Urban Country Style - Hardcover

Explains how to integrate vintage and modern furnishings with a crisp, clean approach to home decorating and unexpected touches to create an eclectic style that emphasizes the principles of function, unexpected, simple, integrated, old, and new.

A VINTAGE TABLE PAIRED WITH CONTEMPORARY METAL CHAIRS, French doors hung on overhead tracks like barn doors, traditional wood cabinets alongside open steel shelves-this is urban-country style. For those drawn to both weathered country furnishings and sleek stainless appliances, this new genre of easy elegance celebrates the contrast between old and new, traditional and modern, chic sophistication and cozy comfort.
Urban-Country Style captures the contrast between big-city style and small-town charm and applies it to interiors and exteriors. Finally, here is a book that goes beyond the "eclectic mix" and defines an emerging style by truly demonstrating how to achieve not only a stylish home, but a more functional one as well. Urban-Country Style provides a six-element guideline: F.U.S.I.O.N., or Functional, Unexpected, Simple, Integrated, Old, and New. The six elements apply to nearly any home project and provide a unifying design philosophy for everyone from suburban families to urban twenty something's, young couples to empty nesters.
With an emphasis on sensible style and creative combinations, this book shows you how to assess your own living space, make better design choices, and capture the essence of urban-country style on your own.
Elizabeth Betts Hickman is a national award-winning journalist who has written about design and residential architecture for over a decade and has worked as a stylist on numerous photo shoots for national magazines. Hickman believes that urban-country style represents a flexible approach to design that can work for almost anyone who wants to celebrate everyday living.
California native Nancy Gent planned and completed the full renovation (and urban-countrifying!) of her family's circa 1930 stone cottage in Nashville, and has embraced the opportunity to blend commercial and residential design concepts into workable spaces for various offices and residences. A full-time manager at the Creative Artists Agency, Gent understands the realities of busy families and the design challenges of living with children and animals, and emphasizes these practical considerations in her design work and in Urban-Country Style.