Home Swell Home

Sex and the City meets Martha Stewart in this savvy and eclectic interior-design manifesto for high-flying chicks with nesting fantasies from the authors of the bestselling Swell: A Girl's Guide to the Good Life.

In their first breakthrough style manual, fashion designer Cynthia Rowley and former New York Times Sunday Styles editor Ilene Rosenzweig showed girls-on-the-go how to navigate the world with a little swagger and a lot of grace. Now they're taking the Swell aesthetic home with this inspiring guide to creating the ultimate dream pad. With more of the friendly tone and wry wit that lit up their first book, they introduce the idea of haute décor: How to make dressing up your home as exciting and accessible as buying a new wardrobe: Making it sexy. Trying new looks. Breaking rules. Mixing retro with modern. Changing with the seasons and your moods.

Offering a blueprint for the entire creative process, the two best friends and coauthors take you from inspiration to practical execution. Tour the swell playhouse room by room and see how design daydreams inspired by movies, a Palm Springs vacation, a painting, a favorite dress, or your own personal nostalgia (for the Brady Bunch living room) can become reality.

Full of the authors' own anecdotes and wisdom from a pantheon of swell style heroes, Home Swell Home has household hints, tips, and bits of history on everything you wish you'd known but never would have thought to ask. Some of the tour highlights ahead:

A recipe for a four-star dining room
(hint: logo-print slip covers)

Furniture EMS to resuscitate
doomed hand-me-downs

Turning the underused kitchen
into a day spa

Wiring "moonlight" into your trees

Create the ultimate sitcom screening room

Three new uses for your coffee table

"Paint" the walls with colored
fluorescent lights

Get real paint out of your hair!

Swinging from uptown decadence to downtown chic, Home Swell Home demystifies design, sweeps away snobbery, and shows how any house or apartment can be a place for high-style adventures. So come on in!