, living rooms, kitchens and dining rooms, bedrooms, home offices, and kids’ rooms, Apartment Therapy’s Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces is brimming with ingenious tips and ideas, such as:
 
•   Shifting the sense of scale through contrasting colors
•   Adding airiness by using transparent collections
•   Utilizing the area under a loft bed for a kitchen and mini-bar
•   Tucking an office with chic vintage doors into an unused bedroom corner
 
In each dwelling Maxwell points out what makes the layout work and what adds style. Most of the “therapy” involves minor tweaks that can be accomplished on a limited budget, such as dividing a room with sheer curtains, turning a door into a desk, or disguising electrical boxes with art displays. An extensive resource guide, including Maxwell’s favorite websites for buying desks, open storage solutions, and much more, will help you turn even the tiniest residence into a place you are always happy to come home to. 
 

Reviews

Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-08-28
Summary: "Smaller is Better"

This book should appeal to a wide audience as almost everyone has a small space - no matter how large the house. There are many clever and creative solutions included in the book. I also like the size - compact and easy to hold.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-08-07
Summary: "Not just for apartment dwellers..."

I honestly could not love this book more. My husband and I just bought our first home, and spent hours checking out the design/decorating section at the bookstore. I was apprehensive about getting this book because our house is enormous (we need ideas on what to do with all the space), and we aren't apartment renters any longer. Low and behold, we kept going back to this one; "Remember the kitchen/bathroom/kid's room in that AT book?"

This book is not for people who need a bucketload of cash to spend, and it is not for the super vanilla, traditional folks. The ideas are fresh and new, and aren't so over the top. If you are a little quirky and open to ingenious uses of space, you might just love this book as much as I do. I reccomend this book if you love the Domino Book of Design.

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-08-03
Summary: "Great book full of Ideas"

The great thing about this book is that it really is a good place to start when thinking of all the things you can do to redecorate your place. When ordering this book, I looked forward to its release seeing how I read Apartment Therapy daily on my blog reader. When I received the book, I was glad that it had all sorts of great ideas put into one place. If you're thinking about doing some decorating or reorganizing of your space, this is a great book. It has a lot of variety.

Unfortunately, the bad news is that it isn't all that specific. It could use a great more detail with its ideas and could show some more steps for each idea.

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Rating: 3 / 5
Date: 2010-07-05
Summary: "It's (not) related"

Decorating books could be divided between the ones that instruct, and the ones that display. Terence Conran began a different way of discussing how people live in spaces, and AT has been different in that it shows how people live in apartments -- which aren't just small spaces. They are, by definition, smaller parts of a whole space -- a building, a street, a neighborhood, a city. AT led the way for thinking about functional living in apartments - and the entire line of 'landing strip' furniture now available would seem to be their doing.

This book, Apartment Therapy's Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces, unfortunately, doesn't do that -- it shows little snippets and still lifes organized by room (bed, bath, living, etc.) without showing floorplans, and entire spaces. (With the possible exception of the G-R storage space outside the door to their apartment which mentions how they keep the space neat in deference to their neighbors.)Its more decorating porn than erotica: it shows you what someone else does, with no way to draw on those ideas -- rather than excite your own senses about what's possible for you and your space.


For example, the old Gillingham-Ryan pad (as shown in "Apartment Therapy Presents: Real Homes, Real People, Hundreds of Design Solutions") was an object lesson in so many ways: rethink materials for their function, not purpose; expand one area (kitchen) and minimize another (lr) - but together, the sum is greater than the parts. In the bedroom, you need a place to sleep, and a place to store things -- but you don't necessarily need space to walk around.


It's unfortunate -- for all that AT has to say about living in (relatively) small spaces that this book misses the point. Much of what it DOES offer is said elsewhere, and often: get rid of clutter (your stuff)/hide wires/ light colors expand and dark colors. Really: do we need a book to tell us that mirrors can enlarge space?

It's too bad, because, for me, the previous book is a bible: it shows complete apartments, describes who lives there, shows floor plans, etc. The Small Cool contest as shown on AT's website did that, as well. But this book is like too many others: great photos filling lots of pages, and little more.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-07-03
Summary: "Great ideas for small spaces"

Really enjoyed this book from the first read! As an advocate for small spaces, I sometimes get stymied about how to best utilize what space I have. This book is full of clever ideas, nicely detailed, and a narrative that takes you through the process. Great resource for those of us in small space by choice or fate.