It's Getting Personal... My book in the Boston Globe, the New York Times + more!

Just... wow. This week has brought so much press and love my way, and my book Your Home, Your Style isn't even in stores yet.

It landed in the New York Times, in a roundup of design titles by Jeremy Allen:

"'Your Home, Your Style: How to Find Your Look & Create Rooms You Love' offers to help you discover your 'design disposition'... The book’s second half suggests ways to transform your home accordingly. It’s an easily digestible guide that may turn the pain points of renovation into creative epiphanies."

Today it's in a piece by Marni Katz in the  Boston Globe:

"Donna Garlough wants you to find the look you love...[H]er new book, 'Your Home Your Style: How to Find Your Look & Create Rooms You Love'... lays out all you need to transform your space into a place that reflects your personal style, even if you didn’t know you had any."

And a piece I penned for MindBodyGreen not only ran, but was one of their most-read pieces that day. Here's a snippet:

"It occurred to me one day, as I pinned yet another DIY art project that I’d never actually complete, that this profusion of inspiration wasn’t getting me any closer to my dream home... The problem? Most of what was out there was one-size-fits-all: Use this type of bed in this type of space. Follow this formula for combining colors. Describe your look as X, Y, or Z.

Even how-to articles with options for high budgets versus low ones seemed to be asking the wrong question. I thought what if instead of asking what do you like, we asked what are you like?"

More than anything, what this tells me is that folks are legitimately interested in creating spaces that aren't just beautiful, but that feel like them. A roundup of spring design books, including Your Home, Your Style, that ran in Publisher’s Weekly this month suggests this is part of a much larger shift:

“Authenticity. This of-the-moment buzzword recurs throughout 2018 home and garden titles and in publishers’ descriptions of what their readers are seeking. How can readers achieve authenticity at home? By eschewing prescriptive how-to sand figuring out who they are, what they love, and how it translates into their style—and lifestyle.”

I’m thinking of diving into this topic a bit at upcoming book signings and discussions, but I’m curious: Does it seem to you like this shift is occurring? Are there other topics about home, and our relationship to it, that you’d rather have a conversation about instead? I’d love to hear your ideas, either in the comments section below or over on Instagram.  Tell me what you think!

Your Home, Your Style... and My Book!

It’s been 13 months since I announced my book on this blog, two years since I got the publishing deal, and almost three years since I first got the bug to write a book at all. It’s been both an exhilarating and excruciating process.

Exhilarating: Spending countless hours with interior and lifestyle photographer Joyelle West, who has become not only my go-to collaborator on beautiful imagery, but also a dear friend during this long process.

Also exhilarating: Working with friends, friends-of-friends, and colleagues to capture their spaces and make them shine in print. What’s unique about Your Home, Your Style is that none of the featured rooms was put together by a professional interior designer. For the photo shoots, I added a few choice props and plants and rearranged items a bit, but for the most part, it was about celebrating the homeowners’ individual styles and showing the fun they’ve had decorating. The accompanying text then breaks it all down into actionable tips and ideas that anyone can adopt. It was important to me to show that personal and “imperfect” can be utterly charming and welcoming, and it was unbelievably fun.

Excruciating: Having to keep everything under wraps for this long. But I’m happy to share an update... The book is now at the printer! Holy cow. And the cover design, which I agonized over, is finally here:

Photo credit: Joyelle West; cover design by Laura Palese

I’m in love. The pattern, which I found on a pillow on Joss & Main, will have a textured, faux-cloth finish and will wrap around the spine and across the back cover. It echoes the colors in my parlor (the room featured on the front cover, a space which I’ve already changed—ha). More important, it’s a pattern that I could see working on coffee tables of all styles, from traditional to rustic to shabby-girly to beachy.

Over the next few months, I’ll share some outtakes from the shoots and post updates on fun stuff like advance press, book launch events, giveaways, and more. In the meantime, you can head over to Amazon and pre-order a copy of Your Home, Your Style now.

Happy decorating! XX

Mock-Up to Makeover: How Four Celeb Spaces Came to Life

You know that phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none”? Lately that feels like my motto. I’ve been jumping between work, my upcoming book, and of course my family, and it seems like none of it is getting enough attention. The good thing is, everything I’ve been doing has been heaps of fun.

This summer and early fall, my plate was stacked particularly high with makeover projects. I was able to design a great living room and office for the author and personality Katherine Schwarzenegger (yes, Arnold and Maria’s daughter), a backyard space for Pretty Little Liars star Shay Mitchell, and a bedroom and nursery for entrepreneur and TV star Whitney Port.

One challenging aspect of these projects is working with the homeowner from a distance and not being able to see the spaces in real life before I select the products. Fortunately, technology is there to help bridge the gaps: I get measurements of the space and often create 3D rendering of the rooms using software such as RoomSketcher, which is a stripped-down version of the advanced CAD software a lot of interior designers use. We also communicate via phone and email—so, so many emails!

