Animal House Style by Julia Szabo
Designing a Home to Share With Your Pets
This coffee table/gift book offers stylish solutions for creating an animal-friendly home.
Animal House Style is a book for animal lovers who want to live in a stylish home with their pets. The pictures and suggestions show ways to keep your pet's accoutrements in full view without having a sloppy, hairy, messy, smelly home. So go ahead and let the dog on the sofa, buy a bed for every creature in the house and still look smart no matter how many critters you keep.
Dog Digs
Author Julia Szabo writes several pet columns for national publications and hosts a pet television show. She is also an animal lover and rescue worker, and her book addresses many facets of living with pets. While some pet owners may scoff at the idea of pets having fancy digs, an important aspect of rescue work is served by suggesting ways to design a home with pets in mind: many pets are returned to shelters because of simple annoyances a new owner didn't know how to resolve.
Rescue Animals
Unfortunately, shelter animals are often adopted on a whim. Once the happy dog or cat is brought home, the new owner suddenly has a lot of issues they hadn't prepared for, and need pretty fast solutions. Sometimes it is just one last problem that becomes a deal breaker, and that rescued animal is once again caged in a crowded shelter. This is certainly not a training book (something every pet owner needs), but lots of the comforts-of-home issues are resolved stylishly, making a pet owner proud to share a home with animals.
Practical Interior Design
This book serves as an interior design guide offering practical suggestions for choosing furniture for both the pet and its owner, as well as tips on cleaning, painting and upholstery. It's packed with beautiful pictures of pets in the stylish surroundings Ms. Szabo suggests, which is great inspiration for replacing a tattered blanket with a new doggie bed. Your eye will be trained towards color schemes on your next pet shopping trip, making sure Max's interiors match yours.
Great Coffee Table or Gift Book
Remember that this book is about aesthetics rather than the specifics of living with pets, such as behavioral issues, feeding, training and managing a home with more than one animal. But if pets are part of your household, it's worth considering them when making design decisions. That way, you'll have both a comfortable and stylish home. Also makes a great gift book to pet lovers on your shopping list.
Author: Julia SzaboPublisher: Bulfinch, April 5, 2005
Pages: 176
Price: $8.99
ISBN: 978-0821257111
