The Sensual Home: Liberate Your Senses and Change Your Life [Turtleback]

As befits the title Sensual Home, this comes with a sensual suede-like cover, with an atmospheric cut-out card featuring a cat peering through a muslin window. Subtitled "liberate your senses and change your life", this is an interiors book with a difference. Reading the list of contents, such as hearing, touch, sixth sense, sight, taste, you could mistake this for a guide to holistic health.

Interiors guru Ilse Crawford is known for launching Elle Deco, the first contemporary interiors magazine, and then moving onto masterminding designer Donna Karan's home furnishings. Writing more like a wise friend, than a design snob, Ilse Crawford presents an approach to the home that transcends the look. This is not a how-to manual, but an invitation to consciously enjoy every aspect of the home, from bed linen to crockery, from food to flowers.

Absolutely every photograph by Martyn Thompson is a gem, from the child drawing on a giant black board, to the shaggy dog (captioned "we are all animals underneath"). Ilse Crawford's trademark contemporary style, with natural colours, comfy minimal furniture and the simplest of details such as log fires and candles becomes a vision available to us all. What's more, the clever database at the end contains a plethora of practical tips and information that will defy any cynic. --Lorna V

This literally stokeable, touchy-feely book offers a feast of
inspiration for all the senses.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

With the rigours of daily life we need our homes to be havens of calm and tranquillity. This book offers guidance in achieving an atmosphere that is visually pleasing, sweet-smelling, airy and spacious, yet at the same time, warm and comforting, relaxing and energizing, whether alone or in company.

Ilse Crawford has been at the forefront of new directions in design for over a decade, her company, Studioilse, stands for modern and emotional design. Crawford masterminded the interiors for Soho House, New York, the Electric Cinema, London, and the first of the new generation of country house hotels, Babington House, Somerset. Studioilse also design furniture that combines form with feeling. Crawford is head of the Man and Wellbeing department at the Design Academy, Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. Ilse's book, Home is where the Heart is, was published by Quadrille. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.