Open Your Eyes
1,000 Simple Ways To Bring Beauty Into Your Home And Life Each Day
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
For nearly forty years and in numerous books, Alexandra Stoddard has shared her keen eye for design and sure sense of style. Now this renowned decorator and lifestyle philosopher teaches you hoe to see with the expertise and clarity of professional designers.
First, Alexandra helps you become more attuned to your surroundings-as you set a table, straighten out a linen closet, stroll through a garden, or browse in a thrift shop. Then, through personal anecdotes; examples from masters; a rich array of ideas, tips, and techniques, she reveals hundreds of ways to see and solve problems or proportion, pattern, color, and composition. Her simple suggestions-whether it's changing a lampshade, rearranging treasured objects on a table, or moving a chair-will yield dramatic results. Filled with practical solutions offered with warmth and encouragement , Open Your Eyes helps make each day a visual feats as it deepens your understanding not only of what makes something beautiful but what makes something beautiful to you.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Seeing well," suggests noted interior designer Stoddard (The Decoration of Houses) in her 20th book, "transforms mere existence into the art of living." The six chapters that comprise her substantive guide to creating a beautiful home environment examine such concepts as order and balance, applying them to the arrangement of everyday surroundings. Often mining personal experience, Stoddard's appealing first-person approach to making one's home a harmonious and restorative setting focuses more on aesthetics than on period furniture or flooring materials; this is as much a training manual for observing one's surroundings--and one's response to them--as it is a book of design principles. Stoddard discusses these principles--such as proportion and scale, symmetry and depth, form and composition--and demonstrates how they can be translated into the language of furnishings, window treatments and picture arranging. Despite the annoying distractions of aphorisms (from Plato, Kant and Joseph Campbell, for example) on nearly every page and Stoddard's tiresome tendency toward injunction (Become a Critic; Be Highly Opinionated), the foundation of classic interior design is clearly laid out on these pages. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
