Anne McKevitt's Style Solutions: 365 of the Freshest Looks, Smartest Tips & Best Advice for Your Home

British ""style guru"" McKevitt, who looks something like a paintbrush-wielding dominatrix on the cover of her latest volume, fetishizes the little things, at least where home decor is concerned. She offers tips on flower arranging, soap dispenser decorating, wallpaper stenciling and the like, advising readers to pot cacti in cups and saucers for ""a dash of humor"" and approximate stained glass with colored film glued to windowpanes. Her suggestions are all supremely do-it-yourself and generally low-budget, but she's very skimpy on the how-to's; her section on backsplashes for kitchen counters gives plenty of ideas for materials (tiles, laminated glass, aluminum mesh) but no suggestions for how to actually construct one. (Instructions for a bathroom backsplash are better, but still far from thorough.) Although some of her ideas do seem cheery, others border on the tacky and, occasionally, the dangerous: she suggests, for example, cluttering a staircase with a cute mail bag for each household occupant, and ""dressing up"" a door handle by using it to hang a ""selection of intricate glass bottles, each with a single flowering stem."" What happens when that door gets slammed? Color photos throughout.