House Home

More than just a stylish design book: The founder of Parachute Home teaches you how to design a home that’s not only beautiful but mindful, functional, and uniquely you. A house is a structure that provides shelter. A home tells the story of who you are. How to Make a House a Home guides your discovery of what is most important to you in achieving warmth and comfort as well as a functional space. Explore the possibilities of creating an environment that is uniquely yours—one that welcomes, nurtures, and inspires. Parachute founder Ariel Kaye meets you wherever you are, with actionable tips and advice on how to match purpose with style. Here is everything you need to bring mindful choices into your home to make it completely you, from color palettes to organization, house plants to furniture. Whether you want to update your bedding, redo your living room, or take on the whole house, enjoy the remarkable journey of making your house your home.

Have you been thinking about how to make your house into a true home? Or are you buying a house that needs the same attention? Where do you begin? This book will get you started, see you through it, and make home design doable rather than daunting. Charming and accessible, House to Home is a beginner-friendly guidebook for creating a home that supports your life the way you live it. With practical, hard-earned wisdom, architect Devi Dutta-Choudhury guides you through the process from the foundation up. Dive into home design with charts, questionnaires, and sketch pages that help you confidently approach and define your renovation. With Dutta-Choudhury’s relatable expertise, you’ll begin to think more like an architect. From understanding the site, working with architects, and being your own contractor to deciding when to redesign and when to leave alone, this book teaches core concepts about privacy, use of space, lighting, access, and more. Whether it’s just one room or your whole house, House to Home is here to help.

A classic bestselling resource for every household, Home Comforts helps you manage everyday chores, find creative solutions to domestic dilemmas, and enhance the experience of life at home. “Home Comforts is to the house what Joy of Cooking is to food.” —USA TODAY Home Comforts is an engaging and comprehensive book about housekeeping. It is a lively and readable guide for both beginners and experts in all the domestic arts. From keeping surfaces free of germs, watering plants, removing stains, folding a fitted sheet, cleaning china, tuning a piano, lighting a fire, setting the dining room table—this guide covers everything that people might want to do for themselves in their homes. Further topics include: making up a bed with hospital corners, expert recommendations for safe food storage, reading care labels (and sometimes carefully disregarding them), keeping your home free of dust mites and other allergens, this is a practical, good-humored, philosophical guidebook to the art and science of household management.

Stories of House and Home is a social and cultural history of the massive construction campaign that Khrushchev instituted in 1957 to resolve the housing crisis in the Soviet Union and to provide each family its own apartment. Decent housing was deemed the key to a healthy, productive home life, which was essential to the realization of socialist collectivism. Drawing on archival materials, as well as memoirs, fiction, and the Soviet press, Christine Varga-Harris shows how the many aspects of this enormous state initiative—from neighborhood planning to interior design—sought to alleviate crowded, undignified living conditions and sculpt residents into ideal Soviet citizens. She also details how individual interests intersected with official objectives for Soviet society during the Thaw, a period characterized by both liberalization and vigilance in everyday life. Set against the backdrop of the widespread transition from communal to one-family living, Stories of House and Home explores the daily experiences and aspirations of Soviet citizens who were granted new apartments and those who continued to inhabit the old housing stock due to the chronic problems that beset the housing program. Varga-Harris analyzes the contradictions apparent in heroic advances and seemingly inexplicable delays in construction, model apartments boasting modern conveniences and decrepit dwellings, happy housewarmings and disappointing moves, and new residents and individuals requesting to exchange old apartments. She also reveals how Soviet citizens identified with the state and with the broader project of building socialism.

"Julia's flying house has come down to earth--and sprouted legs! Now it roams the landscape looking for the perfect spot to settle down. But just as Julia spots the Perfect Spot, off in the distance--her walking house trips! It tumbles down a steep mountain side, and Julia and her creatures are scattered across the hills while her runaway home continues rolling off on an adventure of its own"--Provided by publisher.

House and home are words routinely used to describe where and how one lives. This book challenges predominant definitions and argues that domesticity fundamentally satisfies the human need to create and inhabit a defined place in the world. Consequently, house and home have performed numerous cultural and ontological roles, and have been assiduously represented in scripture, literature, art, and philosophy. This book presents how the search for home in an unpredictable world led people to create myths about the origins of architecture, houses for their gods, and house tombs for eternal life. Turning to more recent topics, it discusses how writers often used simple huts as a means to address the essentials of existence; modernist architects envisioned the capacity of house and home to improve society; and the suburban house was positioned as a superior setting for culture and family. Throughout the book, house and home are critically examined to illustrate the perennial role and capacity of architecture to articulate the human condition, position it more meaningfully in the world, and assist in our collective homecoming.

What's the best room in the house? Is it the kitchen with its wonderful aromas and goodies? Or is it the front porch, where guests flock to visit on summer nights? Maybe it's the cozy bedroom, when you are snuggling deep under the covers on winter mornings. With gracious text and enchanting images, Newbery Medalist Cynthia Rylant and acclaimed illustrator Wendy Anderson Halperin invite readers home -- to remind us why there's no place like it!

