Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure [Paperback]

Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 2006

From not enough space and too many things to not knowing what color to paint the living room walls, many of us struggle with our homes. Now Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, frequent makeover expert on HGTV’s Mission: Organization and Small Spaces, Big Style, shares the do-it-yourself strategies that have enabled his clients and fans to transform their apartments into well-organized, beautiful places that suit their style and budget.

Week by week, Apartment Therapy will guide you to treat common problems, eliminate clutter, and revamp even the tiniest space. Here is an eight-step process that includes:

A therapeutic questionnaire to help you get in touch with your personal taste and diagnose your home’s physical, emotional, and energy flow issues

A prescription with recommendations for each room based on your needs and lifestyle–including tips on how to use color, lighting, and accessories

A treatment plan, including regular maintenance schedules to ensure the ongoing health of your space

Illustrations of floor plans and decorative examples that allow you to visualize concepts before you begin

With surprising ease and without elaborate professional help, Apartment Therapy will help you clear a path through disorder and indecision–to reveal a home you’ll love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

New York-based interior designer Gillingham-Ryan is out to prove that even the dreariest, no-view walk-up can be transformed into a cozy urban oasis using his "eight-step home cure." The unflaggingly enthusiastic author asks readers to "listen" to their apartments-appraising what he refers to as the bones, breath, heart and head of the space-before determining ways to streamline. Despite the decorator's forays into psycho-babble, his advice proves practical as he teaches readers how to determine a makeover budget, de-clutter, liberate themselves from a lifetime of accumulated possessions and choose paint hues. Gillingham-Ryan's belief that the right lighting can "create warmth and visual movement" leads to more helpful advice on choosing the right fixtures, the different types of light and the virtues of high-end candles. No housing revival would be complete without a party, so Gillingham-Ryan shares the most festive recipes in his arsenal, including "Orange Pant's Deadly Simple Chocolate Mousse" and "Margaritas to Make Men and Women Giggle." While the author's ideas may not break new ground, his ebullient, can-do attitude will appeal to readers interested in, but intimidated by, an apartment overhaul.
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Review

"New York-based interior designer Gillingham-Ryan is out to prove that even the dreariest, no-view walk-up can be transformed into a cozy urban oasis using his "eight-step home cure.... Ebullient!"--Publishers Weekly

“What a refreshing decorating book! Apartment Therapy is a must-read for creating your perfect nest. Fire your shrink and follow Maxwell's eight-step therapeutic cure!”--Jonathan Adler, potter, designer, and author of My Prescription for Anti-Depressive Living

"Decorating a home is just plain stressful! Maxwell's book offers a way out; it's like hiring a pro (without the attitude or expense). He takes us by the hand and gently guides us through the entire process, from coming up with a plan to executing it without going broke. Whether you're just dipping in for a quick hit of inspiration, or committing to the whole eight week cure, your home -- and life -- will be better because of it."--Angela Matusik, Editor-in-Chief, Budget Living Magazine

"Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan's Apartment Therapy is refreshing in its point of view–your house has to work for you from the inside out. Gillingham-Ryan encourages readers to really take a good look at where they are at home and how they can improve the quality of their lives.”--Wendy Goodman, interior design editor, New York Magazine

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Bantam (March 28, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553383124
• ISBN-13: 978-0553383126
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.6 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #81,401 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

71 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Great Recipe, June 15, 2006

By 

scraplolly - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure (Paperback)

As a reviewer previously noted, there really isn't anything new here. But like a chef who takes ingredients we are well familiar with and combines them to give us a new experience, so too does Maxwell. There are the little gimmicks--calling people warm and cool, talking about the house like a body when he could just say he's writing about attending to repairs (bones), arranging and organizing the stuff in your space (breath), figuring out the functions of each room (head) and decorating (heart). But this is not a meal of last night's leftovers. Instead it is packaged into another gimmick: the eight week cure. There's a lot to do in your eight weeks: and the work seems unbalanced. It starts out slowly (throwing out one thing, making lists) and ends slowly (preparing for a party) but in the middle there's almost an impossible amount of things to do. But it's all laid out. There are worksheets and practical tips to begin. Maxwell has taken all the steps to transforming a living space and laid them all out sequentially. This book is about more than just fixing up your place however: Maxwell aims to change and enrich your experience of your home. And that's the spice that makes the book worth consuming.

This book is also something else. It's a primer for a web site and blog. It sets out the vocabulary and explains the aims of hundreds of people who have already participated in the first on-line cure. Like Marla Cilley's Sink Reflections, the book functions as a portal to the collective on-line experience. There are no lush photographs in the book.They are on the web site.

More than anything, though, Maxwell writes his prose well and in such a way that one feels inspired to tackle transforming one's home and experience in it. I'm not in a small apartment in the city---but a small house in a city whose burbs are ever expanding outwards. I don't need to start cooking at home--as he recommends--but taking those wonderful morning baths he advocates. It'll be a challenge to implement the cure for my home and it will take longer than eight weeks. Nonetheless, he has inspired me to do all he counsels and for that reason I recommend the book.

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Really helps, August 6, 2006

By 

M. "teagurl327" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure (Paperback)

Unlike a lot of other books about design and interior spaces, this one doesn't give you photos and examples of what you can do with the space... it really helps you evaluate what it is you feel/have with your living space and steps to take to make it into the space you feel better living in. It's as insightful into your self as it is where you live.

55 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A mixed bag, really., November 1, 2007

By 

Ange Anderson "American Thighs" (Mars) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure (Paperback)

While I didn't dislike the book with quite the venom of other reviewers, I do understand their frustrations. I did find the tone a little off-putting, but I decided to put those feeling aside and see if the book had anything useful to offer.

It does and it doesn't. Like many design/decorating book it suffers from a lack of realistic understanding of its audience. Let's face it, anyone seeking design advice and is only ponying up 14 bucks, probably isn't the same kind of person who would spend 3000.00 on a couch.

still there is some excellent advice for clearing cluttering and making your home more of a refuge. And for the people that didn't enjoy the book, you can just toss it, sell it or give it away (which is what the author recommending doing with books you don't love.)

Bottom line: it can get you motivated to live more simply and if you can ignore the classist attitudes about what kind of decor best suits a home and how NYC centric the book is you might be able to find a few bits of advice worth taking.