Nina Campbell, one of Britain’s foremost interior designers, has garnered international acclaim for her signature designs—classic and comfortable interiors executed with elegant understatement. In Nina Campbell’s Decorating Notebook, she reveals the trademark touches, the secret sources and techniques, and the methods she uses to create her timeless, sophisticated interiors.
Starting from the belief that homes should always reflect the preferences and idiosyncrasies of the families who live in them, Nina Campbell leads home decorators from bare walls to finished room, offering insights into each step of her design process and showing how to apply her design principles in any home.
Nina Campbell includes beautiful photographs of homes she has decorated in the United States and Europe, including a luxurious New York City penthouse as well as her own new apartment in London, and provides explanations of the key decorating decisions behind each design. As she guides the home decorator on a tour of these locales, she recounts the challenges inherent within each project and the little tricks that produced sweeping effects, and she demonstrates how to enliven decorative schemes with the smallest of details. To further aid the reader in selecting the perfect elements, Nina Campbell offers options for wonderful windows and wall treatments along with directions for properly selecting each piece, tips for designing the most effective lighting scheme based on a room’s structure and style, secrets for choosing the right fabrics and appropriate color schemes, and ideas for positioning furniture in exciting new ways. Nina Campbell also explains how the reader can re-create her signature touch: a stunning focal point in every room.
Using her top ten decorating principles, Nina Campbell shows how to make the most out of a home’s architectural detailing, and she reveals her favorite style touches, including witty ornaments, sensual cushions and throws, and scented flowers for the bedroom. With the aid of invaluable questionnaires, swatches, and floorplans, she offers countless ideas for personalizing and revitalizing the home with creative solutions for every room.
Lavishly illustrated and filled with inspired suggestions, Nina Campbell’s Decorating Notebook is an indispensable guide for anyone seeking tailor-made home design.
In her fourth book, longtime designer Campbell presents a stunningly elegant view into the decision-making process of a prominent interior decorator. Campbell details secrets of solving practical problems and shares cozy personal stories. Each chapter begins with an elegant photo essay of a redecorated space. A "notebook" page follows with wonderful close-ups of the fabrics and textures used in room, as well as interesting ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos and informative notes explaining what the decorator had in mind. When necessary, floor plans have been included to demonstrate where architectural changes have been made. The direct and helpful writing style gives readers many tips: "White china with a coat of arms is both grand and simple." Yet, just when it seems this volume is aimed exclusively towards the upper echelon of decorators ("A room of this size demands several seating areas…"), the author suddenly tosses out universally useful information: "A good tip for buying a rug, incidentally, is to look out for one that doesn’t have a central motif, as it will be less restrictive when you are arranging furniture." Though at times the cost-saving tips liberally sprinkled throughout the text seem incongruous with the magnificent and stately homes pictured, Campbell wisely notes that "few people want to start completely from scratch and there are often real budgetary constraints, even in very grand homes." For readers tasked with redecorating their penthouse apartments or country homes, this is a ‘must have’ volume. Decorating enthusiasts will enjoy reading the text as well as studying the luxurious pictures, and anyone with a flair for decorating will find this volume fascinating midnight reading.
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Well-known British designer and author Campbell teams up with her photographer daughter in this personal view of her recent projects. Beginning with her own apartment, outfitted to accommodate a mother and adult child, Campbell features upscale interiors for a variety of residents: a refined bachelor, a retired couple, a single woman scaling down from a grand manor, the members of a private residential club. Throughout, Campbell describes her design choices in rooms that, in a few cases, were updates of her previous work. Campbell's personal voice and focus on detail work especially well on the scrapbook pages, which feature swatches of fabric and paint and include more specific hints for pulling design elements together. Campbell's aesthetic, at once cozy and grandly opulent, may not appeal to fans of sleek, contemporary, minimal design. But all readers will benefit from advice such as the "Top 10 Decorating Principles" and Campbell's practical suggestions to reuse pieces whenever possible. A rich, useful resource. Gillian Engberg
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