Home, for the holidays and beyond

REVIEWS BY DEANNA LARSON

From HGTV and Discovery Channel to Country Living and Elle Décor, there's plenty of advice about the home floating around. But the following books offer something a little different, whether shortcuts to expert cleaning, a way to make your home your emotional castle, or cheap and clever ideas for entertaining.

The fresh smell of line-dried laundry practically leaps off the pages of Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook. In this massive guide—dressed in an easy-to-clean plastic dust jacket—Stewart combines the efficient techniques learned at her mother's knee with up-to-date information gathered by her formidable lifestyle team for maintaining every room of the home. She starts with step-by-step explanations of basic cleaning tasks (there are ways and then there are better ways), followed by room-by-room and periodic home maintenance tasks and shortcuts (clean when dirt is fresh, straighten as you go), helpful for those who didn't learn by family modeling. Practically everything else about the home is covered, too: buying a mattress, storing wine, organizing a tool shed, preserving digital photos, emergency preparedness and moving house. While the book often reeks of Stewart's "iron the sheets" perfectionism and fetishistic obsessions (most people can select a light bulb and wash a blanket without a page of instruction), it still makes an excellent one-stop-shop for cleaning up a messy act.


Let your spirit show

If home advice is as ubiquitous as cheap throw pillows, why aren't our houses less cluttered and more reflective of our best selves? Television host and interior decorator Moll Anderson has some theories, presented as a fascinating décor throw down in Change Your Home, Change Your Life. Anderson, guest designer on "Southern Home by Design," "Look for Less: Home" and "Two Minutes of Style," presents the usual ideas about color and accessories and room arrangement, but asks the stuck amateur decorator to explore the emotional excuses for not picking up the paintbrush, from waiting for the kids to grow up or the raise to come through, to waiting for the ideal house to drop in your lap. Peppered among her fairly pedestrian decorating advice and projects for rental apartments, starter homes and bachelor pads using inexpensive "must haves"—paint, light, fabric, music and flowers—are insightful short questionnaires that reveal deepest desires for home. "If you could pull any item from your closet and cover your couch in it," Anderson asks, "what would it be?" She acts as a room-by-room psychologist, encouraging readers to assign a song to each to capture its mood, to name three places you'd like to live other than your present abode, and to identify a space that's your own "scary movie," among many other seeking questions that refine and define décor in a new way.


Time to celebrate

A bible in the frugal but fabulous periodicals category, Real Simple magazine and its associated books are packed with arty still lifes and easy and adaptable templates for parties that whisper hip without trying too hard. Among those featured in Real Simple Celebrations include Thanksgiving dinner; a holiday open house; New Year's Eve potluck; an all-purpose shower; and a backyard barbeque with Campbell's soup cans adding a Warholian touch. Clever and inexpensive invitations, decorations, table settings, guest activities and party favors using easy-to-find items are enticingly illustrated. Simple, classy and mostly make-ahead recipes and festive alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks are featured for each event. Add preparation and clean-up lists, etiquette tips (like the brilliant suggestion for getting guests to leave an open house), a pull-out "Party by Numbers" wheel to help figure booze and food quantities and inventive ways to use party leftovers, and the book becomes indispensable for the sociable and stylish short on time and cash.


A wealth of ideas

If you own white- and black-tie apparel, occupy a home that wouldn't be cramped with 100 guests, and think "relaxed" is making wild mushroom risotto cake and poached pears wrapped in pastry for a dinner party, you'll relate to the elaborate ideas in designer and lifestyle author Carolyne Roehm's A Passion for Parties. If you're like rest of us, you'll still enjoy seeing what a lot of money, time and a staff can accomplish when celebrating holidays and other special occasions. Roehm throws an elegant autumn hunt club "barn dance" at her place in Connecticut, Christmas in Aspen, an intimate Valentine's Day dinner in Paris, a children's Halloween party complete with cobweb mazes and buckets of dry ice, and Fourth of July with fireworks. The parties are illustrated like Vogue fashion spreads, and more ambitious readers can tackle the included recipes to lend their events that classy Roehm touch.


Comfortably chic

Shoppers drive hundreds of miles into the heartland, drawn to Nell Hill's, the home furnishing store in Atchison, Kansas, known for its layered, lived-in, neo-Victorian style. Proprietor Mary Carol Garrity has become a bit of a cult figure for her warm, relaxed "presentation over preparation" philosophy and her affection for both the antique and valuable and the worn and found. Her comfortable but elegant style has now expanded into books, including Nell Hill's Style at Home and Nell Hill's Christmas at Home. The newest addition, Nell Hill's Entertaining in Style, features luscious photography that further illustrates Garrity's great eye for decorating with accessories like old china, textiles and cast-iron urns, and her expertise in pulling it all together using natural elements from pumpkins, gourds and pine cones to tree boughs and tons of faux foliage. Garrity's home, as well as the homes of friends, is the scene for parties including Easter brunch, a summer "sip and see" (baby shower), a fall garden mini-fete and a Christmas Eve supper.

Close-ups, detailed descriptions and tips reveal why the settings look so enticing, and menus and some recipes are also included. Garrity takes a confident, stylish approach that turns a bunch of fabric, furniture and objects into an expressive home and a magnet for friends and family. "My goal is to so captivate guests," Garrity writes, "they won't notice if the mashed potatoes or turkey have gotten a little cold."


Deanna Larson hangs faux foliage in her 1928-built Nashville home.

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