Product Description

"Inside Out" brings together the best designs and ideas from the "Home Front" series. Inside, Laurence transforms the different rooms in your home, while outside, Diarmuid provides ideas for the garden. The boys, though, combine forces to link what's happening inside with what's happening outside.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #246314 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 168 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Gorgeous, pouting Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and reliably rugged Diarmuid Gavin return in Home Front Inside Out, a collection, amply illustrated, of house and garden make-overs that range from the soigné to the startling. The recipe is familiar--the ambitious transformation of humdrum house and garden spaces into environments expressive of aspects of their owners' lifestyles and personalities--but the results can be extraordinary, even by the standards of this pair. Need to add a focal point to the garden of a 30s house which Diarmuid is refashioning along Art Deco lines? A giant revolving egg, mirrored like a disco ball and concealing a cocktail cabinet, is the answer. Laurence himself describes a curvaceous 50s-inspired circular kitchen, installed no doubt for very good reasons, as "part-Sputnik, part-Wonderbra". A reference to a bathroom mobile as being inspired by "Alexandra Calder" adds a suitably ambiguous note.

Gavin's gardens, with their consistent use of concrete, wood and metal as strong, defining structural elements, are more of a piece than Llewelyn-Bowen's fanciful but precisely detailed responses to rooms, but the boldness and wholeheartedness of both are refreshing to a high degree. They court mockery with their flirtations with historical and cultural kitsch, yet the finished spaces are undeniably thought provoking, and the boldness of approach is, in many ways, liberating. If they can make readers and viewers think in new ways about how they use their customary places, the authors will no doubt consider their time well spent. --Robin Davidson

Customer Reviews

Wish List senarios made real!
Laurence LLewelyn-Bowen and Diarmuid Gavin produce what seem to be on the face of it, incredibly incredible indoor and outdoor spaces. The designs inspired by real-life aspirations for real people who have to inhabit these spaces long after the camera has stopped rolling.
Yet somehow as each brief unfolds itself, a way through the design maze is found and Laurence turns the suburban into the sublime in his own distinct way - these strikingly innovative and sometimes achingly beautiful spaces do not so much marry with the graphic and fluid outdoor spaces conceived by Diarmuid, but live in luscious sin with them! This book will not only inspire greatness in all who read it - but might just inspire you to run down to Homebase for those mirrored walls or a mexican pink fireplace for your sitting-room or better, suddenly make you yearn to install an wonderful outdoor cinema with funky neon for your friends to enjoy! Surely that got to be better than staying in to watch 'Friends'.

Imaginative and Inspiring
This books is a great read and its lively text has done much to make me want to get stuck in and revolutionise my home and garden. I found Diarmuid Gavin's writing particularly interesting and useful and am very much looking forward to his next book. The book looks great and has been beautifully designed and put together. Well done the publishers!