Inspired homes can change lives. We just need to look below the surface. Home- Inspired by Love and Beauty, explores how your home can be an inspiring friend and partner in creating a meaningful good life. Homes have the potential to support our dreams, teach, heal, and co-parent. They also inspire us to create beauty and clarify values. Homes are mirrors of our consciousness as well as our personal lever for changing the world. Stories, exercise, and practical suggestions stimulate questions and insights that open up desires and insights you didn't know were waiting for you. You may find yourself rejoicing, reflecting, exploring, or crying as stories of others who love their homes connect with your life. It's rare to find such an integrated story drawing from many fields of research; even more exceptional is to find someone who turns to the people who love their homes to find wisdom and expertise. For anyone who wants the place they live to fulfill their heart's desire and see possibilities with new eyes. The stories are simultaneously touching, motivating, and thoroughly enjoyable to read. They model practical spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical self-help. Lulic explores the full dimension of home: buying a home, meaningful living, decorating with simple beauty, home maintenance made meaningful, harmonious relationships with both two footed and four footed inhabitants, homes as parenting helpers, gardens as teachers and connectors to community, environmental values, the role of money in homes, rituals and rites of passage at home, values and hiring experts, and leaving home. In the process, Lulic notices the relationship of homes to local, national, and global issues. I admit I wasn't interested at first in Margaret Lulic's "Home Inspired by Love and Beauty". I was wrong. Lulic's timely wisdom about your relationship to your house came when I was realizing I'm going to have to stay in my home until the market improves (if that ever happens). So, how do we rekindle our love of our homes and create spaces that nurture our souls? Lulic tells us how in her book, part memoir, part spirituality, part common sense, part decorating guide, part exercises that help you make decisions with a little discussion of our culture thrown in. I've rarely read a book that incorporates so much in just 280 pages. "Inspired homes can change lives," writes Lulic, who calls herself a "consulting philosopher." That means she uses her experience and knowledge of philosophy as a way of looking at what our homes could be. "A loving home is the unity of a specific dwelling, all those people and things that it shelters, and the sense of treasuring and being treasured," she writes. "In its fullest form, everything about the home has been conceived in love and inspired by beauty -- not just the physical aspects but the relationships, values, and daily rituals." Lulic has no doubt there is a spiritual connection between houses and people. That's why people often say, "The house spoke to me" or "I just knew it was our house" the first time they saw their dwelling. Her chapters include how to be creative in revisioning your house, whether it's moving furniture or changing wall colors. She acknowledges that sometimes partners will disagree. She uses the example of an interior door in her home that opened onto an unheated foyer. If the door stayed open, heat leaked out. If it was closed, the adjacent room lost light. She and her family kept coming back to the problem but never found a solution until the house "spoke" to her and they realized they could have a stained glass window in the door. She and her husband decided to make the $800 door their Christmas gift to each other. If you've got a house problem, Lulic suggests having a conversation with the house. What is the problem? Why is it a problem? What do you want to accomplish? Sometimes, questioning your motives leads you to thinking about the subject in a new way. When her daughter left for college, for instance, she envisioned what would make her happy when she redid the room. She searched her values and realized she imagined a room like a library, with books and two comfy chairs in which she and her husband could sit while they talked over the day. At the end of each chapter, Lulic offers reflections/suggestions. In the chapter on creativity, she posits these questions: How could you play with your home to uncover beauty? How do you play with your family or friends? What kinds of spaces would be good for your home to have or to enhance? Lulic emphasizes throughout the book that she's not writing about expensive decorating. She recommends grouping throw pillows, framing those old family pictures, painting the fireplace bricks a different color. Just rearranging furniture, she has found, can change patterns of light and how you move through a room. --Mary Ann Grossmann, St. Paul Pioneer Press, 11/12/2010 Margaret Lulic's philosophy of home is that an inspired home