Does your home inspire creativity and express your own? Here are 10 interior design books to inspire a more creative home.
Interior design is about making the most out of a room’s potential to not only improve the experience but also align aesthetics and use with goals. By aligning interior design with creativity, not only does a home become an expression of one’s self but also a place of inspiration.
Creativity isn’t just something you do in the workplace. It’s something you express and feed in every moment. If you want to be more creative, start by looking at your lifestyle and adding elements of creativity to your everyday life. This is the zen are of creative living.
My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation by Donald Rattner features 48 Techniques and over 200 high-quality photos of interiors from around the world, many of the work of top-tier architects, designers, and creatives to boost your creativity at home, according to science.
For over twenty years, scientists have been discovering connections between our physical surroundings and the creative mind. Written by a noted architect, My Creative Space is the first book to turn this rich trove of psychological research into practical techniques for shaping a home that will boost your creativity.
Learn:
- Which colors lead to peak creative performance
- How furniture affects idea flow
- Pros and cons of messy versus neat environments
- Optimal lighting and noise levels for achieving insights
- How memorabilia can break creative logjams
- Why ceiling height matters
- Which scents improve creative problem solving
Whether you pursue creativity for pleasure or profit, whether you’re a writer, entrepreneur, work in a creative industry, or simply enjoy doing creative things, this book will help you do them better. No prior expertise in design psychology is required!
Inspired by Nature: Creating a Personal and Natural Interior by Hans Blomquist explores the essential components of a well-loved home and the power of nature to inspire well-being and happiness.
It’s long been known that nature has many benefits for the creative mind. From plants that boost creative thinking to the mood-boosting benefits of time in nature, bringing green into your home and creative workspace inspires.
Celebrated director and stylist Hans Blomquist has nature at the heart of his decorating philosophy in this interior design book to expand on the connection between our home environment and emotional wellbeing. The book first teaches these philosophies and then goes on a tour of real-life homes that possess a sense of comfort, contentment, and beauty and will inspire the reader to create a home that offers a refuge from the wider world as well as the perfect place to welcome family and friends.
Living with Color: Inspiration and How-Tos to Brighten Up Your Home by Rebecca Atwood is an inspiring manual on adding color to your creative home.
In Living with Color, you’ll tour beautifully designed homes to see some of the most interesting uses of the rainbow and to gather inspiration for your own spaces. You’ll train your eye to notice how color lives all around you, from the pink light bouncing off a building you see every day to the exact blue of the ocean on your last getaway. You can even learn how to express yourself through your own custom palette with Rebecca’s accessible, illustrated overview of color theory. As you embark on your color hunt and begin to trust your own instincts, Living with Color will embolden you to breathe life into every part of your home.
Life Meets Art: Inside the Homes of the World’s Most Creative People by Sam Lubell is an inspiring collection of the extraordinary private spaces of 250 of the world’s most creative people, past and present.
Life Meets Art presents an unparalleled, global, behind-the-scenes tour through 250 beautiful interiors from the homes of the most creative people in art, architecture, design, fashion, literature, music, film, and theatre. See where the greatest creatives in history lived their lives, honed their crafts, and, in many cases, produced some of the world’s most celebrated masterpieces — providing an intimate and insightful perspective on the masters that define art history.
Creative Spaces Include:
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Charles Dickens
- Frank Lloyd Wright
- Eileen Gray
- Pablo Picasso
- Henry Moore
- Ernest Hemingway
- William Faulkner
- Agatha Christie
- Louis Armstrong
- Francisco Clemente
- Cornelia Parker
- Moby
- Jimmy Page
- David Bowie
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondō has quickly become one of the most influential interior design and lifestyle books that’s even inspired a Netflix hit series.
Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you’ll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate a room-by-room or little-by-little approach, which doom you to pick away at your piles of stuff forever. The KonMari Method, with its revolutionary category-by-category system, leads to lasting results. In fact, none of Kondo’s clients have lapsed (and she still has a three-month waiting list).
With detailed guidance for determining which items in your house “spark joy” (and which don’t), this international bestseller will help you clear your clutter and enjoy the unique magic of a tidy home—and the calm, motivated mindset it can inspire.
A Well-Crafted Home: Inspiration and 60 Projects for Personalizing Your Space by Janet Crowther is a beautiful and practical craft book for both aspiring and seasoned DIY makers interested in decorating their homes through creative projects.
A Well-Crafted Home includes simple, creative details that will tailor creative spaces to your taste. More than just “DIY” crafts, these carefully designed projects call for good materials like linen, leather, and wood, so the finished product will last you a lifetime. Ranging from beginner to more advanced, each item elevates a room in a way you’d never expect: a large-scale painting with an effortless “dot” design looks like a modern piece of art, flax linen bedding sewn with a few easy seams is a gorgeous way to set off the bed (and is more affordable than you would think), and a copper pipe rack for hanging clothes is so pretty, you’ll want to keep it on display.
