Call It Home: The Details That Matter—Book by Amber Lewis

Is Amber Lewis’s Book Call It Home the Interior Design Guide You’ve Been Waiting For?

Honestly, I think that many interior design books give you beautiful rooms and almost nothing else. You flip through the photographs, feel briefly inspired, and then close the cover without any real idea of how to get from where you are to where those pages took you. Call It Home: The Details That Matter by Amber Lewis does something fundamentally different—and that difference is exactly why it deserves a place on your shelf.

Published in October 2023 by Clarkson Potter, this national bestseller runs 288 pages and weighs over three pounds. It’s a proper book. Moreover, it reads like one. Lewis—the founder of Amber Interiors and author of the earlier Made for Living—doesn’t just show you finished rooms. She actually walks you through her thinking, material by material, decision by decision. That’s rare in this genre, and it matters more than you might expect.

So what makes Call It Home stand out among home decorating books? And is it worth your time and money? The short answer is yes. The longer answer requires unpacking what Lewis actually built here—and why her approach to interior design details reframes the entire conversation around creating a beautiful home.

What Does “Detail-Oriented Interior Design” Actually Mean?

The phrase gets used constantly in design circles, but rarely with any precision. Lewis gives it one. Her entire philosophy centers on what I’d call the Detail Primacy Framework—the idea that a room’s success isn’t determined by its furniture layout or its color palette. Instead, it’s governed by the cumulative weight of small, specific decisions: the bullnose edge on a marble countertop, the pleat style of a drape, the wood grain direction in a floor installation.

This framework has real implications for how you approach a project. If the details drive the outcome, then you can’t make them afterthoughts. You have to bring them to the front of your decision-making process. Lewis structures the book accordingly. She doesn’t bury material choices in a final chapter on “finishing touches.” Instead, she builds the book around eight specific homes she designed—including her own—and uses each one as a vehicle for demonstrating how early material decisions shape everything downstream.

Think of it as a design logic that runs counter to most renovation advice you’ve encountered. The conventional sequence is planning the layout, choosing the furniture, and then picking finishes. Lewis essentially inverts this. She argues that fabric, paint, tile, and flooring should inform the larger decisions, not follow them. That’s a genuinely useful reorientation for anyone who has ever felt paralyzed by the sheer number of choices a renovation involves.

The Eight-Home Structure: More Than a Portfolio

It would be easy to read the eight-home framework as a portfolio showcase—and yes, the photography by Shade Degges is stunning. But the structure serves a more deliberate purpose. Each home gives Lewis a different contextual canvas. Some are mountain retreats. Others are surfside properties. Her own home sits in the mix as well, which adds a layer of honesty to the project that’s hard to fake.

What Lewis demonstrates through this variety is what I’d call Contextual Material Sourcing—a principle she applies consistently but rarely names explicitly. Every home pulls its material palette from its immediate environment. A coastal property uses textures and tones that echo sand, driftwood, and bleached stone. A mountain retreat draws on raw timber, dark iron, and dense wool. The result is a look that feels site-specific and inevitable rather than imposed.

This isn’t just aesthetics. It’s a practical decision-making tool. When you’re overwhelmed by the infinite options at a tile showroom or a fabric house, asking, “What does this place actually look like?” turns out to be a remarkably efficient filter. Lewis makes that process visible in a way that’s genuinely transferable to your own projects.

Furthermore, the personal essays scattered throughout each section add texture that most design books completely skip. You learn about the challenges her team faced, the mistakes she navigated, and the reasoning behind choices that might otherwise look effortless. That transparency is valuable. It demystifies the design process without making it seem ordinary.

Photography That Works as Reference, Not Just Inspiration

Shade Degges shoots these interiors with a precision that matches Lewis’s editorial intent. The more than 200 images in the book aren’t just atmospheric. They’re instructional. You can actually identify the specific details that Lewis describes in the text—the tile grout width, the curtain break on the floor, and the way a plinth block transitions between a baseboard and a door casing.

