Shabby Chic -- the rich, inviting, practical, time-worn style created by one of America's top designers, Rachel Ashwell, is a style of living that reflects the grace and simplicity of another time.

Now you can do more than just dream of living in a Shabby Chic home. You can create one yourself. With invaluable treasure-hunting advice and tips for essential materials, furniture, objects and decorations, you can live a life of simple, but rich, beauty.

With her practiced eye Rachel takes you on a tour of flea markets, antique malls, and a variety of secondhand sales-- estate, tag, yard, church, garage-- to demonstrate how, with a little taste, imagination, work and ingenuity, you can turn trinkets from the past into treasures for today.

As Rachel sifts through the discarded, the crumbling, the shabby, she takes you step by step through her personal process, sharing how you, too, can spot a fabulous buy, repair and alter it, and by following her guideline words-- comfort, function and beauty-- develop your own distinctive, original look that is down-to-earth yet truly exquisite.

Following her sensible advice you can exchange the anonymity of mass-produced furniture and home accessories for unique, inviting surroundings for a fraction of the cost and decorate comfortable, livable rooms in which family heirlooms blend with flea-market finds and the new combines gracefully with the well worn. Lavishly illustrated with lovely and informative photographs and drawings, Rachel Ashwell's "Shabby Chic Treasure Hunting & Decorating Guide" shows you how to have the home you've always dreamed of, a place where children's dinners are served on mix-and-match antique plates at a table covered with lace from a renovated curtain set with unironed linen napkins. A space where fresh flowers stand in antique jugs, complementing comfortable furniture covered in crisp white denim that is enhanced with each laundering.

For Rachel, Shabby Chic is not just style. It is a way of living. With her trademark warmth and charm she reveals how she sleeps on embroidered antique linen and dresses in cashmeres and bias-cut silk dresses discovered in vintage clothing shops and flea markets. Throughout, she teaches you how to recognize and appreciate beauty in unlikely and often overlooked places, as well as how to define and refine your individual taste.

Worn damask, relaxed velvets, tea-stained florals, washed-out cotton prints, tattered lace, monogrammed linen...

Comforting colors: celadon, mint and seafoam greens; dusty rose; ivories, creams and faded grays; a touch of pale sky-blue; crisp, clean white...

Faded grandeur: the incomplete, the neglected, the crumbling, the cracked, the mismatched, the wrinkled...

Ruffles, gathers, tucks; scuffs, chips, imperfections; worn moldings, tired elegance, peeling paint...

An appreciation of vintage and history...