Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic by Rachel Ashwell 1998, Hardcover: items on eBay.com

Publisher's Note
"The" guide to discovering beautiful treasures on a budget from the acclaimed creator of the Shabby Chic style and line of home furnishings. 200 color photos & 50 color illustrations.

It helps the healthiness both of body and soul to live among beautiful things. --designer William Morris, 1882 Shabby Chic--the rich, inviting, practical, time-worn style created by one of America's top designers, Rachel Ashwell, is a style of living that reflects the grace and simplicity of another time.Now you can do more than just dream of living in a Shabby Chic home. You can create one yourself. With invaluable treasure hunting advice and tips for essential materials, furniture, objects, and decorations, you can live a life of simple, but rich, beauty. With her practiced eye Rachel takes you on a tour of flea markets, antique malls, and a variety of secondhand sales--estate, tag, yard, church, garage--to demonstrate how, with a little taste, imagination, work, and ingenuity, you can turn trinkets from the past into treasures for today. As Rachel sifts through the discarded, the crumbling, the shabby, she takes you step by step through her personal process, sharing how you, too, can spot a fabulous buy, repair and alter it, and by following her guideline words--comfort, function, and beauty--develop your own distinctive, original look that is down-to-earth yet truly exquisite. Following her sensible advice you an exchange the anonymity of mass-produced furniture and home accessories for unique, inviting surroundings for a fraction of the cost and decorate comfortable, livable rooms in which family heirlooms blend with flea-market finds and the new combines gracefully with the well worn. Lavishly illustrated with lovely and informative photographs and drawings, Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic Treasure Hunting & Decorating Guideshows you how to have the home you've always dreamed of, a place where children's dinners are served on mix-and-match antique plates at a table covered with lace from a renovated curtain set with unironed linen napkins. A space where fresh flowers stand in antique jugs, complementing comfortable furniture covered in crisp white denim that is enhanced with each laundering. For Rachel, Shabby Chic is not just style. It is a way of living. With her trademark warmth and charm she reveals how she sleeps on embroidered antique linen and dresses in cashmeres and bias-cut silk dresses discovered in vintage clothing shops and flea markets. Throughout, she teaches you how to recognize and appreciate beauty in unlikely and often overlooked places, as well as how to define and refine your individual taste. Worn damask, relaxed velvets, tea-stained florals, washed-out cotton prints, tattered lace, monogrammed linen...Comforting colors: celadon, mint, and seafoam greens; dusty rose; ivories, creams, and faded grays; a touch of pale sky blue; crisp, clean white...Faded granduer: the incomplete, the neglected, the crumbling, the cracked, the mismatched, the wrinkled...Ruffles, gathers, tucks; scuffs, chips, imperfections; worn moldings, tired elegance, peeling paint...An appreciation of vintage and history...This is Shabby Chic

Industry Reviews
"[L]eads us through the basics of creating the style by visiting flea markets, swathing our own upholstery in white slipcovers, and layering the linens."
Philadelphia Inquirer - Susan Caba (07/21/1996)

"[P]romotes the rumpled, déshabille style (swiped from English grandmothers) as its own. The author, Rachel Ashwell, founded the four Shabby Chic stores in America that sell the look--and the book."
New York Times - Christopher Mason (11/21/1996)

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