Ari Seth Cohen loves older women and it shows. “Ever since I can remember,” he writes, “I have been captivated by amazing older women. My Grandma, Bluma, was my best friend.”

Cohen is a blogger who focuses on the fabulous street style of the women of New York in his blog called Advanced Style. Now, he has a new book by the same name to showcase these fabulous people.

Some are shamelessly flamboyant with flaming red hair and fluttery long lashes. They sport outrageous hats, jewelry and oversized glasses. They don’t just wear purple, but also embrace orange, chartreuse, hot pink and fire-engine red.

Others are studies of classic elegance: tweed jacket over camel cashmere sweater, gloves, pearls and cloche hats.

What shines through with them all is the utter confidence they have with their own appearance. In a culture where young women often seem tortured by self doubt, it is thrilling to encounter those who are so thoroughly comfortable in their own skin.

Fashion is an art form and it’s great fun to see people committed to decorating themselves with élan. They make me want to try harder.

If you think that fashion and style are properties of the young and beautiful, Cohen will make you think again.

- Jane

Janet’s two cents:

While this book is definitely about style, I’m really drawn to the portraiture feel of it. Faves for humor are the women with twinkling eyes and gleeful smiles on pages 78 and 79. For poise, see the charming ladies on pages 100 and 219. Just love them.

Today's blog comes from Janet Millett, Central Library staff:

When we need help with home decorating, a lot of us reach for books with titles like Cheap Chic, Dime Store Decorating or Junk Beautiful. Creating a fabulous space on a shoestring can be creative and fun. There are times, however, when it can also be fun to glimpse the rarified lives of those who decorate with an unlimited budget and an in-demand designer.

Martyn Lawrence Bullard is such a designer and his clients are a variety of well-moneyed celebrities. Bullard discovered at an early age that he had an affinity for design. By the age of 16, he ran a profitable little antiques business with a dedicated following of dealers and collectors.

Despite his talent in this area, he still made his way to Hollywood with aspirations of becoming an actor. However, his passion for decorating and design resurfaced and won over those who visited his space.

Through word of mouth he became a very popular designer. As his celebrity clientele grew, he soon found himself jetting around the world, collecting the perfect textiles and artworks with an unerring sense of style and cultivated eye. And, as life can ironically work out, he now is the host of the television show, Million Dollar Decorators.

Being a confidant and a friend to celebrities such as Elton John, Ellen Pompeo and Cher, Bullard has insight into their characters and lifestyles. This he confides in the introduction of each chapter. You then lose yourself in the sumptuous photos with a greater understanding of how and why they came to be.

He can also be very discreet. In the October 2011 issue of In Style magazine, he was asked about his more eccentric décor requests. He replied, “One of the maddest things I was asked to do was to apply gold leaf to the interior of a garage! I actually declined, thinking it would ruin my reputation.” No name was disclosed.

Love of colour and design is universal. And although these spaces are decorated with budgets most of us can only dream about, you can still see how his inspirations might just work in your own humble abode.

-Jan Millett

A few months back, we added a new title to our collection called Fresh American Spaces by Annie Selke. If you are yearning for a splash of colour to brighten winter-weary interiors, this book will give you a fix.

Selke is a product designer whose popular home furnishings frequently decorate the pages of shelter magazines such as House Beautiful and Better Homes & Gardens. She identifies five distinct design/lifestyle perspectives that she uses to guide her design.

The first one, which she labels Everyday Exuberance, is characterized by vibrant colour. I am captivated by a room inspired by an exotic rug. Here, walls are painted lilac and furniture is upholstered in pink and burnt orange. Sweet colours of the same intensity are balanced by earth tones. The result is a knock-out.

Exciting colour is also a theme in her Cultured Eclectic outlook where colour appears in ethnic textiles, such as Afghani Suzani embroidery and Indonesian batiks. Happy Preppy borrows crayon-box colours to cheer up the rooms.

If you prefer to colour your world with subtlety, she shows the way with Nuanced Neutral and Refined Romantic. She advocates a restrained approach to romantic style that “is about incorporating beauty, grace, and elegance into a space without a heavy hand”.

I like this book a lot. Out in the design world, there is a swirling sea of ideas; if you subscribe to too many of them, your interior landscape becomes chaotic. Selke has the ability to sift through the ocean, distill ideas that work together and help the reader learn from her experience.

