Creating Luminous Spaces

Ancient and global modern design come together in this practical guide to interior design, biophilic design, and feng shui for your home. Part spiritual growth workbook and part treatise on the power of nature, Creating Luminous Spaces is your practical guide to giving your home a refreshing energy boost. In this inventive approach to interior design, Maureen K. Calamia blends modern trends with the five elements of feng shui, an ancient Chinese system that brings the cycles and benefits of nature to your home interior. With inspiring ideas and practical information, Calamia will help you discover which of nature’s elements represents your energy. Should you enhance your home with natural light or a fish bowl? New organizational habits or tall, vertical lines? Featuring practical exercises, meditations, and real stories about clients and students, as you embark on this mind-body-spirit connection with your home, you’ll find out how: Indoor lighting and lighting design can strengthen the fire elementOrganizational behavior is influenced by the metal elementSpace planning with plants nourishes the wood elementAnd more!

From an interior designer and modern feng shui expert, High Vibe Home is a luxe handbook for creating restorative spaces that feel as good as they look. Create a home that feels as good as it looks. From an interior designer and energy practitioner, High Vibe Home teaches readers how to design harmonious spaces that invite free-flowing, positive energy into their homes and lives. By decluttering and cleaning, arranging furniture, decorating with crystals or houseplants, incorporating new colors, textures, and more, anyone, on any budget, can design a home with high vibes. The book outlines key design principles and energy rules that contribute to a nourishing home, and then, room-by-room, offers achievable ways to put those practices into place. In a luxe package, this handbook is woven through with atmospheric photography, evocative shots of styled decor elements, and helpful diagrams. High Vibe Home is a must-have for design aficionados, wellness enthusiasts, and anyone interested in crystals, feng shui, or energy work. Alongside smudge sticks or a cozy throw, it's a thoughtful gift for a girlfriend's birthday or a housewarming party. ACCESSIBLE PRACTICES: High Vibe Home offers achievable, affordable practices to make spaces feel more Zen. Anyone, on any budget, can make these small adjustments to improve their home and in turn, channel that newfound positive energy into other areas of their life. MORE THAN JUST HOME DECOR: This book is not simply a collection of design tips; it also teaches how to foster specific types of energy in your space—calming, invigorating, healing, etc. These choices can have an outsize impact on not just your mood but also your relationships, career, and health. ON TREND: The wellness trend is still going strong, and holistic interior design is an extension of that. There are sections throughout the book on crystals, chakras, feng shui, and other types of energy work, which will appeal to those interested in these on-trend wellness topics. Perfect for: • Anyone looking for ways to make their home lovelier or more Zen • People interested in energy work, crystals, or feng shui • Shoppers looking for a Mother's Day, hostess, or housewarming gift

Joel Beath and Elizabeth Price explore this question drawing inspiration from a diverse collection of apartment designs, all smaller than 50m2/540ft2. Through the lens of five small-footprint design principles and drawing on architectural images and detailed floor plans, the authors examine how architects and designers are reimagining small space living. Full of inspiration we can each apply to our own spaces, this is a book that offers hope and inspiration for a future of our cities and their citizens in which sustainability and style, comfort and affordability can co-exist. Never Too Small proves living better doesn’t have to mean living larger.

Infuse your images with glowing, luminous light From high-profile wedding and portrait photographer Elizabeth Messina comes this beautiful guide to shooting lush, romantic portraits exclusively in natural light. Whether you’re photographing children, weddings, maternity and boudoir, or portraits of any kind, The Luminous Portrait will inspire you with Elizabeth’s personal approach and award-wining images, sharing the art to making flattering portraits that appear “lit from within.”

Those of us in midlife are facing a dilemma: We are going through a period of multiple life-altering changes all at the same time - at work, at home and within. More of us are being made redundant than ever before, just when we need it the least. More of us are becoming self-employed. More of us are experiencing losses of status and crises of self-confidence - and that was before COVID-19! Our relationships with our partners, our parents and our children are all entering new phases. Meanwhile, half of us are also going through the menopause. Yet we are healthier and more vibrant than previous generations - and we are living longer. Much longer. We are 50 years young, not 50 years old. But more importantly, we don't know where or who to turn to for help. If the thought of consulting a 'life coach' makes you twitch involuntarily, but you want more than impenetrable financial advice from an IFA - this book is for you. Award-winning author Campbell Macpherson and yoga therapist co-author Jane Macpherson will help you embrace these changes and come out on top. From dealing with seemingly ubiquitous ageism and starting your own business to building resilience, finding a financial adviser you can trust and learning from professional athletes who are forced to 'retire' in their early thirties, the Macphersons show that your 'Part Two' isn't about retirement or ageing; it's about change and how you turn it to your advantage. You: Part Two is the must-read guide to thriving in the second half of your life.

This book advocates an approach to lighting design that focuses on how people experience illumination. Lighting Design in Shared Public Spaces contextualises light, dark and lighting design within the settings, sensations, ideas and imaginaries that form our understandings of ourselves and the world around us. The chapters in this collection bring a new perspective to lighting design, arguing for an approach that addresses how lighting is experienced, understood and valued by people. Across a range of new case studies from Australia, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, the authors account for lighting design’s crucial role in shaping our dynamic and messy experiential worlds. With many turning to innovative ethnographic methodologies, they powerfully demonstrate how feelings of comfort, safety, security, vulnerability, care and well-being can configure in and through how people experience and manipulate light and dark. By focusing on how lighting is improvised, arranged, avoided and composed in relation to the people and things it acts upon, the book advances understandings of lighting design by showing how improved experiences of the built environment can result from more sensitive and context-specific illumination. The book is intended for social scientists who are interested in the lit or sensory world, as well as designers, architects, urban planners and others concerned with how the experience of light, dark and lighting might be both better understood and implemented in our shared public spaces.

How electric light created new spaces that transformed the built environment and the perception of modern architecture. In this book, Sandy Isenstadt examines electric light as a form of architecture—as a new, uniquely modern kind of building material. Electric light was more than just a novel way of brightening a room or illuminating a streetscape; it brought with it new ways of perceiving and experiencing space itself. If modernity can be characterized by rapid, incessant change, and modernism as the creative response to such change, Isenstadt argues, then electricity—instantaneous, malleable, ubiquitous, evanescent—is modernity's medium. Isenstadt shows how the introduction of electric lighting at the end of the nineteenth century created new architectural spaces that altered and sometimes eclipsed previously existing spaces. He constructs an architectural history of these new spaces through five examples, ranging from the tangible miracle of the light switch to the immaterial and borderless gloom of the wartime blackout. He describes what it means when an ordinary person can play God by flipping a switch; when the roving cone of automobile headlights places driver and passenger at the vertex of a luminous cavity; when lighting in factories is seen to enhance productivity; when Times Square became an emblem of illuminated commercial speech; and when the absence of electric light in a blackout produced a new type of space. In this book, the first sustained examination of the spatial effects of electric lighting, Isenstadt reconceives modernism in architecture to account for the new perceptual conditions and visual habits that followed widespread electrification.

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.