That level of visual specificity is unusual and genuinely useful. Many readers will use these photographs the way Lewis explicitly suggests: as reference images to bring to their own contractors, tile suppliers, or fabric showrooms. That’s a smart framing, and it positions the book as a working document rather than a coffee table object.

Amber Lewis’s California-Inspired Style, Decoded

Lewis is widely known for her signature California aesthetic—eclectic, laid-back, warm, and tactile. But Call It Home goes further than previous documentation of that style. It gives you the underlying logic rather than just the finished look. Understanding that logic is what separates readers who can apply these ideas from those who simply admire them.

The core of Lewis’s California-inspired style rests on what I’d call the Layered Restraint Principle. She introduces pattern, texture, and material variety in quantities that feel rich but never chaotic. The restraint isn’t minimal—it’s calibrated. A room might have a bold tile floor, a vintage rug, a linen sofa, and a painted plaster wall. Individually, any of these elements could be overwhelming. Together, they hold because Lewis controls the tonal range and material weight with precision.

Practically speaking, this means she pays close attention to the value (lightness or darkness) of each element rather than just its hue. Two patterns can coexist if their values are close. Two materials can compete if their values clash. That’s a simple but underused framework that any decorator can apply immediately.

Additionally, her approach to fabric selection deserves specific attention. Lewis treats upholstery as a long-term investment and chooses accordingly, favoring durability and natural texture over trend. She gives you enough specificity about fiber content, weave structure, and performance ratings to actually make informed choices at a fabric showroom. That’s rare, and it’s directly useful.

Home Decorating Book or Renovation Manual? The Answer Is Both

One of the strongest arguments for Call It Home is its genuine range of applicability. Lewis explicitly addresses three different reader situations: decorating a single room, renovating an entire house, and building new construction from scratch. Each requires a different entry point into the design process, and she adjusts her guidance accordingly.

For single-room decorating, her focus on material details is immediately applicable. You don’t need a contractor or an architect. You need to make better choices about flooring, paint, fabric, and trim—and Lewis gives you a decision-making structure for all of them.

For full renovations, the guidance on team assembly is particularly strong. Lewis is frank about the fact that the right contractor relationship is a design variable, not just a logistical one. She shares how she approaches finding and vetting her team, how she communicates material specifications, and how she manages the gap between design intent and construction execution. This is information most design books completely ignore.

For new construction, the sequencing advice becomes critical. Decisions about rough-in plumbing, electrical placement, and structural openings all affect what’s possible with finishes later. Lewis makes that interdependency clear in a way that’s genuinely helpful if you’re early in a build process.

The Interior Design Details That Matter Most, According to Lewis

Lewis is specific enough throughout the book that you can extract a working hierarchy of design details. Based on her emphasis and the weight she gives different choices, here’s how that hierarchy roughly stacks up:

Flooring comes first. Lewis argues—convincingly—that flooring sets the tonal and textural baseline for everything else in a room. Get it wrong, and no amount of furniture or textile layering will fully compensate.

Paint and plaster finishes come second. Lewis is particularly strong on the difference between flat, eggshell, satin, and specialty finishes—not just in terms of sheen but in terms of how they interact with light at different times of day. That time-of-day consideration is underemphasized in most design writing.

Tile selection is third, with specific attention to grout color as a design variable in its own right. Lewis makes the case that grout color can either advance or recede a tile pattern and that most people make the choice too quickly.

Fabric and upholstery close the hierarchy—not because they matter less, but because they’re more replaceable than the fixed elements above them. Lewis treats this replaceability as a reason to take more risks with textiles than with tile.

What Call It Home Gets Right That Most Interior Design Books Don’t

The home decorating book market is crowded. Distinguishing a genuinely useful book from a beautiful but ultimately decorative one requires asking a specific question: after reading this, can you actually do something you couldn’t do before? With Call It Home, the answer is consistently yes.

