cover image The Bee Cottage Story: How I Made a Muddle of Things and Decorated My Way Back to Happiness

The Bee Cottage Story: How I Made a Muddle of Things and Decorated My Way Back to Happiness

Frances Schultz. Skyhorse, $24.99 (176p) ISBN 978-1-63220-495-0

Schultz, a blogger, author (A House in the South), and cable TV host, combines memoir with decorating in this illustrated tale of love and home. The author buys a cottage in the Hamptons, planning to live in it with her fiancé. When the relationship ends before the wedding, she turns heartbreak into headboards (woven, from Pottery Barn) and drowns her sorrows in an 11 ft. × 38 ft. lap pool with an installed fountain. In the process, she learns something about herself and her style: “I didn’t even know what help I needed. Help moving forward from a painful decision with hurtful consequences for people I cared about? Help digging out of boxes and getting organized? Help from a handyman? The answer, of course, was all of the above.” Schultz is the epitome of the successful woman who is unlucky in love until she puts her own house in order, which, in her case, means placing a bench from Katharine Hepburn’s estate in her bedroom and painting the guest bedroom with Benjamin Moore Galapagos Turquoise. The book is lighthearted, self-indulgent, frivolous, and likable—a good beach read, especially in the Hamptons. (July)