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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Living in Style Without Losing Your Mind isn't the usual tips-and-tricks guide to decorating your home. Author Marco Pasanella attempts the nearly impossible: to define style in order to help homeowners understand the difference between the stylish and the merely trendy. It's a Herculean task, but Pasanella's approach is truer to the real meaning of style than that of many other interior design books.
Living in Style Without Losing Your Mind isn't the usual tips-and-tricks guide to decorating your home. Author Marco Pasanella attempts the nearly impossible: to define style in order to help homeowners understand the difference between the stylish and the merely trendy. It's a Herculean task, but Pasanella's approach is truer to the real meaning of style than that of many other interior design books.
Pasanella eschews gimmicky style tips and doesn't believe everyone should adhere to one mode of decorating. "Style is important. A style is not." Instead, he urges homeowners to look to room functions as guides to decorating. Because spaces in the home are generally used for gathering (e.g., the living room or kitchen) or retreat (such as a bedroom or bathroom), Pasanella holds that homeowners should design a space with its underlying use or dynamic in mind to help them make wise choices. Above all, rooms must be comfortable and reflect their inhabitants. "True individuality comes from honesty, not 'creativity,'" says Pasanella.
He addresses some common design mistakes--for example, falling on the wrong side of the fine line between simple and spartan or cozy and cluttered, as well as the faux pas of making everything match or trying to be cool. He discusses options for home offices and computers, relevant but routinely ignored topics in other design books. Pasanella's abstractions on style can be somewhat vague or overly didactic themselves ("To be really stylish, you need a touch of bad taste"). But overall, he does an admirable job of defining a nebulous concept and giving homeowners the confidence and skills to trust themselves when decorating their homes. --Kris Law
Book Description
Flip through the pages of any design publication and you can't help but wonder: So beautiful, so spacious, so perfect...but is anyone actually living there?
We may want our houses to look like magazine spreads, but to do that can require a mountain of money and a staff of hundreds, the dexterity of Michelangelo, and a backhoe. Most of the time, great design has to be accessible to the rest of us. By deÞnition it has to be easy and affordable, smart and stylish. But as the brilliant designer and writer Marco Pasanella shows us, you don't have to have a "look"; rather, great design can be found in many styles and in any house. For your place to look great, he says, you don't need a platinum card or a flair for fabrics. You don't need a degree and you don't need to know how to draw. You only need to know how to see, and that's where this fresh and exciting book comes in.
Pasanella has the insight of a practicing designer and teacher, which he combines with an iconoclastic and firmly practical attitude; the result is a book that will speak to a generation impatient with frivolous, unimaginative, and pompous design solutions. If you don't have a separate wing for each family member, how can you create private spaces that provide retreat even as they allow for communal use? How do you know what to toss, what to keep, what to get? How do you turn a house into a home? These questions have answers that can make our lives easier and a lot better looking.
Living in Style Without Losing Your Mind doesn't tell us what to do; it helps us understand what we're doing and encourages us to trust our own ideas about great style. Pasanella gives us the confidence to trust our own passions and our own taste. But this isn't just a manual of practical advice. Our author is a wonderful designer himself, with a marvelous eye, and the book is filled with quirky, inspiring, and just plain beautiful photos showing what our rooms can look like with only a little thought, a little effort, and a great teacher.
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