Where to find home inspiration for 2019
From grow your own to minimalist grace, house and garden books have long been a tactile pleasure. They’re filled with practical advice, lofty ideals and gorgeous photos of sumptuous homes.
Here are the latest books inspiring the Habitat team.
Living With Air Plants
By Yoshiharu Kashima and Yukihiro Matsuda
(Tuttle)
With the subtitle A Beginner’s Guide to Growing and Displaying Tillandsia, this is the ultimate no-gardening gardening book. Tillandsia are spidery plants that require good air circulation but no soil. With step-by-step photos, Living With Air Plants shows how these captivating botanical marvels grow and thrive, how to cultivate and creative display ideas. The latter part of the book is dedicated to a reference guide identifying varieties, including those recommended for beginners, the rare, the difficult to care for and the painfully prickly.
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The Farm Community
By Emma and Tom Lane
(Hardie Grant Books)
Once farms could be a place of isolation. Now the dream is that to farm is to connect. To connect to each other, to the land and to where our food comes from. Emma and Tom yearned for that connection and for a simpler life and their dream has created its own community in the Byron Bay hinterland. Their book is filled with both inspiration and practical ways in which we can all live more sustainably. Profiles of people from The Farm sit alongside growing advice, breakout pieces on beekeeping, fishing and foraging, as well as recipes to complete the circle.
Milkwood
By Kirsten Bradley and Nick Ritar
(Murdoch Books)
Milkwood is in a similar vein, though it takes just five topics and explores them in more depth to provide a collection of useful manuals on tomatoes, mushrooms, beekeeping, seaweed and wild food. Each subject is explored with gorgeous photographs and illustrated diagrams as well as detailed instructions to give the reader a head start on skills, some of which have fallen out of fashion. Seaweed collection, making mushroom scrolls and the rules of foraging do not require large tracts of land but they can, in their tiny way, help our connection to food and environment.
Dreamy Landscapes
By Claire Takacs
(Hardie Grant Books)
Australian Dreamscapes is the sequel or companion volume to Claire Takacs’ Dreamscapes book and carries the same pastel hues and muted palette but this time with Aussie flora in the starring role. Takacs puts the spotlight on both gardens and designers and the result is a stunning ode to biodiversity and texture. Published by Hardie Grant Books, RRP $70.
This is Home: The Art of Simple Living
By Natalie Walton
(Hardie Grant Books)
Authentic. Genuine. Calm. Warm. Considered. You can see where all this is leading from the introduction. For Walton there is a joy to this sparseness — it allows room and mental space to indulge in what is truly important. But there is more here than moral minimalism. It is an ode to place, family and the senses.
“Homes must not start with the end in mind. They need to begin with our story,” Walton writes, warning homebodies to beware online pic galleries and perfectionism.
It is a stunningly stylish book that favours flexibility, sanctuary and ingenuity over fashion. The stories of homeowners around the world — interiors experts in France, an expat rug seller in Marrakech, a family in London — elevate it above mere design inspo.
Slow Down and Grow Something
By Byron Smith and Tess Robinson
(Murdoch Books)
While the images evoke a dreamy life living off the land, this advice is suited to the tentative city dweller who wants to get their hands dirty but doesn’t know where to start.
Horticulturalist Byron Smith is here to harness that enthusiasm and turn it into a productive garden and a dish of home-grown rosemary and rocket pesto.
The first part explains the basics — there are no stupid questions here. Smith breaks down the tasks of the vegie patch into easily digestible bites. Here’s how to assess your climate and space, which potting mix to use and how to plant a tree. There are chapters on raising bees, chickens and worms as well as biodiversity at a glance.
The second half is a combined seasonal planting guide and recipe book. First, plant winter vegies. Then make cabbage and beetroot sauerkraut. Want smoky baba ghanoush? Plant eggplant and parsley and you’re away.
Whether you’re a cook wanting to grow produce or a gardener looking for kitchen inspiration, this is an easy-to-follow handbook to keep nearby.
Melanie Coram
The New Creative Home: London Style
By Talib Choudhry, photographs by Ingrid Rasmussen
(Thames & Hudson)
These homeowners — designers, antique dealers, creative directors — are going for baroque. They have a life-affirming love of the things around them. No pattern is too loud, no texture too much. Stylist Matilda Goad finds dark walls set the mood for entertaining. Fashion designer Matthew Williams labels his kaleidoscopic home “organised bohemia”. Not all the homes displayed are OTT, nor are they exclusively the domain of the rich and spendy. If you love feathers, put them on display. Cut flowers past their prime to create intrigue a la Miss Havisham. If you were looking for an antidote to minimalism overload, this is it.
The Little Book of House Plants and Other Greenery
By Emma Sibley
(Quadrille)
The boom in house plants as decor-companions has created an army of plant lovers. They may be deadset keen but can’t tell a Zanzibar gem from an arrowhead. Each spread includes a brief history and house plant care instructions. Although writing from Britain, it seems Sibley has been peering into Aussie entryways and at our kitchen sills because a familiar cast of characters appears. Some 60 species are featured, with fiddle leaf fig, rubber plant, devil’s ivy and staghorn sitting alongside the more colourful Hawaiian Ti plant, ornamental pineapple and the pretty, purple false shamrock. This ready reckoner can be popped in the shopping bag on the way to the nursery or to raid a friend’s garden.
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