The contributors identify important considerations for evaluating the current and future housing situation, clarify housing research issues and priorities, and indicate emergent policy issues. The essays are divided into six sections: economic, demographic, and institutional factors underlying the postwar demand for housing; principal aspects of the supply side of housing, including housing finance, technology, and regulation; housing-stock growth and changes in housing quality; the balance of supply and demand in terms of adequacy, suitability, and affordability; the changing settlement environment; and lessons, challenges, and issues for the future. The book also contains valuable summaries of housing policy initiatives undertaken between 1945 and 1986. An essential reference document on urban housing and city development in the postwar period in Canada, House, Home, and Community will be valuable to academics, planners, professionals, and students with interests related to housing.

This New York Times bestselling book is filled with hundreds of fun, deceptively simple, budget-friendly ideas for sprucing up your home. With two home renovations under their (tool) belts and millions of hits per month on their blog YoungHouseLove.com, Sherry and John Petersik are home-improvement enthusiasts primed to pass on a slew of projects, tricks, and techniques to do-it-yourselfers of all levels. Packed with 243 tips and ideas—both classic and unexpected—and more than 400 photographs and illustrations, this is a book that readers will return to again and again for the creative projects and easy-to-follow instructions in the relatable voice the Petersiks are known for. Learn to trick out a thrift-store mirror, spice up plain old roller shades, "hack" your Ikea table to create three distinct looks, and so much more.

For award-winning architect Gil Schafer, the most successful houses are the ones that celebrate the small moments of life—houses with timeless charm that are imbued with memory and anchored in a distinct sense of place. Essentially, Schafer believes a house is truly successful when the people who live there consider it home. It’s this belief—and Schafer’s rare ability to translate his clients’ deeply personal visions of how they want to live into a physical home that reflects those dreams—that has established him as one of the most sought-after, highly-regarded architects of our time. In his new book, A Place to Call Home Schafer follows up his bestselling The Great American House, by pulling the curtain back on his distinctive approach, sharing his process (complete with unexpected, accessible ideas readers can work into their own projects) and taking readers on a detailed tour of seven beautifully realized houses in a range of styles located around the country—each in a unique place, and each with a character all its own. 250 lush, full color photographs of these seven houses and other never-before-seen projects, including exterior, interior, and landscape details, invite readers into Schafer’s world of comfortable classicism. Opening with memories of the childhood homes and experiences that have shaped Schafer’s own history, A Place to Call Home gives the reader the sense that for Schafer, architecture is not just a career but a way of life, a calling. He describes how the many varied houses of his youth were informed as much by their style as by their sense of place, and how these experiences of home informed his idea of classicism as a set of values that he applies to many different kinds of architecture in places as varied as the ones he grew up in. Because while Schafer is absolutely a classical architect, he is in fact a modern traditionalist, and A Place to Call Home showcases how he effortlessly interprets traditional principles for a multiplicity of architectural styles within contemporary ways of living. Sections in Part I include the delicate balance of modern and traditional aesthetics, the juxtaposition of fancy and simple, and the details that make each project special and livable. Schafer also delves into what he refers to as “the spaces in between,” those often overlooked spaces like closets, mudrooms, and laundry rooms, explaining their underappreciated value in the broader context of a home. Part of Schafer’s skill lies in the way he gives the minutiae of a project as much attention as the grand aesthetic gestures, and ultimately, it’s this combination that brings his homes to life. Part II of the book is the story of seven houses and the places they inhabit—each with a completely different character and soul: a charming cottage completely rebuilt into a casual but gracious house for a young family in bucolic Mill Valley, California; a reconstructed historic 1930s Colonial house and gardens set in lush woodlands in Connecticut; a new, Adirondack camp-inspired house for an active family perched on the edge of Lake Placid with stunning views of nearby Whiteface Mountain; an elegant but family-friendly Fifth Avenue apartment with a panoramic view of Central Park; a new timber frame and stone barn situated to take advantage of the summer sun on a lovely, rambling property in New England; a new residence and outbuildings on a 6,000 acre hunting preserve in Georgia, inspired by the historic 1920s and 1930s hunting plantation houses in the region; and Schafer’s own, deeply personal, newly-renovated and surprisingly modern house located just a few feet from the Atlantic Ocean in coastal Maine. In Schafer’s hands, the stories of these houses are irresistibly readable. He guides the reader through each of the design decisions, sharing anecdotes about the process and fascinating historical background and contextual influences of the settings. Ultimately, the houses featured in A Place to Call Home are more than just beautiful buildings in beautiful places. In each of them, Schafer has created a dialogue between past and present, a personalized world that people can inhabit gracefully, in sync with their own notions of home. Because, as Schafer writes in the book, he designs houses “not for an architect’s ego, but [for] the beauty of life, the joys of family, and, not least, a heartfelt celebration of place.”