Our top books to help inspire you to get crafty inside the home.
A Place Called Home Jason Grant Hardie Grant)
INSPIRED BY AN OUTDOORSY Aussie lifestyle, Jason Grant’s guide to home decor is a breath of fresh air. This laid‑back book takes a tour around 12 stylish homes. Grant supplies snippets of advice, but the focus is on the photographs, with gorgeous shots of whole rooms and the details that make them special, such as stacked crockery, mismatched cushions and even the stripy towels in the bathroom. Vintage and making-and-mending may be Grant’s passions but there’s nothing twee here: just simple, offbeat style.
Decorate Journal Holly Becker (Jacqui Small)
Nearly 50,000 people visit Holly Becker every day, as her design blog Decor8 continues to be the go-to site for creative ideas and e-courses. She is also the author of 2011’s Decorate, which offers ‘1000 professional ideas for every room in the home.’ With her latest book, Holly guides readers through an eight-step process to transform our living spaces. This starts with seeking inspiration, inviting readers to think about their favourite smells, movies and cities even. It ends at decorating, with plenty of ideas drawn from Holly’s experience, as well as from stunning photography by Debi Treloar that peeks at interiors from different homes. And in-between is the transformative journey – chapters on identifying projects, translating ideas and finalising schemes, all with advice and checklists with space to write notes. It’s a happy and thoughtful way to style our homes.
Pretty Pastel Style Selina Lake (Ryland Peters & Small)
The queen of gorgeous interiors, Selina Lake takes pastel colours out of the nursery and proves that they can be bright, versatile and edgy. She mixes and matches the sweetie shades in Modern, Vintage, Retro and Simple schemes across paints, fabrics and furniture, combining handmade with thrifted and shop-bought. Primrose yellow shelves zing against mint‑green walls, while pink tissue-paper flowers bloom in a pistachio jug. As with her other books, this is bursting with good ideas that will have you reaching for the paint pot.
Happy Home Charlotte Hedeman Gueniau (Jacqui Small)
“Give me more colour”, implores Charlotte Hedeman Gueniau. The founder of Danish homewares company Rice knows her colours – and how to make them part of a liveable environment. Happy Home is a romp through her ideas about ways to make your house colourful, quirky and joyful, from painting your front door yellow (to match the solar plexus chakra) in order to ensure a good mood for the day to livening a dark corner with a neon-painted chair. Gueniau is a fan of a “mixy‑matchy” look, jumbling up natural textures with bold ceramics or plastic toys, or crochet with velvet. The book is divided into chapters including “entertaining, unwinding, dining” and “sleeping, bathing, dreaming”, with advice on every room of the house. A visual and heartwarming feast.