Decorative Style is the most practical and innovative resource of decorating styles, techniques, and tools and materials ever created. Using innovative, easy-to-master techniques and surprisingly inexpensive materials (paint, paper, fabric, replica molding -- even photocopies!), Kevin McCloud -- a brilliant young set designer turned interior decorator -- shows you everything you need to know to design and create your own stunning adaptations of today's most popular decorating styles. There are forty styles in all -- from Santa Fe, Shaker, Miami Deco, and Caribbean to Bauhaus, Biedermeier, Mackintosh, and French Country (to name just a few) -- each designed and created especially by the author and stunningly photographed, with literally hundreds of styling options and color variations to choose from. Each style is represented by a complete floor-to-ceiling "room slice" -- a unique device that allows you to see the total impact of a scheme while easily visualizing its possibilities for your own room. The decorative effects and other components of each style are analyzed, rephotographed with a full range of imaginative alternatives, and cross-referenced to all the techniques, tools, and materials needed to create each unique effect. Even the most inexperienced and budget-conscious of home owners will be inspired by Kevin McCloud's imaginative use of inexpensive, readily available materials and amazing timesaving techniques. Whether you do the work yourself or hire it out, whether you're redoing an alcove or an entire house, Decorative Style will kindle your imagination and give you all the tools you need to create spectacular, one-of-a-kind interiors that will truly distinguish and enhance the value of your home. Kevin McCloud is a bright new name in interior decoration. His unique and refreshing approach stems from his background in art history and his experience as an innovative set designer in London. His talents as a lecturer and teacher are in great demand, and his techniques and advice on creating a wide range of period styles are regularly featured in major magazines. Inexpensive materials and a repertoire of imaginative techniques form the crux of his decorating philosophy, one that celebrates innovative reinterpretations of traditional styles and encourages all to design and create their own dramatic and distinctive interiors. Chapter 1 Principles of Decoration Getting Ideas Since every room is different, each has its own starting point for decorating ideas. The quality of light varies from room to room, for reasons like the ceiling height and the number of windows. Some rooms may contain furnishings that you cannot fit anywhere else. All these limiting factors are in fact departure points for creating a scheme. In the Style Directory you will see rooms that are in turn cluttered, sparsely furnished and that appear small and large. Each one makes a strong visual statement, which can sometimes mask a problem, or sometimes make a virtue out of necessity. Transforming a room I created a new decorative scheme for the sitting room in a late-nineteenth-century house, shown in the snapshot below. In the bottom right-hand corner of the facing page you can see how the style of this room was reinterpreted in the flavor of the Arts and Crafts movement of the time, taking into account some of the inspirational materials that appear on these pages. Historical Colors When you are choosing a scheme to decorate, you may want to use period colors. Several companies produce special ranges of paints in "historical" colors but these are not always accurate. The manufacturers usually rely on analyses of paint scrapings, which can be misleading because over time pigments can change color. And, until this century, painters had no standard formulations for making up colors, and shades of a color often varied depending on the local materials used. So trying to match the exact subtle shade of what you think is an authentic color might well be a fruitless task! Instead, it is better to think of approximations and, as I often do in choosing paints, of colors that simply suggest a period. Here is some source material for historical colors (clippings, reproduction fabric and wallpaper) along with standard modern paint chips in similar colors. Dividing Wall Space Once some of the ideas for decorating your room have come together -- maybe a period atmosphere you want to convey, the level of formality you require, or a completed color scheme -- start thinking about how you are going to articulate the wall Space that you have before you. A wall is like an empty canvas, which can be treated in any number of ways for different effects. Even though walls are fiat, and the most usual treatment of them is two-dimensional, the overall effect of the wall decoration is much more powerful than that of floors or ceilings. This is because walls wrap around a room, enclosing the space between them. By manipulating the wa