Discovering Home with Laurie Smith: Find Your Personal Style

by Laurie Smith

Inspirational, full-color photos capture Smith's before-and-after design process to give homeowners confidence to work with any home's architectural bones. She discusses arranging furniture, choosing... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0696224062
• ISBN13: 9780696224065
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Meredith Books
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 9.1" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

easy elegant home decorating

Discovering Home with Laurie Smith is timeless. The layering of textures and patterns are spot on. I've owned it for thirteen years and gifted copies to friends and family alike. I turned to it recently when updating the guest room and bath. It's helped me create welcoming, warm, representative spaces that are reflective of the southern charm that represents home for me. Laurie Smith much like my all-time favorite Sarah Richardson is a touchstones that empower readers to create a home of refuge. The tips travel well.

A Wonderful, Beautiful Book!

If you love Laurie Smith's designs on Trading Spaces, you will be in design heaven with this book. Laurie takes us step by step through the renovation of her own lovely home. The book includes beautiful pictures, drawn floor plans, notes of what she will change in each room and then the beautiful after pictures. Not only do we get to walk through her home, but she gives us ideas on how to interpret her understanding of good design into our own homes. This book is a great addition to your decorating library!

Useful Surprises

The designs of Laurie Smith on Trading Spaces have always stood out to me as practical, inventive, and liveable. This book explores the intimate way she applied her thorough feel for livable design to a mid-century style in her own home. I was amazed at the creative ideas used to make this sometimes-sterile style completely friendly and inviting. The book clearly explaines the process she used to make her home recover from former bad renovations. She gives great advice for those who are renovating or redecorating. In my own home, however, her advice helped me to see more potential for my already decorated but not yet perfected rooms. I live in and love a very traditional French Country home, yet Laurie's process for her own home educated me on ways to bring mine into it's own. The book celebrates individuality, process, and finding your own inspiration. It's a read and re-read design book. Ali Dinkins

A must-have addition for your design book collection

Laurie's book is an excellent book for both inspiration and how-to's. Most design books are just pretty pictures (the photos here are indeed gorgeous) with little practical info OR they give you some practical info but overlook how to find your own style and have no good photos as examples. Laurie gives you both the beauty (photos) and the practical advice. She breaks down how to find your style, how to start each room and how to work with the existing style of a home into easy-to-follow steps even if your style is completely different from hers. I especially like how she showed the 'before' and 'after' photos of the renovations she did on her home and how, even more importantly, she explained WHY, from a design perspective, she made the changes. This is an excellent book for inspiration, how-to and practical advice and a definite must for your design book collection, regardless of your own personal style. She really delivers the goods!

Great Book! Cover-to-Cover Read!

I am an avid reader of all things involving interior design, however most of the books I buy end up on the coffee table or on the book shelf after I've skimmed through the first few chapters. Laurie's book is definitely the exception. She has come up with a great way to share her invaluable design concepts and ideas by using the renovation of her own home as an example. I love the way she takes you from room to room, explaining in depth how she and her husband changed an older, somewhat retro-modern home, back to it's glory after the previous owners had done some renovations that were not in keeping with the home's original architecture. Laurie really got me to thinking about how one should always look at the "bones" and style of the home when renovating or decorating. My home is only 3 years old and when my husband and I bought it, we knew we would not need to make any major structural changes to it, so my main mission has been to decorate the home in a way that compliments it's character and many architectural details. I have found a good resource in this book. When I was a big fan of Trading Spaces, Laurie was by far my favorite designer, so I absolutely had to get her first book. I am very glad I did!

Excellent Design Book

This book details the renovation and design process of Laurie Smith's current home. Though I am partial to her aesthetic (warm, mid-century style), I was ecsatic with the photographs and the narrative. The pictures are excellent -- they are beautiful and abundant (on nearly every page in the book) and there are photos of various angles for every room. But, best of all, I loved the narrative. I don't usually READ decorating and interior design books, but I read this book cover-to-cover. The narrative is warm and, most importantly, extremely informative and educational. Laurie Smith describes color, lighting, furniture, layout and so much more. She describes the basic rules of thumb and how she interpreted these rules to her own home decorating. She goes through the before-and-after for each room in her house and describes the process of renovation and design elements. Don't get me wrong, this book is not basic. It's thoughtful and extremely thorough -- I felt as though no stone was unturned! From the heighth and style of the kitchen bar stools (which can be seen from the opposite end of the house) to the various options she drew for her living room and why she chose one design over the other to the tweaks she made in her master bedroom and bathroom in order to update AND compliment the home's "bones," as well as her own style. I look forward to more titles by Laurie Smith. Highly recommended!