Open Your Eyes: 1,000 Simple Ways To Bring Beauty Into Your Home And Life Each Day - Hardcover

Stoddard, Alexandra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688159044 ISBN 13: 9780688159047

Publisher: William Morrow, 1998

Synopsis

For thirty-seven years and in nineteen previous books, Alexandra Stoddard has shared her keen eye for design and sure sense of style. Now this renowned decorator and lifestyle philosopher takes readers to a new level of visual awareness, showing how to achieve the discerning eye that is the key to creating beautiful environments for living.

In Open Your Eyes, Alexandra Stoddard shows us how to see with the expertise and clarity of professional designers, creating a home that reflects our individual sense of beauty, refined to its best expression. She reveals how to use daily awareness to educate our eye, sharing examples from the masters and her own extensive training and personal experience. These visual epiphanies can happen anywhere, once we become attuned-perhaps as we set a pretty table, straighten a linen closer, stroll in a park or garden, or browse in a thrift shop.

Through Stoddard's anecdotes and a rich array of ideas, tips, and techniques, we learn hundreds of ways to see and solve problems of proportion, pattern, color, and composition through simple, pleasing changes. These may be as subtle as rearranging treasured objects on a table, altering a lamp shade, or moving a chair-but they have dramatic results: a home that is more beautiful, more comfortable, and more useful, reflecting our unique sense of life. Each day becomes a visual feast as we deepen our understanding not only of what makes something beautiful but of what makes something beautiful to us.

Filled with the warmth, encouragement, and down-to-earth solutions that have helped hundreds of thousands to seek and find their own personal style, Alexandra Stoddard's Open Your Eyes provides essential tools to elevate our understanding of what makes our house a home and transform our surroundings into personal works of art.

For thirty-seven years and in nineteen previous books, Alexandra Stoddard has shared her keen eye for design and her sure sense of elegant style. Now this renowned decorator takes readers to a new level of visual awareness, showing how to achieve the discerning view that is the key to creating beautiful environments of professional quality.

Open Your Eyes teaches, step by step, the principles of proportion, scale, order, symmetry, balance, space, form, composition, material, and more that provide the basis for true beauty. Stoddard shows how to use daily awareness to educate our eye, sharing examples from visual mentors and from her own training and experience. Each day becomes a visual feast as we hone our sensitivity to beauty and our understanding of what makes something beautiful.

The author invites us to open our eyes and really see: How many colors are in a sunset? A glass of water? The soap bubbles in the sink? Why does one room look cramped and inharmonious, while another gives the impression of light and space? And how can we use this new vision to create a pleasing, comfortable personal world? In the process of learning to train our eye, Alexandra Stoddard enables us to become the artists of life. With this book in hand, we have all the essential tools to begin transforming our homes and our surroundings into personal works of art.

About this title

About the Author

Author of twenty-four books, Alexandra Stoddard is a sought-after speaker on the art of living. Through her lectures, articles, and books such as Living a Beautiful Life, Things I Want My Daughters to Know, Time Alive, Grace Notes, Open Your Eyes, and Feeling at Home, she has inspired millions to pursue more fulfilling lives. She lives with her husband in New York City and Stonington Village, Connecticut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Seeking the Ideal

Proportion and Scale

Beauty and art pervade all the affairs of life like some friendly genius, and embellish with their cheer all our surroundings. -HEGEL

Making the most of our lives, preserving harmony in our surroundings, and loving what we have and see is the most satisfactory way to live. Just as the satisfactory relationship of one person to another results in comfort, peace and joy, so does the satisfactory relationship of ideal proportion and scale. As in relationships, there is stability in proper proportion and scale that leads to pleasure and sensible living, health and ease. My aim in this chapter is to transform the way you see everyday life, as well as what you do and how you live as a result.

The difference between living and half living is seeing well, looking for associations between things, seeking the connections, being aware of scale and proportion. If it is true that what you seek you find, then it is also true that what you see you find. When you see well, you enjoy the beauty of the world rather than seeing only half the treasures around you.

Proportion and scale are the tools for achieving this harmonious ideal. Their benevolent effects are all around you. Not too much, not too little. Not too high, not too low. Not too fat, not too thin; not too sweet, not too sour; not too loud, not too faint; not too busy, not too bland; not too garish, not too dull; not too extravagant, not too stingy. We know the world is not perfect. But if we can see ideal proportion -- the relationship of things to themselves -- and if we can see scale -- the size of objects on their own -- we will be better equipped to see that a rich life is out there, ours for the seeing and learning. When you seek the ideal, understanding the relationships among people and objects around you, beauty is wherever you are.

Let scale and proportion help you to become a seer; with your eyes and brain answering to your own highest conception of the ideal.

Copyright (c) 1998 by Alexandra Stoddard

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0688159044
• ISBN 13: 9780688159047
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336