A Girl's Guide to Decorating

Decorating secrets, ideas, tips and knowledge abound in A Girl’s Guide to Decorating.

Written by internationally renowned interior designer and stylist, Abigail Ahern, this book offers a hands-on guide to all you need to know to decorate your home.

The book literally does cover everything, from choosing your style and planning your space, to creating a wow factor, using colour, adding texture and making the most of lighting.

One of the great points that Abigail makes is that creating a stylish home doesn’t necessarily mean spending a fortune. Yes, it can help to have money to splash out on unique home furnishings, but it’s by no means it’s essential and you can achieve a fresh, unique new look without breaking the bank.

Before launching into exploring ideas for decorating and transforming your home, the book begins with the basiscs - analysing the space you’ve got and planning what you’d like to do with it.  They’re both essential steps, but all too easily overlooked when you’re longing to get your paintbrush out and start changing your home!

Abigail explains why they’re important and how you can work out the best way of dealing with the space and light you’ve got in the various rooms of your home, even if they’re small and you seem short of space.

Glamour, texture, colour and light

The subsequent chapters each deal with creating glamour in your home, using colour, creating different forms of texture and how to use light effectively.

Between them, they each offer a lot of practical advice, expert knowledge and insight into what you can do to get great results. There are clear and highly illustrative photos throughout the book and this helps a lot with visualising and seeing what you can achieve.

With the various practical ideas, like how to put up shelving, how to make a stair runner, or putting together a flat-pack cabinet, there are clear step-by-step instructions, plus a shopping list of items you’ll need.

The specialist advice and knowledge is invaluable and you’ll learn some great decorating tricks, like different ways of displaying items (symmetrically, in themes, asymetrically and mixed up), different ways of arranging pictures (in grid formations, organic clusters or in lines) and the different effects that colours can have.

The book ends with a useful section dealing with the tools of the trade - the items you’ll need in order to decorate successfully and a basic guide to accomplishing certain techniques, like sanding, stripping, filling a hole or calculating how much paint you’ll need.

Overall, it’s a great book that’s packed to the brim with informative advice, knowledge and tips, all of which can be taken away and applied to your own home decorating.

If you’re keen to create your own unique space, but aren’t sure where to start, or wish you could afford the advice of an interior designer, then The Girl’s Guide to Decorating is the book for you!

The Girl’s Guide to Decorating by Abigail Ahern, published by Quadrille, RRP £16.99

Find out more about Abigail Ahern’s design tastes on her blog.