Relaxed Living Happy Home

This beautiful book was first published in 2015 and I remember vividly buying my copy of Keeping it Simple, it now has well worn pages as I read it often and use it as a reference point.  It brings such happiness when I turn the pages so I was delighted that it has been republished with a new cover image and title as the content is still so relevant today seven years later.

Relaxed Living Happy Home by Atlanta Bartlett and Dave Coote is all about enjoying your home, creating relaxed lived in spaces, being able to balance working and living in your home.  Guiding you to simplify life, ignoring fashion trends and embracing sustainable relaxed living.  The husband and wife team believe a home should be sustainable and not cost the earth, putting materialism to be the back burner and focusing on recycling, decluttering, make do and mend and to be totally in tune with the natural world around us.  It’s so good to see that all of these elements are even more relevant today but still so fresh and inspiring.

The book is a practical but beautiful guide to create a happy home, broken down into three simple sections, the Simple Mindset explains the early stages of the design process encouraging you to think about what home means to you and how you like to live.  Valuing quality over quantity and rediscovering the simple pleasures of life.  Making it Happen focuses on design essentials such as the practicalities from building issues right through to the finishes touches.   Then finally in Living the Dream taking you through room by room sparking ideas and useful suggestions to help you create the perfect interior.

Atlanta is an interior stylist whose signature look is elegant and feminine but very accessible with an easy living touch.  Dave is a furniture and interiors designer well known for his use of reclaimed materials in his work.  Their combined philosophy is about mixing it up, placing old with new, rough with smooth, adding femininity alongside utility.  Both have a strong eco conscious ethic, using reclaimed and repurposed items and celebrating their uniqueness and functionality, nothing is too precious or contrived.

What I love is the true homeliness of this book, their ease at putting together a scheme that looks lived in from the start and the use of unusual pieces that look like they should have always been.  The well worn pages of this publication has given me so many ideas over the years and the confidence to take something ordinary and utilitarian to make it into something special and rather unique for my home.  From scrubbed pine tables, French window shutters as a mantlepiece, French bed linen as wardrobe doors and curtains the list is endless.

If you don’t already have a copy of this beautiful book then I suggest you get yourself a copy as soon as possible.  If you are stuck with a project then its chapters may give you that spark that you need.  Even if its down to helping you declutter and see what you have to refresh a space nothing is wasted as this book so elegantly puts it.

I shall happily be turning its pages once again this weekend, curled up coffee in hand making plans for the next project we can get stuck into!

 

•  With thanks to Atlanta Bartlett and Dave Coote for gifting Relaxed Living Happy Home,  Ryland Peters and Small for publication and Polly Wreford for the beautiful images