[.uk] Mary Gilliatt's Interior Design Course (Decor Best-Sellers) (ISBN 0823030466)

Helpful Book:
This book is excellent for laying out the basics for decorating/designing a house. More so than other books, descibes in detail numberous aspects of decorating that are important and not just stating the obvious. My only diappointment of the book are with the photographs. The books descibes dozens of differnt style of decorating. 95% of the photographs are of contemporary/modern homes. Having a few more traditional photographs would have been helpful.

Dated:
Too much fluff. Typeface is very small and hard to read. Pictures have a yellowish cast and the room scenes look dated.

A Design Book that You Can Live Without:
I regret I did not read some of the other below-3-star reviews before I bought this book - all of those comments are true. First of all, the text is impossible to read. One would have thought font size is a trivial point when it comes to the quality of a book, but trust me, it is not. After just 5 minutes with this book my head was swimming. Even the captions to the photos are quite difficult to read. Apart from the awful presentation, the author has little to offer readers: (1) Contents - if you are new to interior design, this book does not give any systematic, practical and to-the-point tips to get you started. Nor is it well-organized. I was expecting to learn the basics on the historical influences on style - the book does have a chapter on this topic, but it failed miserably to point out the key differences of different periods nor is it sufficiently illustrated. Everything is in a muddle. There is indeed a few glossaries of terms in the book, but I seriously wonder if it would be relevant for most amateur decorators, for example, the ones for fabric and period furniture. (2) Images - as one has to give up on reading the text of this book, one naturally turns to the photos in hope of finding design inspirations. As some of the other reviewers so rightly pointed out, the design images selected in this book is far from impressive. They may not be to the extreme of being ugly, but certainly one would find better styled pictures in any furniture catalogue, say even from Ikea. In summary, the book does not deliver what it promises in the title - I do not feel I have learnt anything useful or practical that I can immediately apply to decorating. If you are an absolute beginner to interior design and looking for practical tips on decorating, I would highly recommend the "Essentials" series ("Living Room Essentials, Bedroom Essentials, Bathroom Essentials etc) which offer easy-to-read, instructional and user-friendly knowledge. The designs featured in the books can often be easily emulated at any budget. If you are however more interested in the asthetics and styling aspects of decorating, you might find books like "New York Apartments" more inspirational as they feature stunning design projects, often by award-winning architects or interior designers.

A terrific book.:
If your mind has been on other things, and you suddenly need to know all the basics, this is the book for you. All subjects are covered in a comprehensive way. This was a great help to me since I have needed to decorate a new house from scratch, and really never was acquainted with the basic ideas. If you need a really good start (and even middle and finish) try this book. I think it was well worth the price.

Worst ever:
We just bought a house and I bought many interior design/home decorating books recently and screened through a bunch in a book store. I bought this one because I saw it was named as a best seller, and I seriously do not understand how could this become a best seller, maybe best seller 5 tears ago? When the book arrived from Amzon, both my husband and I were shocked: Who would want to design like that? The pictures are simply ugly!!! Both the pictures and text are so dated, and the text type is the smallest I have ever seen. I could not bare to read two paragraphs because my eyes were too strained.