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Living Large in Small Spaces: Expressing Personal Style in 100 to 1,000 Square Feet

Living Large in Small Spaces: Expressing Personal Style in 100 to 1,000 Square Feet

List Price: $35.00
Your Price: $23.10
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Nicely photographed and interested
Review: As a studio apartment dweller, I'm drawn to books on living well in small spaces. I've found that many are aimed at those who own their own space and have unlimited budgets. While some of the apartments featured in this book clearly fall into that category, others are a bit more realistic, focusing on the renter who doesn't have the ability to knock out walls and raise ceilings. More of a 'this is what this person's apartment looks like' than a how-to or suggestion guide, I still picked up some good tips that will translate to my apartment. Many of the apartments featured do seem to lean more toward the modern look; FYI if you know that's not your thing.

I gave the book five stars because I think it does very well what the title suggests: it offers good photographs of different living spaces sized 100 sq feet to 1000.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Really Good Start!
Review: I am enjoying this book immensely, unlike the four to five others I've picked up on this subject.

The apartments featured are very realistic - none of that "image expanding" so popular in decorating magazines like METROPOLITAN HOME or DWELL. Tiny spaces do indeed look their size - and that is a GOOD thing! It means we're not being sold a bill of goods by having the eye tricked with photography.

I appreciate the very quirky nature of the design of each of these highly individualized spaces. I appreciate even more the fact that they are grouped by square footage and start at the walk in closet size!

There are many many highly usable and accessible decorating ideas on these pages.

The one fault of this book (and it's a minor one but worth mentioning): very many of the people profiled in the pages use their very small spaces as tricked out 'hotel rooms' rather than full time living quarters. This might not seem to matter until you realize one gentleman rehabbed his kitchen but didn't include an oven of any kind. How many of us can live like that full time? Several people have their places done up as glorified bedrooms w/ the beds on full time display. One or two others have complicated Murphey beds, one on pulleys from the ceiling. While fairly commonplace in New York proper these beds are expensive to duplicate almost anywhere else in the country and are key to several decorating schemes.

Other than these few problems I would highly recommend this book to anyone to learn some ingenius ways of solving small or quirky or differently arranged space problems!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Flip Through at the Bookstore but Don't Buy
Review: I didn't find the contents of this book inspiring enough to justify the $23.10 price tag. To its credit, the photographs are well-done, and you will start to think differently about making small spaces work. But I personally didn't walk away with any ideas for my small space, and I found the decorative styles of the apartment-dwellers interesting but not suitable for my lifestyle. A lot of the apartments featured are 2nd homes for people, so their apartments serve more as places to sleep rather than a dire need to live in <500 sq. feet. There's very little to no "how to" in this book, from furniture arranging tips to how to save space to how to make your life fit into 1 or 2 closets.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Living Large in Small Spaces
Review: I have a confession to make. One of the 33 small homes in this engaging volume is my Neutra apartment, perceptively described by a former editor of Metropolis magazine (who kept her sanity by leaving) and brilliantly shot by Radek Kurzaj, a young Polish photographer. Bias aside, I found this to be the standout in a crowded field of books proclaiming that small is beautiful, even as many Americans are pigging out. Ours is an age of obscene excess, and it's refreshing to see how well one can live in a space half as large as mine, and a small fraction the size of mega mansions shoehorned into the Westside. The book is more about lifestyle than design, but every residential architect and interior designer could learn a lot from this varied mix of homegrown decor, which substitutes poetry and practicality for pretension. (Michael Webb is the book reviewer for LA Architect magazine.)