But the biggest aid is my beloved room mock-ups, a concept I dedicate a lot of space to in my book, Your Home, Your Style. The benefits of a digital mock-up are twofold:

1. They help me visualize how products will look together in real life and see whether the space looks balanced.

2. They let my collaborators in on the design plan so they can flag anything that doesn't work and suggest changes.

Here’s a mock-up of the backyard entertaining setup I put together last year for Julianne Hough:

Here it is in final photos:

Photo credit: Justin Coit for Joss & Main

Photo credit: Justin Coit for Joss & Main

Photo credit: Justin Coit for Joss & Main

Here’s the mock-up of Katherine Schwarzenegger's living room:

And here’s the space finished:

Photo credit: Lu Tapp for Joss & Main

Photo credit: Lu Tapp for Joss & Main

I worked on actress Shay Mitchell’s outdoor space with my colleague Emily Arnow for AllModern:

And the pics turned out great:

Photo credit: Lu Tapp for AllModern

Photo credit: Lu Tapp for AllModern

Photo credit: Lu Tapp for AllModern

Whitney Port’s nursery project with Joss & Main was SO MUCH FUN. We tinkered a lot and came up with this:

It turned out even better in real life. We added wallpaper at the last minute:

Photo credit: Nicole Gerulat for Joss & Main

Photo credit: Nicole Gerulat for Joss & Main

Have you ever created a mockup like this? Do you have any other favorite ways to document and organize your decorating projects?

Featured! A Trio of Bedroom Makeovers

Pillows, headboards, nightstands… Lately it seems like all I’ve been looking at is bedrooms. Lucky for me, the spaces—and homeowners—I’ve had the chance to work with in the last two months have been nothing short of dreamy, and the love for the resulting rooms has been pouring in from far and wide.

First up: In the weeks before Christmas, I worked on behalf of Joss & Main to design master bedrooms for two incredible women, Olympic gymnasts and friends Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin. Nastia was moving into a brand-new home near Boston with her fiance, Matt, and needed a soup-to-nuts design. Shawn, meanwhile needed help adding a layer of personality and coziness the relatively bare-bones space she shared with her husband, Andrew, in Nashville. Both women travel almost nonstop, so they were eager to create welcoming retreats where they could go to relax and recharge.

Funny enough, both Nastia and Shawn selected the same bed, a grand yet rustic sleigh style, so part of the challenge was fine-tuning each bedroom design so it felt distinctly like either Shawn or Nastia. I worked with each of the women to create mockups that we could tinker with together, swapping out products until we were both happy with the look.

Shawn’s mockup took on a slightly more feminine, farmhouse feel, with some linen and ticking stripe and different finishes on the bed and nightstands...

...and here’s how it turned out.

Images credit Nicole Gerulat for Joss & Main

Nastia’s bedroom mockup went in more of a rustic-glam direction, with a crystal orb chandelier and fur throw...

...and here’s the finished look.

Images credit Nicole Gerulat for Joss & Main

The following month, I worked on my first makeover on behalf of Wayfair Canada, a sister brand to Joss & Main. Angela Price, a Montreal-based blogger and star of the reality show Hockey Wives, wanted a glamorous new look for her bedroom. This one was a thrill to design, as Angela was really into the idea of going moody and dramatic. When I pointed out that a lot of her inspiration images had dark walls, I suggested painting the walls a near-black shade, Domino by Sherwin-Williams, and she was 100% game. (How amazing is it when someone just gives you their total trust? I was giddy.)  Here’s the mockup we created together…

…And here’s the finished room.

All images credit Marie-Lyne Quirion for Wayfair Canada

I’ve been overwhelmed by the great coverage these bedroom makeovers have gotten, including three features on People.com and a nod on the Montreal blog MTL, as well as Shawn, Nastia, and Angela's own blogs.

Do any of these bedrooms speak to your style? If so, which would you choose? Leave a comment below!

Featured: Inspiring Women Series on Cloud & Day

Fact: In my line of work—writing, styling, editing—I get to work with some pretty incredible women. One superstar I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with a ton in the last 12 months is photographer Joyelle West, whose work has been featured by on Homepolish, Curbed.com, and on the cover of the Boston Globe Magazine. She’s done travel photography and weddings, which is how we met (I was the editor of Boston Weddings magazine and a contributor to New England Travel for a few years), but these days she's almost entirely focused on interiors. Joyelle is the sole photographer for my upcoming book, which means we spend a lot of time crouched behind a lens together.

Image credit: Joyelle West

Image credit: Joyelle West

Joyelle recently decided to start a series called “Inspiring Women” on her blog, Cloud and Day, and for the first installment, she asked me to answer a few questions about my work in this creative field. I was thrilled to oblige. A few nuggets I shared:

On staying inspired:

I’m lucky to get to visit other cities when collaborating with celebrities and bloggers on decor projects …. Going to the big trade shows for my industry, like High Point Market in North Carolina, always fills me with ideas, too. And when I’m traveling, I make a point to visit local restaurants and decor shops and take in aesthetic experiences that are different from what I see every day.

On shooting for my book:

[A]ll of the homes we photographed were styled by the homeowner and/or me; not a single one was put together by a trained interior designer, so they were living, breathing examples of what I’m encouraging readers to do. I’m urging people to embrace their innate design leanings, start putting things together using tips and tricks I’ve learned over time, and to stop treating decorating as this precious, pretentious thing. Anyone can do it, and it’s such an amazing way to express yourself.

Head over to Joyelle’s blog, cloudandday.com, to read the complete feature and to check out her amazing portfolio of interior photography. And if you have any other questions about my job, my weird and circuitous career path, or my book, shoot 'em over via the comment section!