You are what you read. I suggest these books:

 

The Essential House Book: Getting Back to Basics

By Terence Conran

 

My interior designer friends say this is their all-time favorite home design book. The photos are great, but Conran’s insightful, easy-to-read advice is even better. Sir Terence is the father of the cheap but stylish home stores in Britain — ever heard of Conran’s? — that in turn begat Crate and Barrel. Equally indispensable: The Essential Garden Book by Terence Conran and Dan Pearson.

 

Color and Light: Luminous Atmospheres for Painted Rooms

By Donald Kaufman, Taffy Dahl, Christine Pittel, Dominique Vorillon (Photographer)

 

Kaufman and Dahl are founding partners of Donald Kaufman Color, the country’s foremost color consulting firm. Here they remind us how color — like other design elements — continually morphs with its environment. Rainy Seattle grays down a room, while a Fort Worth August burns into walls with white-hot light. “Color is light made visible,” says Donald Kaufman, “and the atmosphere of the air we breathe and the quality of the light passing through it affect how we see color.” You’ll learn how to understand the changing environmental characteristics in your home, and select paint colors that optimize available light. See also: Color: Natural Palettes for Painted Rooms by the same authors.

 

Man and His Symbols
By Carl Gustav Jung, M.L. Von Franz, Joseph Henderson

 

Jung and his close colleagues discuss the human subconscious and archetypal symbols it revels and reveals itself in. This book will deepen your understanding of art, yourself, the world, everything. Makes dreams more interesting, too.

 

Meaning of Gardens: Idea, Place and Action
By Mark Francis, Randolph T. Hester Jr. (Editor)

 

Gardens are loaded with symbols. Think of all their functions in our culture: gathering place, sacred or healing place, status producer or food producer. This is the first book I’ve seen that talks about gardens as collected ideas, rather than plants.

 

Paradise Transformed: The PrivateGarden for the Twenty-First Century
By Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor

 

This book will forever change your concept of gardening and demonstrate, in remarkable photos, how certain landscapes have been “freed from the boxwood of history.” T

 

owards a New Architecture
By Le Corbusier

 

Corbu’s manifesto for Modernism. Whether you agree or not, it helps to learn where it all came from. An excerpt: “Daylight hardly enters your homes. Your windows are difficult to open. There are no ventilators for changing the air such as we get in any dining car. Your chandeliers hurt the eyes. Your imitation stone stucco and your wall-papers are an impertinence, and no good modern picture could ever be hung on your walls, for it would be lost in the welter of your furnishings.” Take that, Meridian-Kessler-ites!

 

Radical Fashion
By Claire Wilcox (Editor)

 

Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed
By Harold Koda

 

Fashion is the endless conversation we have with one another about our bodies. These books document some of history‘s more intriguing statements, capturing the views and expressions of fashion’s avant garde. Extreme Beauty accompanied a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit of the same name, and Radical Fashion documented an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Ahhh, to have been there!

 

Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art
By John Szarkowski

 

This book takes a group of great photographs and, one by one, tells you what makes them great. An excellent overview of the medium presented in simple but astute terms. I took a photography course in college and spent years selecting and producing photography, before reading this book and finally understanding it.

 

Architecture: Form, Space, and Order
By Frank D.K. Ching (Author), Francis D. Ching

 

Form, Function and Design
By Paul Jacques Grillo

 

Reading either of these books will take the novice a long way toward understanding how design works — or doesn’t work — in our world. Which makes me wonder, why aren’t they part of the standard curriculum in our schools? Ching’s is more of an all-purpose primer on architecture, Grillo’s take is more poetic. Both are revelations. I’d be interested to know if you actually read any of these — or if you have suggestions for me.

 

Go ahead and write me: debikeay@aol.com. Nothing too twisted, please.