Carol Stangler’s The Craft & Art of Bamboo: 30 Eco-Friendly Projects to Make for Home & Garden is, at heart, a book about persuasion: it asks the reader to see bamboo not as a decorative novelty, but as a living medium with history, utility, and aesthetic dignity. The revised and updated 2009 edition presents itself … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – The Craft & Art of Bamboo: 30 Eco-Friendly Projects to Make for Home & Garden by Carol Stangler
T.A.E.’s Book Review – Reclaiming Style – Using Salvaged Materials to Create an Elegant Home by Maria Speake & Adam Hills
Reclaiming Style is less a conventional interiors manual than a persuasive meditation on what a home can mean when it is built from memory, repair, and intelligent reuse. The book promises to take readers “behind the scenes,” and that phrase is exact: its drama lies not only in the finished rooms, but in the scavenging, … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – Reclaiming Style – Using Salvaged Materials to Create an Elegant Home by Maria Speake & Adam Hills
T.A.E.’s (The Adaptable Educator) Book Review – The Ultimate Basket Book: A Cornucopia of Popular Designs to Make by Lyn Siler
The Ultimate Basket Book: A Cornucopia of Popular Designs to Make (2006) presents itself as an expansive, practical craft volume: it combines The Basket Book and Handmade Baskets, adds ten extra projects, and includes new colour photography. The edition is listed as a 192-page book published by Lark Books in New York, and the available … Continue reading T.A.E.’s (The Adaptable Educator) Book Review – The Ultimate Basket Book: A Cornucopia of Popular Designs to Make by Lyn Siler
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Shopkeeper’s Home: The World’s Best Independent Retailers and Their Stylish Homes by Caroline Rowland
Caroline Rowland’s The Shopkeeper’s Home: The World’s Best Independent Retailers and Their Stylish Homes reads at first like a beautifully curated cabinet of curiosities — a procession of storefronts and private interiors that insist, by virtue of their arrangement and photography, on a particular kind of attention. But read more closely, and Rowland’s book does … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Shopkeeper’s Home: The World’s Best Independent Retailers and Their Stylish Homes by Caroline Rowland
The. Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Naked Clay: Ceramics without a Glaze by Jane Perryman
Jane Perryman’s Naked Clay arrives as both manifesto and love letter: a careful, persuasive case for the expressive potency of unglazed ceramics and a sustained meditation on what a surface — left deliberately “bare” — reveals about process, place, and person. The book is at once practical and philosophical, moving between shop-floor particulars (clay bodies, … Continue reading The. Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Naked Clay: Ceramics without a Glaze by Jane Perryman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
At once primer and manifesto, Good Bones, Great Pieces stakes a modest but ambitious claim: a home’s durability—its capacity to endure fashions, life changes and moves—depends less on trend-chasing than on a coherent set of flexible, well-chosen objects. Suzanne and Lauren McGrath, a mother–daughter design team steeped in editorial and television worlds, lay out that … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Good Bones, Great Pieces: The Seven Essential Pieces That Will Carry You Through a Lifetime by Suzanne and Lauren McGrath
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
Tamara Maynes’ The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space is at once a manifesto for tactile domesticity and a practical handbook for anyone who wants their home to read like a lived, handcrafted archive. Maynes—who writes from the vantage of a practitioner—treats making not as a hobby but as a mode of seeing: an attentiveness to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Maker: Crafting a Unique Space by Tamara Maynes
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Creating the Vintage Look: 35 ways to upcycle for a stylish home by Ellie Laylock
Ellie Laylock’s Creating the Vintage Look arrives as a gentle manifesto for the second life of things. Part practical handbook, part elegy for the handcrafted object, the book stages thirty-five projects that read as short essays in material culture: each one a measured argument for keeping, altering, and celebrating the past rather than erasing it. … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Creating the Vintage Look: 35 ways to upcycle for a stylish home by Ellie Laylock
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi-Sabi House by Robyn Griggs Lawrence
Robyn Griggs Lawrence’s Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi-Sabi House is at once modest and insistent: modest in scale and encomiastic of everyday materials, insistent in its claim that the ethics and aesthetics of wabi-sabi belong not to museums or museums-of-taste but to ordinary domestic practice. The book performs a careful, corrective gesture — it reframes … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Simply Imperfect: Revisiting the Wabi-Sabi House by Robyn Griggs Lawrence
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Chairs: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs by Ray Hemachandra
500 Chairs: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs, edited by Ray Hemachandra, offers both the aficionado and the casual reader a panoramic survey of seating as a sculptural, functional, and cultural artefact. Structured into thematic chapters—ranging from “Frameworks of Form” to “Innovations in Materiality”—the volume showcases five centuries of chair design, from the humble Windsor to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 500 Chairs: Celebrating Traditional & Innovative Designs by Ray Hemachandra
The New Renaissance Mindset 