Lewis introduces what I’d call the Decision Sequencing Method—a practical framework for approaching a design project that prioritizes fixed elements before flexible ones, structural decisions before decorative ones, and site context before personal preference. This sequence isn’t revolutionary, but articulating it clearly and demonstrating it across eight projects makes it teachable in a way that most design intuition isn’t.

The book also earns points for intellectual honesty. Lewis doesn’t pretend that every project was easy or that every choice was right the first time. The personal essays include genuine admissions of difficulty, adjustment, and revision. That honesty makes the guidance more credible, not less.

Furthermore, Lewis doesn’t aestheticize poverty. She acknowledges that the homes in this book represent a significant investment. But she’s also thoughtful about which elements of her approach are budget-scalable and which are not. That distinction matters for readers who are working with real constraints.

Who Should Buy This Book?

Anyone planning a renovation in the next two years should own this book. The decision-making frameworks Lewis provides will save you money by helping you avoid costly material changes mid-project. They’ll also save you time by giving you a clearer vocabulary to communicate with architects, contractors, and suppliers.

Aspiring interior designers and design students will find it valuable as a case study collection. Eight complete projects with full material transparency and personal narrative are a substantial body of documented professional practice.

Design enthusiasts who just love beautiful spaces will obviously find plenty to enjoy in Degges’s photography. But this group should know they’re getting significantly more than photography. If they engage with the text seriously, they’ll come away with a fundamentally different understanding of how professional interior designers actually work.

A Forward-Looking Prediction: Why the “Detail-First” Approach Will Define the Next Decade of Interior Design

The broader design culture is moving in Lewis’s direction, and Call It Home is early documentation of that shift. For the past decade, interior design conversation has been dominated by broad aesthetic categories—minimalism, maximalism, Japandi, cottagecore. These categories are useful for mood-boarding but largely useless for making actual decisions in a hardware store or a tile showroom.

The next phase of design literacy—already emerging in professional practice and slowly entering consumer culture—will be material-specific. People will care about the difference between a honed and a polished finish. They’ll understand why curtain header tape affects a room’s perceived ceiling height. They’ll know what “grain direction” means in the context of wood flooring installation.

Lewis is already operating in this space. Call It Home is a primary document of what detail-first interior design looks like at a high level of execution. As the broader conversation catches up, this book’s relevance will increase, not decrease. That’s a meaningful thing to say about a design book in a category where most titles are dated within five years of publication.

The California-inspired aesthetic Lewis has built her reputation on will also continue to influence design internationally. Its emphasis on natural materials, site responsiveness, and casual warmth is directly countercultural to the hyper-polished, heavily staged aesthetic that dominated the previous decade. That countercultural position tends to have staying power.

My Personal Take on Call It Home

I’ve spent time with a lot of interior design books. Many of them are genuinely beautiful. Fewer of them are genuinely useful. Call It Home manages to be both, and that combination is harder to achieve than it sounds.

What I find most valuable is Lewis’s commitment to transparency about process. She doesn’t just show you the finished bullnose edge—she tells you why she chose marble over quartz in that particular context, what the alternatives were, and what would have happened if she’d gone a different direction. That level of reasoning is what separates a design education from a design inspiration.

The book also changed how I look at flooring. Lewis’s argument that flooring sets the entire tonal baseline for a room sounds obvious when you say it out loud, but I hadn’t fully internalized it before reading her explanation. Now I can’t look at a room without registering the floor first. That’s the mark of a book that actually shifts your perception—not just your Pinterest board.

If I had one critique, it’s that the book occasionally assumes a level of access—to high-end tile showrooms, to experienced craftspeople, to specialty material suppliers—that not all readers will have. Lewis is generally thoughtful about this, but there are moments where a note about alternatives would have been welcome. That’s a minor friction point in an otherwise excellent book.

Frequently Asked Questions About Call It Home by Amber Lewis

Who is the author of Call It Home?

Amber Lewis is the author. She’s the founder and principal of Amber Interiors, a full-service interior design firm based in California. She also authored Made for Living, her earlier book. Call It Home was photographed by Shade Degges, with contributions from Cat Chen.

