Product Description

Cheap Chic tells you all you need to know to create a stylish home without breaking the bank.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #192985 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 144 pages

Review
Transform your home into somewhere highly personal and individualistic with this super book by stylist Emily Chalmers. Full of cheap and cheerful ideas for brightening your home, beautifully photographed by Debi Treloar, it shows you how to turn your rooms into something extra special on a shoestring. Junk shop finds and car boot bargains; oriental exoticism from your local Chinese, Middle Eastern and Indian stores; antique shops and bric-a-brac stalls. All are wonderful sources of the sort of things you think would cost a fortune but don?t and that add a touch of class or fun to your home normally only seen in magazines. Emily highlights the best way of displaying your finds, of storing them, and utilising them as practical pieces in the home: a collection of Tunisian tea glasses make a wonderful display, especially filled with flowers from the garden; old hampers and baskets become homes to all those things you never find anywhere to put; mismatched dinner services, when based on a theme, add a quirky touch to a dinner party and become items to be treasured as well as used. Piles of fabrics, perhaps collected over the years but never used, if organised into colour or pattern become decorative features in their own right and beloved childhood toys become attractive additions to any room when suitably placed. Anyone looking for a taste of quirkiness, anyone with an eye for the unusual or the pretty, anyone looking to do up their home cheaply and effectively will find this an inspirational read.

Customer Reviews

Cheap and Very Colourful!
If you like very bright colours this is the book for you. If you are more of a traditionalist like me, you may find the ideas in this book a bit too rough and ready. I think it would suit a younger audience (teens and 20s) who maybe are in their first home and don't mind a 'bright rustic' look. I'm going to pass mine onto my daughter.

A lovely, inspirational book
I adore this book, it is full of lovely ideas for rooms that won't date (in my opinion of course). My one teeny criticism is that my budget is MUCH smaller than theirs could be, and my house about a tenth of the size of the ones shown in the book, but hey, that's the same as every book of this ilk I have ever seen. Nonetheless, it is still a lovely book, and i found some useful ideas that I can achieve in my own (tiny) home. I would definitely recommend it as a nice 'ideas' book.