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?