Joelle Delbourgo Associates, Inc.

LOVE THE HOUSE YOU’RE IN, Paige Rien

Stop hating your house and start adoring it—40 steps to make your home express who you are and work for how you really live.

PAIGE RIEN, interior designer, mother of four, and passionate home lover, wants you to love where you51-EsEaFBGL live and believes you can do the work to get there. She consults with families all over the world to make interior design accessible, friendly, and multidimensional, encouraging clients to bring their whole selves into creating a home. Paige was one of two designers on HGTV’s top-rated Hidden Potential for five seasons. She also appeared on HGTV’s Curb Appeal and was the winner of Pier’s 1 Imports’ Design & Conquer Challenge in 2011, a contest featured on YouTube in four webisodes. When she is not working on a television project, she is helping others make real changes in their homes with a dynamic, creative, and spiritual approach to home improvement, or diving into the next project in her own home outside Washington, DC.
In Love the House You’re In (Roost Books/Shambhala), Paige gives readers actionable steps to adapt and make their homes work for them, imploring them to ignore outside influences and look inward for inspiration. Readers are asked to think about what makes them unique, not what style they prefer, making their lives and experiences the central focus in composing a very personal, very functional home. As opposed to traditional design books that are often a catalog of a particular designer’s work, or a collection of work with no discussion of process, Love the House You’re In is all about the reader: uncovering what she needs and desires and providing concrete, doable ideas to take her there.
From the introduction:”I know what you’re going to say. Your house is unlovable. Maybe unredeemable. You bought it because of the schools or the yard or the price, but you come home after a long day and think: yuck. You wish it were different. You need it to be different–to look better, to work better, and to make you feel better. I’ve been there, many times.

“If you want to get you to house love, here’s the secret: house love doesn’t come from interior designers or wildly popular design bloggers or rampant craftiness or an endless flow of new things, it comes from within you. It won’t spring forth from a great couch or the perfect paint color–it comes from the feeling you create in the space which feels just right, to you. It comes, not when your rooms necessarily match each other, but when your rooms match you and what you are all about. Put what you love and what’s important to you into your house and it will be lovable. (And it will love you back.)

“Guided by the ideas here, you’ll discover how to transform your home into a space that reflects all that you love and all that you are–with your own funds, time, and possibly, your hands. You will love your house by getting to know yourself, coming to know and accept your house (and it’s limitations), and most importantly, learning when you can trust yourself. We’re taught to think others have better taste or abilities than we do. For something as intimate as your home, which serves you and your family 99 percent of the time, you are the best person for the job, by far. What you need in the greatest supply to make your house great is not money, time, or advice, but confidence. Even if you do hire an architect, designer, or decorator to help you (and I don’t advocate one way or another) the work here will help you get the most out of that relationship.”

–Paige Rien

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.