Create a relaxed, comfortable home for you and guests.
Forget using the front door or eating dinner in the dining room. Today, we live in a casual, no-tie-required fashion where we dress down for work, put our feet up on the coffee table, and entertain in our kitchens. We no longer sit down to a formal dinner, but rather fire up the barbecue on the back patio. Our lives have become increasingly informal, and now our homes are following suit.
The 24 houses featured in The Barefoot Home reflect today's barefoot times. From a long, low house on the Kansas prairie to an adobe home in New Mexico and a New England cottage by the sea, these homes capture the essence of barefoot living.
With The Barefoot Home: Dressed-Down Design for Casual Living, you'll find ideas to make your home as comfortable as a pair of well-worn jeans.
From the Introduction:
Kick off your shoes. Relax. Take it easy. But don't wait until you go on vacation. Get comfortable in your everyday home.
Open up. Feel the breeze blowing through your house. Feel the warm sun on your toes, the cool tiled floor, the polished wood planks on the back deck. Pad around your uncluttered house, slipping easily from room to room. Cook and eat and live in one big space. Sleep peacefully with doors thrown open to the garden.
Embrace the sun. Make your windows and doors really big, with lots of glass. Let sunlight pour in through clerestories, skylights, and transom windows. Curl up in a window seat, tiptoe through an open colonnade, catch the view from a sun-drenched veranda. Stretch your arms-and your house-up into the light.
Live outside as well as in. Open whole walls to the outdoors, extend the roof outward, let the floor slip seamlessly outside to become a deck. Cook and eat on the patio, build a fire in an outdoor fireplace, take a nap in a hanging bed on the porch. Plant a kitchen garden right beside your house. Run through the wet grass to get to your backyard studio.
Adopt a barefoot state of mind. Be glad you live in a warm climate, move to one, dream of moving to one, or act like you're in one even if you're not. Use every room in the house every day. Think informal thoughts. Simplify. Live outside when you can, bring the outside feeling inside when you can't. Never forget how good it feels to have sand between your toes.
Contents:
Chapter 1: The Barefoot Manifesto. Chapter 2: Barefoot Dreams. Chapter 3: Letting the Light In. Chapter 4: House and Garden Are One. Chapter 5: Barefoot under a Big Roof. Chapter 6: Opening Up in New England. Chapter 7: Alfresco Oasis in the City. Chapter 8: Barefoot Cubed. Chapter 9: Building Upward and Outward. Chapter 10: Open to the Breeze. Chapter 11: A Plan for Coming Together. Chapter 12: Farmhouse on the Beach. Chapter 13: Barefoot out Back. Chapter 14: Growing Barefoot over Time. Chapter 15: Barefoot on the Prairie. Chapter 16: Living Room as Town Square. Chapter 17: Slice of Life. Chapter 18: A Feel for Natural Materials. Chapter 19: Barefoot Casita. Chapter 20: A Simple Summerhouse. Chapter 21: The Warmth of Sun and Earth. Chapter 22: Barefoot Garage. Chapter 23: Stay-at-Home Summer Camp. Chapter 24: Barefoot by Choice. Chapter 25: Uncluttered Home, Uncluttered Life. Chapter 26: Architects and Designers.
