T.A.E.’s Book Review – Easy Concrete: 43 DIY Projects for Home & Garden by Malena Skote

Malena Skote’s Easy Concrete: 43 DIY Projects for Home & Garden is a surprisingly graceful book for a material so often associated with heaviness. Published in 2010 and circulated in English-language editions under both Lark Books and New Holland, it presents concrete not as brute substance but as a medium for domestic invention. Library and bookseller descriptions consistently frame the book as a practical introduction to molding, finishing, and decorating, with projects ranging from outdoor pots and candleholders to garden benches and a compost bin. 

What gives the book its appeal is the way it converts a traditionally industrial material into a language of intimacy and craft. The pitch is direct: concrete is “easier than most do-it-yourselfers imagine,” and the instructions are presented as simple enough to guide readers through molds made of cardboard, wood, and metal, as well as hypertufa, a lighter concrete mixture using peat moss. That practical clarity is important, but the deeper charm lies in the book’s implied argument that making is a form of re-seeing: the ordinary garden object becomes a sculptural event, and utility is never allowed to feel boring. 

As a craft book, it seems to value legibility over mystery, yet the title’s promise of “easy” should not be mistaken for blandness. In the book’s own framing, the appeal is not merely that the projects are achievable, but that they are “spectacular and practical” at once. That pairing matters. It suggests a design ethos in which usefulness is not the enemy of beauty, and the handmade object is judged by both its function and its capacity to transform a space. In literary terms, the book’s rhetoric is almost democratic: it invites readers to imagine themselves as makers without first demanding professional fluency. 

If there is a limitation, it is the one shared by many well-made instructional books: its voice is more demonstrative than exploratory. The emphasis falls on how to do, not on why concrete, specifically, carries such aesthetic charge. Still, that restraint may be the book’s strength. It lets the material speak through process, and in doing so it gives concrete an unexpected literary life: hard, mutable, utilitarian, and oddly lyrical in its stubborn permanence. 

Overall, Easy Concrete is best read as a celebration of matter made hospitable. It is a handbook, yes, but also a quiet manifesto for the handmade landscape—one in which the backyard can become a studio, and the most unromantic of substances can be persuaded into elegance.