Excerpts from the Apartment Therapy book “The Eight Step Home Cure”.

Removing objects to gain breathing room…

Marre’s apartment, despite its severity, had a calmness and openness to it that my apartment lacked. Her apartment was smaller and yet it felt bigger. It was comfortable to sit in Marre’s kitchen, and people naturally gravitated to her apartment to talk. She was right. My apartment wasn’t carefully arranged, it was packed. There was no breathing room. It may have seemed functional, but it was crowded and required a lot of attention…I began to experiment with removing objects from my apartment. I got rid of a chair. I took out the drafting table. I threw out a pile of old, mismatched dishes and mugs. What began as a trickle turned into a torrent, and over the next few months I emptied half of my apartment.

Only a few elements should play a starring role…

A room stirs our emotions by leading our attention to a few strong elements, while the rest sit quietly in the background. Successful style is all about dramatic touches used sparingly. Most of the elements of a room should go practically unnoticed at first glance, while a few play a starring role, such as a vase of flowers, brightly colored lampshades or a commanding piece of art. If you have too many things jostling for attention, your home will be too busy and over stimulated, but if you don’t have any, your home will lack pizzazz.”

Balance is key…

Whichever type you identify with, the cure is balance. Whether warm or cool, you never want to change your basic temperament. It is who you are and it contains your strengths. Therefore, warm people achieve balance by “weeding,” since they have too much growing. Small things like cleaning out a closet, canceling a magazine subscription, or taking a load of clothes to the Salvation Army provide balance. Cool people achieve it by “watering and feeding,” since they don’t have enough growing. Their small tasks are buying flowers each week for the kitchen table, hanging curtains, and inviting a few friends over for a drink now and then. Both types should start slowly — a little bit goes a long way.”

The home as living organism…

I want you to broaden the concept of home and apply to it the same principles we apply to our own bodies. Like the body, the home should be thought of as a living organism. For starters, healthy homes are homes that consume carefully and get regular exercise. After health is established, style and decoration come much more easily and can be seen as natural finishing touches. In fact, style and decoration are extensions of a healthy home. You can’t have one without the other…

In place of creating a healthy home, we are trying to buy solutions and cram too much into our homes. What was modestly termed “cocooning” in the 1970s by trend-spotters who saw us spending more recreational time at home has become Hypernesting. Instead of asking ourselves what would really make our home work better, we usually jump to the conclusion that there must be something we can buy to solve our home’s challenges — a flatter television screen, a closet organizing system, or color-coded photo albums.

But when we take something new into our home, we rarely let go of something else. This is how our home gains weight, grows unhealthy, and begins to nag at us…Most of us aren’t in need of more organizing; we need to manage our consumption, let go of our stuff, and learn how to restore life to our homes.

Where to begin?...

I often ask my clients what they imagine their apartment would say to them if it could speak. Samantha, a stockbroker, told me that her home would say, “Can’t she see that I am dying? Why doesn’t she do anything to save me?” As she said this, we were sitting in a badly lit, cluttered, unfinished room. Embarrassed, Samantha said that she didn’t know where to begin. It was one of the best things I had ever heard a client say. Besides being completely honest, I told her, in using the word begin she’d hit upon the main issue. The solution was not about eliminating clutter or lightening a room; it was about beginning to work with her home. I told her that I could show her where to begin. It might feel challenging at first, but her home would love her for it.