Materials: A Sourcebook for Walls and Floors

By Francesca Torre

There are hundreds of ways to decorate the walls and floors of your home, and choosing the right materials can be challenging for even the most creative thinkers. What you need is someone to take you by the hand and lead you through all the options, as if you were in a design showroom together. Enter Materials , a handy guidebook that's the next best thing to having an interior designer at your side. This informative book covers the full range of decorative possibilities for walls and floors, whether the effect you're seeking is traditional or contemporary, subtle or eye-catching, luxurious or down-to-earth. Chapters devoted to wood, stone, tile, metal, plaster, concrete, paint, wallpaper, linoleum, and carpets provide everything you need to know to select, buy, and install each type of material, including pros and cons, relative cost, and durability. Hundreds of beautiful color photographs present clever ideas to help you conceal design flaws, modernize or spruce up a room, or entirely transform the look of your home--and to express your personal sensibility while you're at it. Overflowing with advice and inspiration, Materials is an invitation to use color, texture, and pattern to create the living space that suits you best.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1584797266
• ISBN13: 9781584797265
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Stewart, Tabori, & Chang
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.5" x 11.1"
• Age Range: 13 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 8 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

Outstanding!

This is a great book--color pictures on almost every page, up to the minute decorating suggestions, and plenty of useful information on how you can transform your home's walls and floors. The next best thing to having a decorator as a best friend. Take limewash. Did you know it had "disinfectant and fungicidal properties" (p 18)? The book shows you how to apply limewash and tint it, and gives pictures of limewash that makes it look like aged plaster, an effect that would be especially lovely in Spanish style homes.. Paint, wallpaper and wall fabrics are discussed, showing how to use them, what effects to go for, and types to use. Carpet, tile, and wood floors are discussed, as is resilient flooring and metal. You are bound to find new ideas in this book.