Calm Living: Simple Design Transformations to Fill Your Spaces with Tranquility

by Olga Trusova

Designing Your Life meets  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up in this guide to creating a space that promotes calm, clarity, and positivity.

Discover how simple changes can make any room—and its inhabitants—feel more inspired, clear, and energetic. Designer and Stanford instructor Olga Trusova's practical and inspiring guide offers easy-to-follow tips for cultivating a calming environment at home or at work.

Using the principles of design thinking, Trusova distills essential design wisdom, revealing how to use light, color, sound, furniture, and more to make simple, intentional changes for a profound impact on your mind, body, and spirit. Illuminating examples, accessible tips, and short exercises reveal how easy it is to transform a space, whether you're targeting a small corner or multiple rooms. Brimming with smart, digestible design tips and life-changing techniques, this stylish handbook makes a lovely self-purchase or gift for creatives, design enthusiasts, at-home workers, and anyone looking for simple, proven ways to design a soothing space.

AUTHOR This book is based on author Olga Trusova's work as a design consultant and as a teacher at Stanford University, where she focuses on a human-centered approach to problem-solving called "design thinking." Here she distills the tenets of design thinking and empowers readers to problem-solve like designers so that they can create soothing spaces that reflect their taste, values, and needs.
 
IMPROVED LIVE/WORK In today's era of remote work, it is essential to have a work-from-home space that encourages calm, inspiration, and clarity. This resource is filled with helpful tips for creating organized, productive spaces, making it a must-read for the anyone who works from home.
 
FOR ANY SPACE YOU CALL YOUR This book offers concrete, easy-to-follow tips. You can pick the advice that works for you and your space, whether you’re a renter, a homeowner, or someone looking to improve an office space.
 
ACCESSIBLE & This book is written for a wide range of readers, from design enthusiasts to people with no design experience looking for easy ways to transform their space. The guidance is encouraging and achievable, and the practical design suggestions are accessible and doable, ensuring the book will be useful for anyone, including small space dwellers, DIYers, and new homeowners or renters.

Perfect

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction

168 pages, Hardcover

Published March 7, 2023

Reviews

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are some reviews on here that are missing the point. This is a very pretty Chronicle Book, however it should be treated like a workbook and you should follow the exercises. It inspired me to re-design my studio space and the room’s energy flows much better because of the cleanup.

[Marianna · Rating 2 out of 5]

A design book with no pictures is…odd.

[Kat Drennan-Scace · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of good ideas, but it’s all over the place. It deals with both work spaces and home spaces, and designing spaces for all sorts of purposes (ie focused spaces for work) not just for calm. I do feel like it’s mistitled. Also, no photos, even when she’s referencing a specific home or office, which is odd. I understand not wanting a book to become dated with interior design photos but when referencing specific places, a photo is needed.
I did screen cap some things to try, mostly at work, so calling it a 3 star.

[Elva Carri · Rating 1 out of 5]

Title is misleading IMO. It's almost entirely focused on work and workspaces. Tips to support creating new ideas, brainstorming, collaboration etc.

It could MAYBE be titled Calm Working, but because it is so much about ideas and inspiration and collaboration, and I feel those are energetic things, I don't even think that title works.

The book is very aesthetically pleasing. Love the cover, size, layout, hardback, everything. But as well as being badly titled, I felt the content was really poor quality. Cringingly basic. Suggests making boards on Pinterest at least twice - once was too much.

Also felt like an exceedingly privileged perspective, stories of people using €50 porcelain mugs and suggestions to work in a room with a higher ceiling.

[Lizzy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I learned nothing from this. These sorts of books rarely offer a ton of new stuff, but this was laughable. The most basic generic tips. Too many descriptions of her rich friends and their fancy lives, too much name-dropping. I’m not calmed or inspired by hearing about overpaid CEOs counting rice to center themselves. Also, the tips are supposed to help any living situation but so much of her story telling was about people who built custom homes in Hawaii or corporations. Plus, there were no photos or diagrams or anything practical. We just had to imagine how effective her help is I guess. And if I had to read about the pretentious sounding “d.school” one more time…

[Abbygail · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed the "walk the walk" energy this book brought. The design for reading is as formative as the design tips and ideas inside. I found a lot of this book to be focused not on the space but on the ritual and energy of space. It occasionally discusses specific areas (workspace, living room, etc.). Still, the idea was that these calming skills could be exercised in every space to invite your own calm around you with creativity and focus.

[Leah Kauffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a practical design workbook full of tips and tricks for calm living and working. It really helped my LA apartment feel more serene yet set up for working from home. Some things are practical yet transformational and are based on the author’s experience at Stanford and in corporate environments. I would treat it more like a design guide with a range of exercises to try out.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

an easy to read book - with more exerices and questions to ask than actual guidelines.
more helpful to create a space that reflects you and your needs.

[Joe Arillaga · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a design student and was recommended this book. It’s a great workbook (not coffee table book) with practical exercises and both home and work examples.