Product Description

It helps the healthiness both of body and soul to live among beautiful things. --designer William Morris, 1882

Shabby Chic -- the rich, inviting, practical, time-worn style created by one of America's top designers, Rachel Ashwell, is a style of living that reflects the grace and simplicity of another time.

Now you can do more than just dream of living in a Shabby Chic home. You can create one yourself. With invaluable treasure-hunting advice and tips for essential materials, furniture, objects and decorations, you can live a life of simple, but rich, beauty.

With her practiced eye Rachel takes you on a tour of flea markets, antique malls, and a variety of secondhand sales -- estate, tag, yard, church, garage -- to demonstrate how, with a little taste, imagination, work and ingenuity, you can turn trinkets from the past into treasures for today.

As Rachel sifts through the discarded, the crumbling, the shabby, she takes you step by step through her personal process, sharing how you, too, can spot a fabulous buy, repair and alter it, and by following her guideline words -- comfort, function, and beauty -- develop your own distinctive, original look that is down-to-earth yet truly exquisite.

Following her sensible advice you can exchange the anonymity of mass-produced furniture and home accessories for unique, inviting surroundings for a fraction of the cost and decorate comfortable, livable rooms in which family heirlooms blend with flea-market finds and the new combines gracefully with the well worn. Lavishly illustrated with lovely and informative photographs and drawings, Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic Treasure Hunting & Decorating Guide shows you how to have the home you've always dreamed of, a place where children's dinners are served on mix-and-match antique plates at a table covered with lace from a renovated curtain set with unironed linen napkins. A space where fresh flowers stand in antique jugs, complementing comfortable furniture covered in crisp white denim that is enhanced with each laundering.

For Rachel, Shabby Chic is not just style. It is a way of living. With her trademark warmth and charm she reveals how she sleeps on embroidered antique linen and dresses in cashmeres and bias-cut silk dresses discovered in vintage clothing shops and flea markets. Throughout, she teaches you how to recognize and appreciate beauty in unlikely and often overlooked places, as well as how to define and refine your individual taste.

Worn damask, relaxed velvets, tea-stained florals, washed-out cotton prints, tattered lace, monogrammed linen....

Comforting colors: celadon, mint and seafoam greens; dusty rose; ivories, creams and faded grays; a touch of pale sky-blue; crisp, clean white....

Faded grandeur: the incomplete, the neglected, the crumbling, the cracked, the mismatched, the wrinkled....

Ruffles, gathers, tucks; scuffs, chips, imperfections; worn moldings, tired elegance, peeling paint....

An appreciation of vintage and history....

This is Shabby Chic

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #85717 in Books
• Published on: 1998-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060392086
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
By now most readers even marginally interested in home decorating are familiar with the democratic principles of decorating elaborated in Rachel Ashwell's first book, Shabby Chic: namely, that well-made vintage furniture and home accessories can add a cozy grandeur to your home, even if the paint's a little thin or the fabric a bit faded. In her second book, Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic Treasure Hunting & Decorating Guide, Ashwell shares her processes, from a stall-by-stall description of a flea market trip to pictures of her design boards scattered with photos, fabric swatches, and paint chips. Ashwell doesn't skimp on details: she tells how to decide on a fair bargaining price at flea markets, how to clean old items without harming them, and (step by step) how one ugly glass-fronted cabinet topped with old linoleum and mismatched shelf paper became an attractive, roomy storage piece that houses her daughter's books, dolls, and bedding. This is a friendly, intimate book in which Ashwell shares pictures of her own home and those of her friends--some of whom live in roomy beach houses and some of whom live in 450-square-foot cottages, and all of whom use the main Shabby Chic concepts of comfort, function, and beauty in deciding which objects to share their space with. Fans of the original Shabby Chic will find this follow-up every bit as useful, attractive, and accessible.

From Booklist
Who is Rachel Ashwell--and why should we care? Not really a Martha Stewart clone, she is the owner and quasioriginator of a line of home furnishings that recalls the aesthetic sensibilities of genteel nobility, the kind of clean but slightly neglected homes and interiors associated with a decline in income. In an intensely personal narrative, she invites readers to flea markets, to examine the old and unusual, and to tour her home (and those of four others), and all photographic wanderings are accompanied by gentle, almost subconscious instructions. An oversize round table, whitewashed and with cutoff legs, becomes a comfortable coffee table in a seaside cottage. Carefully scrubbed and washed, old Christmas mercury ornaments shine like silver in garden settings. Even a stained linen cloth and a pink sari have new lives. Barbara Jacobs

Review
"...Rachel Ashwell [is] the founder of the Shabby Chic home-decor empire and the queen of secondhand stylishness...." -- Mary Daniels, Chicago Tribune

"Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic" is a treasure-hunter's dream guide...." -- Africa Ragland, Palm Beach Post

"Exquisitely photographed and richly detailed, this is the essential, step-by-step guide to finding the treasures of a lifetime...." -- Bay News

"When she merged English country style with L.A. ease, Rachel Ashwell didn't realize she was unleashing a phenomenon." -- Hamish Bowles, Vogue Style

"...Rachel Ashwell [is] the founder of the Shabby Chic home-decor empire and the queen of secondhand stylishness...." -- Mary Daniels, Chicago Tribune

Customer Reviews

Lovely pictures, uninspired text
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Ashwell's previous book, Shabby Chic; and mistakenly assumed that the followup would be just as packed with interesting ideas and beautiful pictures--WRONG! The Shabby Chic Treasure Hunting & Decorating Guide is absolutely uninspired. The author spends far too much time describing her childhood and trips to flea markets with her mum and carries on longer than necessary about her present day trips to markets. I am not particularly interested in hearing what she had for a snack during her breaks from haggling with the vendors. Also, much space is given to nice but meaningless drawings bordered by text that is so fancy as to be almost illegible. I also found many of her helpful tips and pointers to be mainly common sense for anyone that has ever visited a flea market, auction, antique mall, or yard sale. Furthermore, I felt insulted by the author's almost hauty tone in describing how honed and refined her tastes are. The only redeeming trait this book posesses are the marvelous photos of Ashwell's enchanting flea market finds. Many of the pieces of furniture, fabric swatches, lighting fixtures, and baubles are extremely charming and the photographer did an excellent job of bringing their magic to the reader. If you just look at the pictures and discount the nonsense in between, you will likely enjoy the book.

Inspiration for antique/flea market shoppers.
While some of the people who have read this book dislike Rachel Ashwell's chatty tone, I find it personal and very informative. I think that she has exquisite taste and is a genius at vintage decorating. This book will help you to ferret out the quality finds at a flea market or antique mall and put them into use by providing tips on what to look for and how to restore them to charming beauty. There are sections on collections, decorations, and vintage clothing, among others, and the book finishes with a look at some finished homes done in impeccable Shabby Chic style. The pictures are beautiful, the text is as if a friend were talking to you, and the whole package is entertaining and inspirational.

Rachel has an eye for Design & Beauty!
I thouroughly enjoyed this book. I deal in thousands of books and this book is one of the few that is staying on my shelf as a reference. Rachel thouroughly captures the art of design, and sees beauty in the simple but unique items that we run across in our everyday lives. I feel she helps people to see that decorating can be fun, whether were rich or poor. It is not a book of rules but creativity! Thanks Rachel! Keep up the good work and I am looking forward to your future books!