Breaking the Rules

In this exuberantly designed book, network morning show regular Ferer shows a range of new perspectives on such design considerations as color, texture, light, furniture, and space. "Breaking the Rules" celebrates a fresh, liberating, and surprisingly practical new revolution in home decor. Photos.

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The old rules of decorating are dead, says style maker and TV personality Christy Ferer. Whether we've wanted to or not, we've staged a revolution -- a revolution in taste and in the way we live. In today's homes, anything goes, and we're all the happier for it. In this exuberant and groundbreaking book, we discover what works and what happens to the way we live when all the rules are broken. Today we find that the dining room, once a place of fine linens and formal dinner parties, has become an office, a rec room, a space families live in every day. It's still beautiful, but who cares if the chairs match? Life has changed and, like everything else, the old rules sometimes just don't make sense. This revolution in taste has opened the door to a million new possibilities. But where do we start? In "Breaking the Rules," style whiz Christy Ferer shakes up the old assumptions and provides us with fabulous tips about: COLOR -- Common wisdom tells us to stick to neutrals for major areas and let brighter colors serve as accents, but Ferer shows us how green, blue, and even pink work as the new neutrals. PATTERN -- Plaids with florals, checks with stripes? Heresy! Not so, says Ferer, who proclaims that patterns mix well when their colors are the same intensity. SCALE -- We've all heard that in a small room we should keep the furniture small. But here, we see that oversize pieces can expand our perception of space. FUNCTION -- The dining room for dining, the library for reading, the maid's room for the maid...whose house is that? Every space serves multiple functions today, Ferer points out. If a dining room unfolds its cabinets to become a home office/media room, somuch the better. FURNITURE -- The bedroom suite and the matching Colonial living room are things of the past. Today, nothing needs to match -- and it's more interesting if it doesn't. An eighteenth-century sofa is only enhanced next to a 1960s coffee table. This inspiring book illuminates these and other ideas with more than 140 extraordinary color photographs that take us into the living quarters of some exceptionally creative people, among them Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Bette Midler, Bill Blass, and Cynthia Rowley. In "Breaking the Rules," Christy Ferer brings together fabulous ideas and a feast of dazzling photos as she walks us through the brave new world we've made for ourselves -- and shows us how much fun a revolution can be.