For those of you who like to make lists of ways to improve yourself* in the New Year, here is the perfect book.

101 Things I hate about your house, by James Swan, is a delightfully opinionated view of how your home décor is sliding off the rails and all the ways he would fix it. It’s a book that will have you yelling, “YES!” in agreement one minute and screaming, “Are you crazy?” the next.

Here are two things my colleague, Kate Kasinski, loved and hated.

Loved: Swan sneers at a bathroom with a dish full of mucky soap.

“YES!” says Kate who can’t imagine anyone with a family having anything but a soap pump.

Hated: Swan wants you to cover your bedroom floors with the thickest, most luxurious carpet you can find.

“Are you crazy?” asks Kate who knows that bedding produces an excessive amount of dust, hair from pillows and other unmentionables. Whoa, think of the dust mites.

I’m with Kate on both counts and we’re thinking that he probably doesn’t do his own cleaning.

I really enjoyed his riff on open kitchens which I agree are overrated. Some cooking styles benefit from a discreet wall between the grease and clutter and the guests. And some of us can no longer perform simple cooking tasks and carry on a conversation.

You know, like walking and chewing gum.

*I have attained such a level of perfection (AKA common-sense grip of reality) that I would never dream of doing this.

My favourite decorating books always include both lively, intriguing rooms and good stories about the people who live inside them. I’ve just added a new one to my list: Undecorate: The No-Rules Approach to Interior Design (Clarkson Potter, 2011) by Christiane Lemieux.

Lemieux is a founder and creative director of a home décor and children’s furniture company who also contributes to design blogs Apartment Therapy and Design*Sponge. She is inspired by the vibrant design of talented amateurs that is burgeoning on the internet.

“The most stylish people these days understand this fundamental of good living: it’s always evolving,” she writes. “Great style isn’t necessarily a finished product so much as an ongoing process.” Just so, good design is not static, but must adapt to changing circumstances.

Rather than gorgeous perfection, Lemieux champions relaxed design that facilitates happy living. All the homes in the book ooze pizzazz and the rumpled comfort of real life within. I love to learn how creative people design their homes to suit quirky tastes and personalities.

“I wanted to work with what we have rather than fight against it,” says Erica Tanov, a fashion designer whose funky Berkeley home is among the 20 places profiled. Here, second-hand furniture mixes with worn rugs, art, books, pets and projects. It’s one of those places that wears imperfection like a badge of honour and is all the more beguiling as a result.

Check it out. Enjoy the rooms and the stories. Embrace the process.

This week I'm taking a look at two new books from popular bloggers. They are getting rave reviews in (other) blogs and shelter magazines.

DECORATE comes from Holly Becker, the founder of the popular Decor8 blog and is co-authored by veteran design writer Joanna Copestick. It reveals what the pros have to offer, namely, a passion for design and some heavy-duty thinking about every little aspect of it.

This is not a book for minimalists. For the most part, what you find here are design professionals like Jonathan Adler who embrace colour and eclecticism with exuberant abandon. Every now and again there is restraint. But when a designer loves white, it is endorsed with poetic enthusiasm.

I like the way the book is structured, moving from the general to the specific, from the philosophy to the practice.

The first section deals with space in general: using space, flexible spaces, linking spaces. This is followed by chapters on style. Next come room-by-room analysis and, finally, all the details.

The focus of the book is the ideas behind the design and the sources of inspiration whether a painting, a piece of vintage furniture or a favourite colour. They demonstrate the use of mood boards – tools that help you to see the links between your favourite ideas and things to develop a coherent approach. You know how you rip a pic from a magazine (please, not a library magazine!) and tuck it in your pocket because you want a paint colour exactly like the one on this purse/ car/ dresser? Mood boards are collages of such sources. Very Martha-Stewart organized.

Throughout the book, floor plans allow you to see how the room views relate to each other and how the room functions.

If you enjoy this book, check out some of the other titles in the collection by Joanna Copestick. In Vital Color:Color themes for Every Room (with an ironically drab cover) you will find fab rooms and - yes - mood boards that develop an idea.

Another older favourite is The Family Home: Relaxed, informal living for all ages. We are down to one, well-travelled copy in the Village Square branch. Though published in 1998, it still has a lot to offer anyone wanting to spruce up an active family home.

Trends are fun and good; so are ideas that endure.

Come back Friday for UNDECORATE.