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great ideas for small spaces
Review: I love this book! There are a number of inventive solutions that don't require hiring a contractor. We've already used some ideas from the book and all we did was rearrange some furniture and paint a wall and a couple of ceilings. This book is truly inspiring if you are struggling with a small, bland space. I've been recommending it to all of my friends and clients who are living in small apartments.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: #2 of 7 "small decor" books
Review: I rated this second best of the 7 "small space" decorating books I
bought. The author says the average American apt. is less than 800 sq ft.,the average NY city one is less than 400. Most featured here are in NY, but there's a healthy mix of other US cities. Pros: Gives square footage, helpful photos, units more like what Americans live in then in many other decor books; with 398 pages, it's hard not to find ideas you can use.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: please be aware
Review: I realize that alot of people gave good reviews for this book.
But please be aware, that this book is for people who have
a zero budget for decorating. This book is not for people
who want beautiful design. It's for very simple people who
cannot afford a large home or high quality furnishings.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Cool Pictures
Review: I really liked the photography, and weight/size/texture of this book, but I didn't get any ideas that I hadn't already thought of for my small space. It's basically a book that shows who lives where, and how they live...which is cool.

Some of the spaces were so small there wasn't really anything you could put in them besides a dresser, a bed, and a counter with some dishes on top, and a laptop next to it.

Most of the designs are created with items that one would have in their place if they were 18-26 years old. The ideas appeared as having second-hand furniture, knick knacks they had as a kid, miscellaneous art bought from a homeless guy on the street...which is all good, but if you've moved on to the next stage of your life, I don't think this book would be very helpful, but would make a nice coffee table book.

At most, it was visually entertaining, but didn't spark my imagination.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Solace for Those of Us Living in Teeny-Weeny Places
Review: I recently moved into a <600-sf house with my husband and 33-lb dog. My decorating skills are very minimal, and I end up doing most of my shopping at IKEA. And so it was a pleasant surprise to find this book, which I came across while browsing in the interior design section of a bookstore.

Of course, I had to force myself to pull it out and look at it, since I've been so immensely disappointed by almost all of the books on the subjects of "small" spaces (probably because most of these books define small as 1,000 to 1,999 sf) and since I'm interested in more than just pretty pictures.

Lo and behold, this book, which is largely wonderfully detailed photos of real people's real small spaces (including a 100-sf dorm room and 2 couples with babies living in less than 500 sf), is inspiring in the most practical sense of the word. It's reassuring just to know that other people in the universe reside in sub-1000-sf quarters.

While it is true that many of the featured small-space livers are artists/designers of some sort, with skills that the average Jane doesn't have, I see it less as a book whose ideas you'd want to copy and more of a book whose ideas you'd want to emulate, and I quickly found several good ideas I could apply to my own spaces. Plus, I'm not even half-done just going through it and absorbing the minutiae of each photo and each apartment.

The best part(s)? No fancy-schmancy lofts (with the exception of one converted factory space) and no excessive and gratuitous photos of Wolf ranges and Miele dishwashers.

I couldn't find it used, but I can't feel too much regret about buying it for full price.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Solace for Those of Us Living in Teeny-Weeny Places
Review: I recently moved into a <600-sf house with my husband and 33-lb dog. My decorating skills are very minimal, and I end up doing most of my shopping at IKEA. And so it was a pleasant surprise to find this book, which I came across while browsing in the interior design section of a bookstore.

Of course, I had to force myself to pull it out and look at it, since I've been so immensely disappointed by almost all of the books on the subjects of "small" spaces (probably because most of these books define small as 1,000 to 1,999 sf) and since I'm interested in more than just pretty pictures.

Lo and behold, this book, which is largely wonderfully detailed photos of real people's real small spaces (including a 100-sf dorm room and 2 couples with babies living in less than 500 sf), is inspiring in the most practical sense of the word. It's reassuring just to know that other people in the universe reside in sub-1000-sf quarters.

While it is true that many of the featured small-space livers are artists/designers of some sort, with skills that the average Jane doesn't have, I see it less as a book whose ideas you'd want to copy and more of a book whose ideas you'd want to emulate, and I quickly found several good ideas I could apply to my own spaces. Plus, I'm not even half-done just going through it and absorbing the minutiae of each photo and each apartment.

The best part(s)? No fancy-schmancy lofts (with the exception of one converted factory space) and no excessive and gratuitous photos of Wolf ranges and Miele dishwashers.

I couldn't find it used, but I can't feel too much regret about buying it for full price.


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