Dashing decor

One of the most popular places on the Internet to get a daily dose of decorating savvy is apartmenttherapy.com. The four-year-old website offers decorating tips and tricks, and posts complete home tours of apartments from L.A. to New York City. The site's founder, Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, has chosen 40 of the best home tours to feature in full-color photos in apartment therapy presents. Despite the book's title, not all of the living spaces profiled here are apartments. Though you won't find McMansions in these pages, the homes range from 500-square-foot studios to 2,000-square-foot homes and townhouses. Most of the residences contain modern design elements (there's heavy reliance on basics from both IKEA and the pricier Design Within Reach, and I've yet to see this many Eames chairs outside of a museum), but inspired copy-it-yourself touches abound. For example, one New York City apartment owner uses a collection of colorful vintage freezer doors (you know, the ones that were inside the fridge) as wall art. And who would have thought to use a shadowbox from Target as a toilet paper holder, wallpaper an office with Post-its, or transpose a paint-by-number street scene into a wall mural? Now you can incorporate these and other inventive ideas in your own home.