Customer Reviews

Open Air Living: Creative Ideas for Stylish Outdoor Living

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This exciting book looks at your yard, patio, balcony or vacation beachfront as a room inside your home. Ideas for decorating and using your outdoor "room" abound - whether it's for making a reading nook or an outdoor bathing retreat.

This goes beyond the usual "spread a nice picnic in a field" or even "have a campout in your own backyard." Those sophomoric ideas are banished in the face of exhortations to hang Chinese lanterns from tree branches, when serving sashimi (from enamel plates) for your own midday Asian Tea Ceremony; moving your computer and desk out to the patio for an al fresco work environment; and turning your old outbuildings into open-fronted art studios and meditation retreats.

Props are liberally suggested to make a sense of enclosure in each locale - often by setting up flowing fabrics like sarongs and saris, bright sheets and even textured cotton shower curtains. Other pictures depict ingenious uses for those ubiquitous bamboo screens for a sense of privacy, shade, or ambiance.

The appendix provides concise instructions to make your own colorful beach tents, decorative chair covers and table skirts, floral tablecloths, rustic stools and garden benches.

While not every idea seems exceptionally practical (depending on your climate), I can vouch for the pleasures of setting up an outdoor shower and fireplace. There's nothing quite like a morning shower under blue skies, or an evening with the family, by firelight, under the stars. This book will put you in the mood to plan your own version of backyard heaven.

This is Enrica Stabile's first book ever published. A few years back, I bought her second book titled "Comfortable Country" and assumed "Open Air Living" would be as visually rich, beautiful, well-designed, and inspiring. I was very disappointed! "Open Air Living" is comprised almost entirely of very simplistic outdoor settings that are either boring, visually uninteresting and bland, or have no real creative or stylish purpose other than to feature the author's family, friends, and pets. Many were repetitive; a lot of closeups and different angles of the same things. Out of approximately 119 photographs, I only found a dozen or so to be pretty and appealing, or even useful for recreating similiar settings at home. Normally, I browse through books at the library or bookstore before I buy them. Unfortunately, I purchased this one online based soley upon the author's second book and Amazon's reduced price, and mistakenly thought it would be as lovely to look at as "Comfortable Country".