Product Description

Transform your home with Tracy’s signature style and spirited approach to comfortable living.

When Tracy Porter founded her company with a $5,000 loan from her parents, she never envisioned that eight years later it would be a $40 million business with products sold at thousands of retail stores.

In Tracy Porter’s Home Style, Tracy demonstrates how to enliven rooms with old treasures and common objects. Lavishly illustrated, and brimming with inspiration, Tracy’s book shows you how to reinvent your home with simple and creative ways to use paint, fabric, rugs, pillows, and even scents. Each chapter contains a multitude of valuable tips and rule-breaking ideas, and the Make & Create Guide for every featured project assures that you can adapt these projects to your own home. Tracy Porter’s Home Style will help new and old fans alike create a warm and welcoming home.

--Tracy has been featured on Oprah, E! Entertainment’s Homes with Style, and in the pages of O Magazine, People, Good Housekeeping, and Victoria.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #128903 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-03
• Released on: 2002-04-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Amazon.com Review
In Tracy Porter's world, decorating choices don't have to be permanent, and even the mud room is pretty. Her combination of vintage collecting and do-it-yourself crafting is appealing no matter what your budget, so grab your paintbrushes and prepare to gild a few lilies with Tracy Porter's Home Style.

The majority of the book showcases her own home and often shows the same piece of furniture in different settings--sometimes even with a completely different look. Each section includes short lists of "Tracy's Tips," which offer simple suggestions on everything from placing candles in the kitchen to effective uses for throw pillows. The feel is lush but also fun and flexible; she admits to mistakes like glossy black floors (they don't work too well with pets and kids!) while at the same time encouraging readers to take a few risks and paint the dining room that deep color they've been craving. Doorknobs, drawer pulls, light plates, and windows are all fair game for decorating, and the last chapter gives plenty of specific details for projects as small as hot-gluing a new tissue box and as large as refinishing a pair of chairs. If rich fabrics, striking colors, and a sense of play are what inspire you, this book provides all the incentive you need to have fun with decorating. --Jill Lightner

Review
"Contains enough sensuous, eye-catching photographs to stimulate even the most neutral-toned imagination." -- Bookpage

About the Author
Tracy Porter is the founder and creative mind behind Tracy Porter, Inc. She is the author of Tracy Porter’s Dreams from Home, in which she transformed a farmhouse into a home, and Tracy Porter’s Inspired Gatherings, a guide to family entertaining. She runs her business out of her studio in Princeton, Wisconsin.

Customer Reviews

The only person in the US who doesn't know who she is!
My affair with this book is love-hate.

I never heard of Tracy Porter or her 'style' until the publisher sent me a beautifully designed shopping bag filled with catalogs showcasing her retail items and the gift of a personal teapot cum cup & saucer -- very clever.

The items from her retail line are much cleaner and more mainstream than the pictures in this book which purports to be from her home.

What Tracy does is give the reader permission to take things out of the 'keeping for good' closet and use them everyday. That's good.

What she also does, and I'm sick to death of it, is use items that have seen better days. If I see one more piece of distressed furniture or one more chipped painted chandelier I'm going to scream.

People -- reupholster your furniture! If something's ripped, fix it. Unless your furniture sports real antique fabrics or finishes or is showing true wear and tear from daily use, repair it. Enough I say!

Tracy bravely uses color in her home. I do think there's too much of a mish-mash in many of the rooms, but that's my personal taste and not necessarily bad.

The other problem I have with this book is this home supposedly has three small (under 4 years old) boys living in it. Yet, there is pin a cushion on chair seat (a delight to the eye), a faux leopard throw hanging off a chest (on top of which sit four painted glasses and a matching glass martini shaker), lampshades with antique buttons hot-glued around the rim, and a dresser top filled with a letter opener, very, very small porcelain dolls, perfume bottles, and hat pins, to name a few.

I hope as soon as the photographer left Tracy ran through the house clearing off all these potential accidents waiting to happen.

There is a very short project section which gives instructions on how to make some of the items shown in the book. If you're a fan of decorating books, magazines, or shows you've seen them all before.

What I did appreciate is the resource directory at the back of the book. In alphabetical order it lists many of the places you can buy nice home design items. Where there is a web site available, it is included, so you're not forced to call.

Flight of Fancy
I am a fan of Tracy Porter's eclectic, fanciful style. My only disapointment with this book is that the format was not as large as "Dreams from Home" or "Inspired Gatherings". "Home Style" is an inspirational guide to Tracy's style, and perhaps your own. I find her sense of whimsy and creativity delightful. There a joy and free-spiritedness to her work that is quite refreshing. Her style may not appeal to all, but if you are a fan of Shabby Chic, flea-market finds, romance and comfortable charm, you will enjoy "Home Style".

Eclectic Look
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book because I usually don't go for the "eclectic lived in look", but this book was inspirational. The photographs are fantastic and feature many design details that would work in any room regardless of style.