Peaceful Spaces: Transform Your Home into a Haven of Calm and Tranquility

Rating:
Summary: tranquil pictures, nice advice
Review: 'Peaceful Spaces' is composed of two parts. The first half is a truly wonderful collection of decorative rooms and principles telling you how to make your own rooms look really nice. The idea is to get rid of clutter and excess furnishings, and then artfully arange carefully chosen furnishings & decorations to build a cohesive, peaceful room. Some of the rooms are a bit too spartan for my tastes, but most are simply wonderful. This book isn't about decorating style (e.g., country or modern) but how to use shape, texture, color, and materials to compose an inspiring display. 'Peaceful Spaces' touches upon Feng Shui, Zen, and Japeneese decorating style.

The second half of the book applies the principles to different rooms of the house & office.

If decorating your house were an art class, then most books teach technique (e.g., how to do faux painting, how to decorate in the country style, how to recover a sofa, how to choose colors); whereas this book teaches composition (e.g., how to put the pieces together into a pleasing ensamble). My experience with art classes & decorating books is that actual advice on composition is very, very rare. This book is a gem!

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: I really looked forward to buying this book, because I was looking for an interesting, but uncluttered, way of displaying my pottery, vintage jewelry, etc. Unfortunately, though some of the illustrations are interesting, very few of them are truly creative. Most of the ideas I could have come up with on my own. And I was hoping that there would be some kind of "how to" aspect to the book as well, so that if I did see something I liked (i.e. shelves), there might be instructions as to how to create them. Unfortunately, there were not.

Though I'll hang onto this book for occassional inspiration, it wasn't nearly as wonderful as I hoped.