This book by James Gauer focuses on more modern dwellings that remind me of east coast apartments and mid-century modern homes in California. Here's some of the quotes from the book that resonated with me:
Simplicity, to paraphrase Edith Wharton, is at home anywhere, but it doesn't just happen. It takes vision and the discipline to pursue it. It takes an ability to establish simple goals and achieve them with simple means. It takes a commitment to creating the sort of harmony that can come only from less rather than more.
To be economical means to do only what is essential. Anything more will only preclude the simplicity that is fundamental to living well. Let go of the nonessential. You are unlikely to miss it, and the freedom will be exhilarating. Less really is more.
Modesty requires us to arrange our homes to suit the real needs of our private lives with no thought of public display. It requires us to embrace the appropriate and the suitable. It requests us to eschew the showy and the unnecessary. And it requires us to reject the notion that our homes must be public indicators of status and ambition. They should instead be private refuges of relaxed suitability.
In a small home there is no room for pretension and the insecurity that feeds it.
"Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them" - Henry David Thoreau
Simplicity, to paraphrase Edith Wharton, is at home anywhere, but it doesn't just happen. It takes vision and the discipline to pursue it. It takes an ability to establish simple goals and achieve them with simple means. It takes a commitment to creating the sort of harmony that can come only from less rather than more.
To be economical means to do only what is essential. Anything more will only preclude the simplicity that is fundamental to living well. Let go of the nonessential. You are unlikely to miss it, and the freedom will be exhilarating. Less really is more.
Modesty requires us to arrange our homes to suit the real needs of our private lives with no thought of public display. It requires us to embrace the appropriate and the suitable. It requests us to eschew the showy and the unnecessary. And it requires us to reject the notion that our homes must be public indicators of status and ambition. They should instead be private refuges of relaxed suitability.
In a small home there is no room for pretension and the insecurity that feeds it.
"Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them" - Henry David Thoreau