So You Want To Be An Interior Designer

In So You Want To Be An Interior Designer, Linda Soules treats the work as writing a room's instructions. A library lowers your voice. A fast-food place hurries you out. Beauty counts, but it loses when a room fails the person who has to live with it, including someone the designer may never meet. Safety rules and careful planning come along too.

Designer and decorator get separated early, and the difference holds. A project then runs through client questions, sample boards, scaled plans, and the punch list. A tape measure, fabric swatches, and a lamp you can test tonight make the toolkit practical. The imagined day earns its keep: a backsplash laid the wrong way, booths that arrive late, a grandmother who wants her kettle within reach. A scanner room becomes a campsite for a scared child, and Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt kitchen still shapes the counters in ordinary homes. Elsie de Wolfe, Paul R. Williams, and Ronald Mace appear in short portraits near the exercises and glossary.

The sentences stay plain, and Soules speaks straight to you. A fresh word gets its meaning on the spot, so you never have to pause and look it up. The pace stays quick from one short chapter to the next, which makes it easy to dip in. Hidden shoes and arsenic wallpaper then land together, before either one has time to settle. You put the book down still alert to the place around you.

A kid who rearranges a bedroom at midnight is the reader Soules had in mind. A parent will linger on the pages about pay, delays, and waste. Few books for this age pair the NCIDQ with a drawing you can make on graph paper. That pairing is why the book is worth passing on.