Amazon.com
This is a refreshing, unique, and fascinating look at how we feel about our homes, how we shape them to suit ourselves, why some homes make is feel safe and secure and at ease, and others make us paranoid and uncomfortable. This book, in my opinion, should be legally required reading for every architect, interior designer, and real estate agent. For the rest of us, it is a surprisingly interesting look at the meaning of home. Clare Cooper Marcus's extensive and detailed interviews with people living in all kinds of homes, from illegal shacks to mansions, provide eye-opening insights into what "home" is, and how to create the feeling of home for you. It's about time someone finally wrote this book!
From Publishers Weekly
Marcus's eye-opening study of peoples' emotional ties to their houses, apartments, cottages, trailers and other dwellings offers useful, often startling perspectives on what makes a house a home. Maintaining, as did Carl Jung, that one's home is a symbolic mirror of one's inner self, of unconscious wishes and emotions, she interviewed approximately 60 people in their domestic settings, some over a 10-year period. Several respondents excessively bonded to a residence or its contents as a substitute for close relationships with people; at the opposite extreme were those who were unable to settle down in one place because having a permanent abode was fraught with unresolved emotional issues from childhood. Marcus, an architecture professor at UC-Berkeley, ably explores how personal crises, the need for privacy, couples' power struggles, divorce and career changes affect one's feelings about, and design of, one's living environment. Case studies, self-help exercises and informants' color drawings (not seen by PW) of their dwellings support her presentation. 40,000 first printing; $80,000 ad/promo; QPB selection; author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
