Illustrations of different rooms provide ideas on using color, fabrics, and assessories to create comfortable and romantic bedrooms, workspaces, and patios that reflect personal interests.
The rooms pictured all share two things in common: they are big, and they are empty. The craziest it gets with knick-knacks is a glass of water on the coffee tables and a couple of thin books artfully discarded somewhere. The rooms have barely any furniture and all of it is along the walls of the rooms and only accentuates how empty the spaces are.
I went back and counted because I didn't remember a single rug, but there are exactly four rugs in the entire book and none are in more than one picture. And worst of all, the rooms all look cold and drafty, either by the coloring, the lack of softness, or from the fact that the house being photographed looks like it had been abandoned for about a decade before someone showed up to slap on some white wash and drag in the furniture.
So many of this book's photographs also appear in The Comfortable Home: A Inspirational Guide To Creating Feel Good Spaces that for a moment I wondered if I was reading different publications of the same book. But nope, they just have eerily similar titles and mostly similar photos (photographer Polly Wreford took them, and they are quite pretty). I liked the other book better, and the whole time I was reading this one I just wished I was reading Burdon's book instead.
The text of this one bored me and towards the end I just started flipping through for the pictures, especially since I don't have an outdoor space or garden to decorate. One thing this book does have, though, is a brief chapter on home offices, which is missing from The Comfortable Home.