Unique Homes: Personalize Your Home Through Good Design

By Carol Soucek King

Book Overview

Do our surroundings really make a difference in how we feel? In the harmony with which we conduct our daily lives? In our exploration of our personal, professional and spiritual paths? The answer, as shown in The Art of Dramatic Living: Personalizing the Home through Good Design, is a resounding "Yes " Form, color, texture, light, proportion and material -- as well as cleanliness and order -- are powerful tools for expressing who we really are.

In these pages, Dr. Carol Soucek King visits more than thirty residences around the world in which good design echoes the identity of those who live there. A house in Israel connects an active family with their cherished land and the sea beyond. A rustic lodge/camp dwelling in Texas celebrates its owners' retreat from urban life to a setting amid oak trees, creeks and hills. In Italy, a bachelor pares down the size of his living space and number of possessions but not his full expression of his devotion to music, lyrical spaces and elegant entertaining. In Tokyo, a Japanese entrepreneur creates a background to share his interests in global business and fine art with visiting business leaders and diplomats as well as his family. A couple in Sydney, Australia, uses every aspect of their home's historic site and style as background for their thoroughly up-to-the-minute interests and worldwide travels.

Today's homeowners want to shape their house to their lifestyle, not adapt their lifestyle to the home. An individual's home is a mirror of their inner self and a person's environment affects their mind, body and spirit. This book goes beyond design to health and well-being. In these and an array of other homes, Dr. King shows how a variety of people in vastly different circumstances have realized that, in creating a home, one is creating one's own universe, and that in order to live life to its fullest, one should make the most of all the tools of good design.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060820497
• ISBN13: 9780060820497
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 2.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 9.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A Great Collection of Homes

The dedication of this book is: To those who understand that our home is our own personal state - our own private universe in which to express ourselves with care, imagination, and love. This book is a book of pictures of homes from around the US and from half a dozen foreign countries. These pictures reflect no particular style, instead they reflect what the individual owner, the individual designer wanted to express as his private universe. There are some spectacular designs that give me some thoughts on the house I am planing. There are some that I find don't appeal to me at all. But that is what you expect, what you should find in a book such as this. One thing you won't find here are inexpensive homes. These are nice houses, with industrial grade kitchens, often in spectacular settings overlooking the ocean or perhaps in a historic villa in Italy.