The Happy Home Project

We all want beautiful homes that reflect our personal style. But the happiest homes don't just look good-they also feel good. Ideally, they support the way we live, keep us healthy and safe and enrich our net worth, too. So how do we create homes that truly make us happy? In The Happy Home Project, author Jean N ayar looks not only at the material things that contribute to the beauty and style of a house, but also explores the hidden elements and intangibles that add to its substance and soul. Brimming with beautiful photos and filled with expert advice from architects, designers, organizing experts, and contractors, the book offers easy-to-follow guidance on how to create inspiring, stylish rooms as well as practical tips on how to invest wisely in furniture and improvements that will add value to your home-and your quality of life. Focusing on comfort and harmony with nature, the book taps into the wisdom of poets, philosophers and social scientists-as well as experts of the ancient Asian building philosophies of feng shui, vastu shastra, and wabi-sabi-to reveal some of the subtler steps that anyone can take to turn to an ordinary, impersonal house into an uplifting, personal sanctuary. With helpful hints on everything from corralling clutter, picking paint and arranging furniture to refinishing floors, replacing windows and remodeling a kitchen, The Happy Home Project is a great go-to guide for home improvement projects, large and small. Whether your home needs a major makeover or just a little fine-tuning, the ideas, solutions and tips in this book will help you increase its happiness quotient-and let you live well in any dwelling and at any stage of life.

This lovely and inspirational guide, organized around six joyful qualities, will show you how to create a happier home, through prompts, quick fixes, afternoon projects, and mindful design and organization—The Happy Home is not just a title, it’s a promise. Energize. Uplift. Comfort. Calm. Empower. Express. The road to happiness is paved with good emotions. In fact, a happy home is infused with these six actions and this cheerful book will help you create a space you love and that loves you back. Lovely Indeed creator Chelsea Foy offers up more than 50 creative ideas to engage all the senses to brighten your mood throughout your home. This book sits at the intersection of HGTV home improvements and design, thoughtful Marie Kondo practices, and a cheery color palette fans of the Home Edit will love. Kicking off with a foreword by Joy Cho, creator of Oh Joy!, the book guides you through questions to consider so you can customize your home to your own mood-lifting needs, be it a calming bedroom, a chill den, or an energizing kitchen. Easy projects and ideas help you tweak the rooms of your house so they engage the senses in all the right ways. Each chapter focuses on a feeling and includes: Guided prompts: Questions to consider about what a happy space might look and feel like for you Quick Tricks: Creative hacks and ideas to freshen up your space Afternoon Projects: Doable projects and inspo for your home and décor to amp up the joy Big Ideas: Step-by-step projects that you can complete in a day or weekend that are inexpensive but go a long way to creating a home tailored to your tastes and happiness needs With this handy and cheery book, you'll quickly find ways to customize all the rooms in your house for maximum bliss.

Jennifer Paganelli designs one of the most popular fabric lines in the marketplace. In this gorgeous collection, she shows readers how to whip up twenty-one beautiful accessories to transform their space into a sunny, happy home. Each project showcases Jennifer's fresh, whimsical style—from luxe drapery to cheery tablecloths and napkins. Featuring simple step-by-step instructions, a comprehensive glossary of techniques, pattern sheets tucked into a handy front pocket, and lush color photos, this book makes it exceptionally easy to pretty up every room in the house.

A step-by-step guide to getting your home loan approved.Buying a home is a milestone that should be celebrated, but too often the achievement is overshadowed by the stress people feel when trying to get their loan approved. Or, worse, the fear of the unknown prevents them from taking the plunge, keeping them stuck in the rental trap.Multi-award-winning mortgage broker Aaron Christie-David is on a mission to reframe Australians' attitudes toward getting a mortgage and turn their aspirations of home ownership into reality. The Happy Home Loan Handbook demystifies the home loan process, providing a step-by-step breakdown of how to get your loan approved; how best to set up your loan; how to locate, negotiate over and purchase the home you want; how to build your support team to guide you; and how this home-buying experience can become your reality.If you are an aspiring first-home buyer or ambitious upgrader, this helpful handbook will show you how to get your home loan approved and buy your dream home so you can get on with enjoying life.

'Design - For Life!' . . . 'And Live - For Design!' (Magic Mottoes 2 & 3) Can Interior Design make you a better person? Alizia TaméTM believes it can. In this book she will take you on a journey through the most private Interior of all: her thoughts and feelings. Everyone has heard of her creations - the Bridge Hallway, the Funnel Office, the Dawson House with its sofas that run on rails: now you can experience the life that lies behind them. Meet her husband Jem - the postmodern potter - who is in many ways her inspiration. Share the thrills and anxieties of juggling family and career. Discover the truth about her partnership with Fisher Paul and Simon Sanders at IntArchitec, the world's most innovative Design practice. Remember that when your world flips upside-down it is sometimes the most surprising people who turn out to be your friends ... For while Alizia has a Design for everything from relationships to work to motherhood, the people who matter most to her refuse to fit. As the gloss she has put on her life begins to crack she realises there may not, after all, be a Magic Motto for everything. And where can she find happiness then? Designs for a Happy Home is the sparkling story of a sometimes impossible, often infuriating but ultimately loveable heroine whose pilgrim's progress through modern marriage is at once funny, poignant and unforgettable.

In Relaxed Living, Happy Home Atlanta Bartlett and Dave Coote present a practical and inspirational guide to creating a happy and relaxed home that works perfectly for everyone who lives in it. Atlanta and Dave start at the very beginning, explaining the key elements at the heart of their own unique decorating philosophy, The Simple Mindset, which appreciates good, honest, and sustainable design, values quality over quantity, and advocates rediscovering the simple pleasures of life. In Chapter 2: Making it Happen, Atlanta and Dave focus on design essentials such as working with existing architecture and choosing color, furnishings, fabrics, accessories, and other decorative details. Finally, in Living the Dream, they take a tour through every room in the home, from attic to cellar, revealing how easy and enjoyable it can be to put together rooms that are practical yet personal and beautiful, and to create a relaxed home that’s easy to live in and easy on the eye.

Health and happiness are fundamental to human quality of life. The United Nations World Happiness Report 2012 reflects a new worldwide call for governments to include happiness as a criterion to their policies. The Healthy Cities or Happy Cities movement has been endorsed by the WHO since 1986, and a Healthy House or Happy Home is a critical constituent of a healthy city or a happy city. Nevertheless, the concept has not been fully explored. Existing literature on the healthy house has often focused on the technical, economic, environmental, or biochemical aspects, while current scholarship on the happy home commonly centers on interior decoration. Few studies have addressed the importance of social and cultural factors that affect the health and happiness of the occupants. Identifying four key themes in Chinese philosophy to promote health and happiness at home, this book links architecture with Chinese philosophy, social sciences, and the humanities, and in doing so, argues that Architectural Multiculturalism is a vital ideology to guide housing design in North America. Using both qualitative and quantitative evidence gathered from ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese living in the USA and Canada, the study proposes that the Courtyard is a central component to promote social and cultural health and happiness of residents. It further details courtyard garden house design strategies that combine a sense of privacy with a feeling of community as represented in courtyard housing. The schemes may have universal implications.