Vintage Style Book

With its floral prints, chintz fabrics, and flea market finds, vintage style is a popular one and Vintage Style: Creating a Complete Look for Your Home introduces us to Cath Kidston's variation on this theme by taking us on a tour of her own home--bedrooms, bathroom, living rooms, kitchen and home office. Kidston's original love of this style stems from the patterns and fabrics she grew up with. When she started her own design shop as an adult, she realised that these same fabrics hadn't lost any of their freshness and comfort, and she began designing around the patterns and items she found at thrift shops and flea markets. Her vintage style consists largely of rose prints in chintz fabric as well as comfortable linen and ticking. Lavish details abound--velvet curtains, tassels, and bobble fringe, for instance. Liberal in her use of colour, Kidston often recommends mixing clashing colour for a vibrant feeling in the room. Her rooms' walls are usually painted white, and colour is added with fabrics, furniture, and accessories, which makes it easy and inexpensive to change the colour scheme if you get tired of the old one. Resourceful decorating ideas include the use of old scraps of patterned fabrics and striped linens, ribbon, and haberdashery flowers to create padded clothes hangers, cover ironing boards, and stitch lavender sachets--all of which would make excellent homemade gifts as well. Kidston is practical about her flea-market finds--she never buys anything she can't use. But as she points out, there are lots of unusual uses for items you already own--you just need to use a little ingenuity. A chipped china cup becomes a laundry detergent scoop; old curtains are turned into tablecloths. There's something very refreshing about such resourcefulness in an age of disposable items. Kidston's Vintage Style is all about cheerful, well-worn rooms that are as comfortable as they are pretty. --Kris LawRead More