The Creative Home: Inspiring Ideas for Beautiful Living by Geraldine James shares how to reinvent your creative home with new and exciting ways to make it uniquely yours and all inspiring.
The Creative Home brings together the best of Geraldine James’s Creative series of books and shows how to apply these ideas in your own home. There are four chapters on different areas of the house. Each chapter features rooms of different styles, from sleek and minimal, to Aladdin’s caves belonging to collectors of anything and everything, thrifty chic-style rooms furnished with second-hand buys, and renovated homes with no expense spared—as well as displays featuring designer items alongside inherited family heirlooms. However, the one thing every room has in common, whatever its style or purpose, is that it has been furnished and decorated with great attention to detail.
This is Home: The Art of Simple Living by Natalie Walton is a back-to-basics guide on how to create authentic wholehearted interiors.
This is Home is about living simply. Learn how to find the essence of what makes you happy at home and create spaces that reflect your needs and style. Filled with clever ideas and creative spaces it shows that you don’t need a huge budget to create a beautiful home. This is Home provides examples and case studies of places with a global and timeless feel that haven’t always been renovated in the traditional sense but are true homes.
Featuring 16 case studies from Australia, the US, and Europe, and nearly 200 color photographs, This is Home will inspire you with beautiful, authentic places you want to be – today.
Learn
- How to determine your decorating personality and what’s authentic for you.
- How to think creatively, not expensively, when it comes to making changes at home. Going beyond the usual suspects can help you to create a home that’s distinctively yours.
- Key ideas to consider when creating your place in relation to its environment – from the surrounding landscape to the local community.
- Ways to evolve what’s important for you and keep focused on your aesthetic and lifestyle.
- How our homes can function as a place to rest our bodies, rejoice in our relationships and restore our values.
Travel Home: Design with a Global Spirit by Caitlin Flemming and Julie Goebel explores 20 sophisticated homes of designers deeply influenced by their international adventures abroad.
Travel Home teaches you how to curate interiors that reflect your favorite travel destinations and experiences in ways that are beautiful and authentic. Tour homes of leaders in global design who share a deep affection for travel. Explore interiors with influences as widespread as Marrakesh, Paris, Cuba, Tokyo, Portugal, and beyond. Vivid photography is supplemented with insightful essays, interviews, and hardworking tips for cultivating your own global home.
For globetrotters and armchair travelers alike, Travel Home showcases the interplay between travel and design, revealing how we can take inspiration from the beauty we experience in the world and bring it into our everyday lives.
Down to Earth: Laid-back Interiors for Modern Living by Lauren Liess is an elevated yet accessible follow-up to Lauren Liess’s Habitat, showcasing her signature easy-living lifestyle.
While Habitat walked readers through the decorating process step-by-step, Down to Earth takes a step beyond the basics and invites readers to incorporate the main components of her familiar design aesthetic: nature, easy living, and approachability. With evocative photos and substantive design advice, Down to Earth focuses on creating a lifestyle that inspires creativity and functionality.
Creative Spaces: People, Homes, and Studios to Inspire by Ted Vadakan and Angie Myung is the debut book from the acclaimed Los Angeles lifestyle brand Poketo.
Creative Spaces: People, Homes, and Studios to Inspire explores the lives, homes, and studios of 23 artistic entrepreneurs, authors, and designers. From a colorful desk in a tiny closet to expansive homes, Creative Spaces features a collection of unique interiors from across the country.
Creative Spaces Include:
- Adam J. Kurtz
- Helen Levi
- DJ Peanut Butter Wolf
- Sono Sakai
The Maverick Soul: Portraits of the Lives & Homes of Eccentric, Eclectic & Free-Spirited Bohemians by Miv Watts opens the doors to twenty-five authentic bohemian homes occupied by some of the world’s most inspirational free spirits.
Look into the creative homes of artists, musicians, writers, actors, stylists, farmers, and more in this collection of homes belonging to creative people who dare to live life on their own terms and are comfortable in their own skin. From Paris to London, Sydney to New York, and various other places across the globe, subjects include Marianne Faithfull, Simon Finch, Wendy Whiteley, Griffin Dunne, Linda Rodin, and more. No one person is a reproduction of another; each of us is unique, shaped by the diversities of our own individual layers, and this book is a celebration of just that.
Zach is an international writer, photographer, filmmaker, martial artist, and creator of Creative Enso, the Zen art of creative living. His goal is to empower and inspire creatives to live healthier, happier, and more creative lifestyles.
