Combining home design with health and environmental concerns, Gaia Books has created a hands-on, lavishly illustrated guide to making any home a healthier, more harmonious place to live. More than 100 color photographs.

Using detailed instructions, charts and photographs, this book shows how we can turn our homes into safe, healthy, ecologically sound and pleasant havens. It shows you how to choose natural materials, how to live with clean air, water and natural light, and how to create a home with style.

Practical and inspiring, this volume sets out the basic principles of the healing home and aims to show us how we can create a home that is healthy, harmonious and ecologically sound. The book examines the interior elements from air and light to furniture and furnishings. It looks at living spaces themselves - from sleeping to eating spaces - and how to introduce comfort and a sense of well-being into the home. A 16-page essay highlights organic buildings, independent energy supplies and living off the grid, and the spiritual principles of the healing home.

Gathers ideas and advice on building, decorating, furnishing, and living with a toxin-free home built from natural materials.

For Arthur Andersson and Chris Wise, the fundamental elements that give buildings meaning are found in nature.Imbuing day-to-day activities with poetry and awe, their designs address both pragmatic needs and the psychological yearning for refuge and contemplation, centering and escape, joy and comfort. Their work is best experienced through the senses. Tactility, expressed through an eloquence of craft, the use of textured materials, and the logical design of structural systems, gives their buildings a rightness within the landscape. In their hands, daylight becomes a building material. Small wall apertures, three-sided dormers, clerestories, and other details grab, bend, and thread sunlight from one end of their houses to the other. Full of light and atmosphere, the houses are the physical embodiment of the great Charles Moore's influential tenet that architecture is about enhancing a sense of place. Natural Houses presents seven of the Austin, Texas-based firm's exquisitely crafted projects. Precise and cool, with forms often derived from the American vernacular of barns and cottages, these are painstakingly crafted houses made from regionally appropriate and aesthetically timeless materials. Natural Houses presents a range of sites and residences—from a small cabin in the woods to a multibuilding camp. Sited on a cliff, the House Above Lake Austin uses terraces to descend its steeply hilly site. The building's simple materials celebrate thesite and climate not by drawing attention to themselves, but by blending in. The stone foundation is similarly tied to the natural stone of the mountain. Smooth plaster walls above the stone foundation appear to have been chiseled from the rock itself. In a deceptively simple boathouse the walls fold down to become impromptu diving platforms. Exceptional photography captures the light and atmosphere of each project setting and illustrates how the firm rigorously expresses the design concept through detailing and construction. An introduction by Rick Sundberg of Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects and essays by Jen Renzi and Frederick Steiner chart the firm's evolution and influences.

Citing a high number of pollutants in today's indoor environments, a comprehensive guide to making organic, all-natural paint and finish alternatives offers step-by-step instructions on how to convert readily available ingredients. Original. 15,000 first printing.

This sourcebook examines the options for building a house that is economical, energy-efficient, nontoxic, kind to the environment, and pleasurable to inhabit. Explores the pros and cons of 14 natural building methods, including straw bale, rammed earth, cob, cordwood, adobe, earthbags and papercrete.