Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure Reviews

Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure

ISBN13: 9780553383126
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From not enough space and too many things to not knowing what color to paint the living room walls, many of us struggle with our homes. Now Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, frequent makeover expert on HGTVâ€™s Mission: Organization and Small Spaces, Big Style, shares the do-it-yourself strategies that have enabled his clients and fans to transform their apartments into well-organized, beautiful places that suit their style and budget.

Week by week, Apartment Therapy will guide you to treat commo

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Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy

I always imagine each of the signoras who lived in this houseâ€”where she shelled peas, rocked the grandchild, placed a vase of the pink roses. Now I would like to take one of these women back to my house in California to show her how Bramasole traveled to America and took root, how the doors there are open to the breeze from San Pablo bay and to the distant view of Mount Tamalpais, how the table has expanded and the garden has burgeonedâ€¦

The â€œbard of Tuscanyâ€ (New York Times) n

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6 Responses to "Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure Reviews"

scraplolly says:

July 15, 2011 at 11:41 am

66 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

A Great Recipe, June 15, 2006

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scraplolly –

This review is from: Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure (Paperback)

As a reviewer previously noted, there really isn’t anything new here. But like a chef who takes ingredients we are well familiar with and combines them to give us a new experience, so too does Maxwell. There are the little gimmicks–calling people warm and cool, talking about the house like a body when he could just say he’s writing about attending to repairs (bones), arranging and organizing the stuff in your space (breath), figuring out the functions of each room (head) and decorating (heart). But this is not a meal of last night’s leftovers. Instead it is packaged into another gimmick: the eight week cure. There’s a lot to do in your eight weeks: and the work seems unbalanced. It starts out slowly (throwing out one thing, making lists) and ends slowly (preparing for a party) but in the middle there’s almost an impossible amount of things to do. But it’s all laid out. There are worksheets and practical tips to begin. Maxwell has taken all the steps to transforming a living space and laid them all out sequentially. This book is about more than just fixing up your place however: Maxwell aims to change and enrich your experience of your home. And that’s the spice that makes the book worth consuming.

This book is also something else. It’s a primer for a web site and blog. It sets out the vocabulary and explains the aims of hundreds of people who have already participated in the first on-line cure. Like Marla Cilley’s Sink Reflections, the book functions as a portal to the collective on-line experience. There are no lush photographs in the book.They are on the web site.

More than anything, though, Maxwell writes his prose well and in such a way that one feels inspired to tackle transforming one’s home and experience in it. I’m not in a small apartment in the city—but a small house in a city whose burbs are ever expanding outwards. I don’t need to start cooking at home–as he recommends–but taking those wonderful morning baths he advocates. It’ll be a challenge to implement the cure for my home and it will take longer than eight weeks. Nonetheless, he has inspired me to do all he counsels and for that reason I recommend the book.

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M. "teagurl327" says:

July 15, 2011 at 12:06 pm

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

Really helps, August 6, 2006

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M. “teagurl327” (New York, NY USA) –

This review is from: Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure (Paperback)

Unlike a lot of other books about design and interior spaces, this one doesn’t give you photos and examples of what you can do with the space… it really helps you evaluate what it is you feel/have with your living space and steps to take to make it into the space you feel better living in. It’s as insightful into your self as it is where you live.

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Ange Anderson "American Thighs" says:

July 15, 2011 at 12:09 pm

51 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

A mixed bag, really., November 1, 2007

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Ange Anderson “American Thighs” (Mars) –

This review is from: Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure (Paperback)

While I didn’t dislike the book with quite the venom of other reviewers, I do understand their frustrations. I did find the tone a little off-putting, but I decided to put those feeling aside and see if the book had anything useful to offer.

It does and it doesn’t. Like many design/decorating book it suffers from a lack of realistic understanding of its audience. Let’s face it, anyone seeking design advice and is only ponying up 14 bucks, probably isn’t the same kind of person who would spend 3000.00 on a couch.

still there is some excellent advice for clearing cluttering and making your home more of a refuge. And for the people that didn’t enjoy the book, you can just toss it, sell it or give it away (which is what the author recommending doing with books you don’t love.)

Bottom line: it can get you motivated to live more simply and if you can ignore the classist attitudes about what kind of decor best suits a home and how NYC centric the book is you might be able to find a few bits of advice worth taking.

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puppy's gal says:

July 15, 2011 at 12:58 pm

75 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

Really Let Down by this book., December 5, 2005

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puppy’s gal –

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This review is from: Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy (Hardcover)

I was so excited when I ordered this book and so let down after getting it and looking it over. The cover is VERY deceptive. This is NOT a style/decorating book. This is the story of a couple renovating a wonderful old home in Tuscany. It is well written and at times charming and warm. It is also often quite boring reading about what stone to pick for the house and who they visited and what wine they drank. It almost seems as if the author were forcing another book out for publication!! There are VERY FEW photos…barely any really in the book. The photos present are of wine, friends, a few of the house and a few of home decor/furniture layout, and food. The photos are very striking and pretty….if you enjoy seeing their friends and not really getting any basic decorating ideas. There are about 30 recipes and photos of the food, as I said above. Some recipes are nice but I really didn’t see anything new and inspiring. A good Italian cookbook would be a better investment. As for the cover….it is very deceptive to say the least since it focuses on a very pretty vignette: furniture, art, pottery and style of arrangement. This is most definitely NOT what this book is about. In fact: I found the cover to be the best part of the book. I decided to return it and look for a better book really focusing on design. The author clearly loves Tuscany and if you want a nicely written and warm hearted book to read about hers and her husband’s story of renovation, friends and their love of food, wine and Tuscany then you will like this book. It is not a picture book at all but rather a reading book with a story that seems rather forced and often VERY VERY boring and drawn out for the purpose of publication.

