Patina Style

I've been meaning to write about this book for a while now.  When I first got it in the mail, I pretty much devoured every page & picture.  Patina Style is written by my good friends, Brooke & Steve Giannetti, and is one of the most beautiful, insightful, honest design books I've ever read. 

Patina Style is all about Brooke & Steve's unique design & lifestyle philosophy.  It's about celebrating the imperfect, appreciating the marks that time & age leave on your home & on your things, and juxtaposing masculine & feminine, curvy with straight.  Their look is full of soft muted colors that just sort of surround you rather than call attention to themselves. 

I first discovered Brooke's blog, Velvet & Linen, around the same time I started blogging & reading blogs.  I was seriously drooly over it & all of their work.  Everything the Giannaetti's do is just beautiful & has a soulful quality.  Brooke is a designer and Steve is a renowned architect & together they own Giannetti Home, a shop in LA.  We visited them & their kids last Winter at their home & it is one of the warmest, most personal & "real" feeling homes I've ever visited.  (Of course they are too!  Leila & Nick were so good to Christian and put up with him tirelessly chasing them around with toy cars. ;) ;)  But almost everything I touched just had a solidarity & a history about it. 

In this day & age, it's sometimes hard to get people to see that imperfect is beautiful.  (Read about creating "imperfect" spaces here.)  So many people out there want shiny & new and don't understand how beautiful pieces with history & patina are.  One of the first things I did when I got the book was show it to my dad.  If you've been reading my blog for a while, you might remember that we butt heads design-wise a LOT.  We're almost finished restoring my grandparents' old cottage and it's been a tug-of-war the entire time.  He watches a lot of HGTV and sees them constantly adding granite countertops, buying new furniture, etc.  and is constantly wanting to go there.  Showing him Patina Style was a breakthrough for us.  He started to get that there is beauty in the imperfect, that floors don't have to be shiny & new, and sratches & dings are okay.  (He is always telling me to get out a table cloth so we won't scratch the kitcen table- gah!)  But after looking through Patina Style with me, I got no more nagging for table cloths on the table and I think it made him a bit more open-minded about what we can & can't do to the house. 

{I love their aged natural pine floors}

Brooke & Steve definitely think outside of the box & love repurposing old things into new ones. One of my favorite examples of this is the dining room light fixture made out of an old industrial metal fram lined with linen:

The book is basically a manual on how to create the Patina Style look & incorporate it into your own home, making it personal.  It's full of real details and specific sources for things like paint, materials, shops and furnishings.  One of the things that has always struck me about Brooke is how willingly she shares information & how she genuinely wants to help others love their homes.  She's been a great friend to me & constantly inspires.

Congratulations to Brooke & Steve on a perfect (-ly imperfect! ;) book.  Love yas!!

To order the book, go here 

If you'd like help creating a home you absolutely love, contact me about our design services.