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

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 EXPERTISE: 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 SPACE: 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 OWN: 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 & PRACTICAL: 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 for:

• Design-minded people and those who love to apply design ideas to their home and work spaces
• Anyone seeking inspiration for organizing, cleaning, decluttering, or simplifying their surroundings  
• Those who work from home full-time or part-time as well as for business leaders who want fresh ideas for boosting employee morale and productivity
• Fans of Marie Kondo and her popular organization books and Netflix reality shows
• Birthday, anniversary, holiday, or retirement gift for readers of Calm the Chaos, The Home Edit, or Spark Joy

Olga Trusova is a designer, design consultant, and teacher originally from Ukraine. She founded the design strategy consultancy Blulab and the lifestyle company Airismer, and has taught design thinking at Stanford University, California College of the Arts, and General Assembly. She has collaborated with a range of major organizations on design strategy, including Nordstrom, Starbucks, JetBlue, IDEO, SFMOMA, and Kaiser Permanente. She is based in San Francisco, California.