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N. Fairbairn "italiaphile" says:

July 15, 2011 at 1:05 pm

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

best feature -front cover, July 6, 2005

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N. Fairbairn “italiaphile” (port angeles, wa USA) –

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This review is from: Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy (Hardcover)

very disappointing publication-suggest you save your money and check it out of the library before making a decision-the front cover was deceptive in its allure to those looking for a creative nudge in decorating tuscany style. but the most chilling part of this book,for me, was a revealing paragraph at the top of page 106 ‘quote’ Given that the farmers probably will not be returning.I begin to plot new purposes for the hundreds of borghi in the italian hills: music camps,artists’ colonies,hospices, religious retreat centers. After all,easily taking the past into the future is part or the italian genius for living.’unquote’… well, there goes he neighborhood! i’m just thankful i got to see Tuscany before the Mayes’ makeover of the whole region –some people just can’t leave rustic charm alone!!…norma

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B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" says:

July 15, 2011 at 1:49 pm

46 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

First Class Writing and Photography Great Price. Buy It., December 27, 2004

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B. Marold “Bruce W. Marold” (Bethlehem, PA United States) –

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This review is from: Bringing Tuscany Home: Sensuous Style From the Heart of Italy (Hardcover)

`Bringing Tuscany Home’ by Frances Mayes has several different faces, but it’s title tells it’s primary objective, which is importing to one’s American home the furniture, style, feel, and `Zeitgeist’ of Tuscany, where the authors Mayes have a `summer’ home. For readers who are familiar with my concentration on culinary works, I was lead to buy this book for review by Amazon’s bringing it up in a list of culinary titles, so I bought it largely on the strength of Ms. Mayes’ reputation as the author of `Under the Tuscan Sun’. While the book does contain a few recipes, the most interesting one being an Italian plum tart borrowed from Tuscan summer neighbor Nancy Silverton of La Brea Bakery fame, it is not really a culinary title. Edward Mayes appears to be the cook of the family and most recipes are attributed to him, including a soffrito, a tomato sauce, oven roasted tomatoes, artichoke pesto, olive salsa, Tuscan beans, grilled radicchio, farro salad, fried zucchini flowers, shrimp in pasta shells, pici with fresh fava beans, potato gnocchi and sauce, pasta with pancetta, black cabbage soup, vegetable soup, eggplant parmesan, chicken with olives, rolled veal scallops, rolled sole, white peaches with almonds, and tulip shells with berries. Aside from the very last recipe, everything is pretty standard stuff.

The basis of the Mayes’ expertise in Tuscan style is their ownership and renovation of a middle-sized villa just outside the village of Cortona in Tuscany for the last fourteen (14) years and their furnishing a Marin County, California home after the Tuscan style. This, more than anything else, is the meaning of the title. If this book were written by a journeyman travel writer and if it were priced above its very modest $29.95, this volume would be on a very short trip to the discount piles near the cash registers at Borders and Barnes & Noble. But, the authors are not ordinary writers. Their `day job’ is being successful poets. Travel non-fiction and even novel writing appears to be more of a sidelight to their business of writing poetry. And, based on the rather grand appearance of their two homes and their antique Italian furnishings, poetry must be paying pretty well, as a supplement to income from Frances’ best-selling novel and movie adaptation.

The modest list price is especially surprising when you see the quality of the photography, not only in the technical skill, but also in the careful choice of subjects and the simple consideration of providing a caption to all photographs. The captions are especially important in being able to distinguish scenes from their Tuscan house, `Bramasole’ from shots of their new Marin County home which has been decorated to appear as if it were furnished by the Medici’s.

One can wonder when they have time to write poetry, as their story is that their Tuscan house was at death’s door when it was bought with sagging floors and numerous colonies of mice in residence. But, the house probably more than paid its keep by serving as material for poetry, fiction, and non-fiction works, some of which, as already mentioned, have been very rewarding. And, behind all the renaissance antiques and really grand decorative wall paintings, one can see very modern electrical wall switches and the latest in vinyl baseboards above the ancient Italian tiles on the floor.

The modest price is also surprising given the quality of the text. While the best reason to buy this book may be to embark on an interior-decorating project aimed at emulating Italian decorative style; the real value of the book is for the reader. How many travel writers make references to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology which is best known as the theoretical underpinning of Existentialism, even though it is primarily a doctrine of epistemology, which is a study of what we can know. And, the Mayes are expert at crafting words to bring the experience of both ancient and modern Tuscany about as close to us as possible without an airline ticket to Florence. I even found a little error in medieval sociology interesting as Ms. Mayes was speculating on the closeness of houses in the Tuscan villages, speculating that the Italians rejoiced in simply being close to one another. My college history professor had a much more probable explanation in stating that this was done to conserve arable land for farming, where every square food of soil was valuable for the food it could produce.

I was pleased to discover that while Ms. Mayes is involved in a business partnership with an American furniture company in cooperation to design a line of Tuscan inspired products, there is but one small reference to this arrangement and no evidence of any commercial inducements benefiting this relationship anywhere else in the book. This is not to say there are no commercial references at all. The appendices to the book contain references to numerous…

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