Animal House Style : Designing a Home to Share With Your Pets

Rating:
Summary: Pretty, Not Practical.
Review: Animal House Style is one beautiful coffee table book. But truely, it is only a coffee table book. It has beautiful pictures of pets on beautiful designer furniture. But not the greatest advice for caring for a home with pets.

Let's get real here, I have a yellow lab that loves to lounge on my dark gray couch. The advice the author gives for removing pet hair from your couch is to get a strong vacuum cleaner! Um yeah, I would have never thought of that without reading this book! Or you can use a roll of tape to remove pet hair from your clothes! Hmmm, that is truely a new idea!

You can tell that Julia Szabo is a true animal lover, and she does have an amazing sense of style. But most of the home decor is way over my price range, like the Gucci bet she got her pit bull. It probebly cost more than my bed! Animal House Style does make you more aware of animal sensativity to house cleaning chemicals and what are good alternatives to your Clorox cleaners. But that is about the only practical advice this book has to offer.

If you are looking for a book with some really cute dog picks Animal House Style is a great pick. But if you are looking for viable solutions to living with pets, don't get this book.

Rating:
Summary: Not a Practical Guide for pet-proofing
Review: I found the title of this book to be misleading, as prior to purchase I believed it to be a guide to designing a home to better accommodate some of the unique challenges of living with animals. This is certainly not a guide; the writing is conversational and contains an abundance of pictures of well-known people, their pets and expensive, famous furniture. There is a resource section in the back of the book, but it is organized by chapter and page, not subject or solution. Specific information (product lines, etc.) is given, which is good (if you want to buy exactly that) and bad (information will become outdated). The most practical use I found were suggestions on fabric choices; I ended up buying an ultrasuede sofa in part because this book suggested it could withstand animals in good shape (it does).

I believe that the book is meant to show that living with animals in an accommodating way can be fashionable, and that the author had good intentions when writing the book. However, it seems dangerous to link animals to fashion, for what is fashionable can always become unfashionable. There are several instances in the book which discuss how well an animal is coordinated with a piece of furniture - that seems wrong to me.

The photography is very good and the layout attractive; if you like pets and fashion, the book may be a good match. If you are looking for a guide to pet proofing your home, you will be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Pets with Style
Review: This is a thoughtful, beautiful and generous book. Animal House Style sets out to prove that you can have beautiful animals AND a beautiful house, and succeeds at this mission--illustrating in articulate words and gorgeous photographs a myriad of ways to make your pets, your guests and yourself comfortable without sacrificing style.

It is a joy to meet the animals who people this book, and their housemates. The author's love of animals, immense grasp of pet care information, and appreciation of stylish living shine through on every page. This is a book that every pet lover should own!