The Vintage Modern Home: Making Design Sense Out of Your Havisham Home

How many times have you found yourself in bed at night, happily reading a glossy shelter magazine, only to raise your eyes and glance around your own bedroom - and sigh with resignation. Why don't our own rooms look like the ones in the magazines?

Most of us live with possessions accumulated over the course of a lifetime - and not just our own. Our families and friends pass on items from the past, until our homes become a repository of mementoes and tchotchkes, souvenirs and antiques. Of course, you still want that stack of A&F catalogs, as well as those bronze Fu dogs from your rich uncle's trip to pre-Nixon China. But how to make design sense out of the mish-mash of objets from your grandmother's estate and the flea market finds from 26th Street?

The recent publication of Katherine Sorrell's "The Vintage Modern Home" addresses these design quandaries, while offering a surfeit of practical solutions. Sorrell is a former Associate Editor of Homes & Gardens magazine, as well as the author of numerous books, including "The Art of Display" (2002), "At Home with Pattern" (2006), and "Fabric Inspirations" (2008). A frequent contributor to leading magazines and newspapers, Sorrell has seen it all - and worked wonders with the glut of junk presented in front of her.

"The Vintage Modern Home" is loaded with 310 color illustrations, many of them full pages - because, let's face it, this is a visual art. You can look into these rooms and see parallels to your own - and immediately get a sense of which possessions of yours you need to donate and which to keep. Sorrell recommends assessing what you have and then considering your own sense of style. She instructs you on how to work with color, pattern, and texture, as well as size and scale. Small rooms, large rooms - Sorrell's got the answers, including planning a scheme and a sample board.

Sorrell's chapter on "Basics" is a primer on second-hand style, free furnishings, and do-it-yourself projects and crafty chic, along with instructions on what to sell, give, and recycle. Her chapter on "Essentials" covers everything from fabric and lighting to flooring and window treatments, with sections on technology and accessories.

What Sorrell is arguing for in these pages is that it's possible for us to enjoy the modern world's technological advances while surrounded with some of the best design treasures of the past decades. It's not necessarily a new stance, and yet the cumulative effect of the photographs and Sorrell's prose is to make us better appreciate homes that successfully celebrate the past while embracing the future.

In short, while we all want to be comfortable, we don't want to become Miss Havisham - and Sorrell shows us how to make order out of our heirlooms.

Sorrell's chapter on "Case Studies" breaks down the home into the various rooms - and to look at the photographs and to listen to her persuasive prose will have you wandering off to the nearest thrift shop and flea market or estate sale in a matter of minutes.

For as much as anything else in "The Vintage Modern Home", Sorrell is reminding us that home is where the heart is - and we all want to be happy.

PRICE: $39.95 / 192 pages / hardcover
LINK: The Vintage Modern Home