Pottery Barn Workspaces

love the book, love the images, love that it got to my house on time!

If you love Pottery Barn, you'll love this book. In thinking how to organize one's workspace, this resource will give you ideas and tidbits from which to work. Touching on everything from your personal style, the space itself, lighting, furnishings, organizing, storage, and accessories, there is something for everyone in this book. Want to display something and not sure how? This book brings the reader lessons from a painter's studio, along with the sketch of a layout on how to make it all work, suggestions for a small workspace, and a home office gallery. Tidbits like how to personalize a bulletin board and how to display collections give great advice and strong visuals. Copy it for your own or use it as a jumping off point for your own creativity and ideas. Good resource to get you thinking, "How can I make this work for my own space?" The resources section lists "how to create" for each room shown in the book. The glossary is a bonus, as well, to help define some art terms that would elude the casual designer. Great resource, as well, to help the reader breathe new life into items already in the house. Got terracotta pots lying around? The Garden Work Room section will inspire. Got a folding carpenter's ruler? Look at How to Make Storage Unique. How about a straw holder or chrome breadbox? Kitchen Office Classics offers storage solutions that have nothing to do with food. Pick up this book as a redesigning resource or as a chance to get your own creativite mind going.

This is a great book. I love all the pottery barn style series. This one isn't as good as PB Living Rooms or PB Bedrooms, but its great to leaf through for ideas. Also check out Martha Stewart's Good Things for Organizing. I bought this book at Home Depot and it's the best reference I've found.

This book uses many of the retail stores' and catalog's current and (unfortunately) discontinued products. If you have often looked through the catalog or the store and thought you wanted your office to look like it does in the book, there are inspiring ideas here. For example, the designers show us new uses for old items (candy jars used to store binder clips, for example). The downside of the book(s) is(are) that some of the items featured are older Pottery Barn items that are now discontinued. Perhaps you can find some on eBay, but some are several years old and probably can't be found. However, it still gives the reader new ideas. The reviewer who said that it is all "junky looking old things" may not appreciate Pottery Barn's sense of whimsy and incorporating new with old. This book does plenty of that. The one gripe I have with the book (any decorating book) is that it appears that computers, monitors, and phones do not have wires. It's very easy to arrange these staged offices and never have to plug in the cables and power cords. This book therefore makes it look a little easier than it really is.