What is Call It Home about?

Call It Home: The Details That Matter is an interior design book that focuses on the material details behind beautiful home design. Lewis walks through eight homes she designed—including her own—explaining her decision-making process for flooring, paint, tile, fabric, finishes, and more. The book covers decorating a single room, full renovations, and new construction.

Is Call It Home suitable for beginners or only for professionals?

It’s suitable for both. The language is accessible and non-technical. Lewis explains industry concepts clearly enough for beginners while providing enough depth to be genuinely useful for professionals and advanced enthusiasts. The decision-making frameworks she introduces work regardless of experience level.

How many pages does Call It Home have?

The book runs 288 pages and contains more than 200 photographs. It was published by Clarkson Potter on October 17, 2023. The ISBN-13 is 978-0593235522.

What is Amber Lewis’s design style?

Lewis is known for a California-inspired aesthetic that she describes as eclectic and laid-back. It favors natural materials, warm tones, tactile textures, and layered patterns. Her work consistently draws inspiration from each project’s surrounding environment, creating interiors that feel site-specific rather than generically styled.

Does Call It Home include advice on working with contractors?

Yes. Lewis devotes meaningful attention to team assembly and client-contractor communication. She discusses how to find the right contractors, how to communicate material specifications effectively, and how to manage the gap between design intent and construction execution.

How does Call It Home differ from Made for Living?

Made for Living, Lewis’s first book, focused more broadly on her design aesthetic and lifestyle. Call It Home goes deeper into the technical and material specifics of her process. It’s more instructional and more directly applicable to readers working on their own projects.

What types of rooms does Call It Home cover?

The book covers living rooms, kitchens, dining rooms, entryways, bedrooms, and bathrooms. The eight featured homes also include outdoor spaces and transitional areas. The coverage is broad enough to support whole-home projects as well as single-room renovations.

Discover other inspiring books on art and design here at WE AND THE COLOR.

How to Live with Objects Is the Interior Design Book That Finally Gets It Right

Most interior design books tell you what to buy. Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer wrote one that asks a far better question: why does any of it matter? How to Live with Objects: A Guide to More Meaningful Interiors, published by Clarkson Potter in November 2022, is not a decorating manual. It’s a manifesto for a more intentional relationship between people and the things they choose to live with. And right now, that message couldn’t be more urgent.

We are living through a profound recalibration of what home means. After years of algorithm-driven aesthetics and “shop-the-look” culture flattening interiors into interchangeable moods, people are starting to push back. The living room is not a brand. Your bookshelf is not a backdrop. Your objects tell the world who you are — or who you’re becoming. Khemsurov and Singer understood this years before it became a cultural conversation.

As cofounders of Sight Unseen, one of the most influential independent design publications in the United States, they have spent over a decade tracking the people who make design objects and the people who live with them. This book distills that experience into 320 richly visual pages. It covers vintage hunting, collecting philosophies, styling principles, and conversations with creatives like artist Misha Kahn and musician Lykke Li about the specific objects that shape their lives.

This is not a book you read once and shelve. It’s a reference. A point of view. A challenge to look around your home and ask harder questions.

What Does It Mean to Truly Live with Objects?

The phrase “live with objects” sounds passive. You own things. They sit in your space. But Khemsurov and Singer reframe this entirely. Living with objects means entering into a relationship with them. It means choosing things that carry personal meaning, emotional charge, or visual tension that sustains your interest over time.

Think about the last object you bought for your home. Did you buy it because an algorithm suggested it? Because it matched a color palette you saw on Pinterest? Or because something about it genuinely stopped you — its material weight, its strange proportions, its history? The gap between those two motivations is exactly what this book explores.

Khemsurov and Singer introduce what I’d call the Object Intention Gap — the editorial construct that names the distance between acquiring objects by default and acquiring them by design. Most of us furnish our homes in the first mode. We fill space, follow trends, and buy things that look fine together. The result is a home that is comfortable but anonymous, and that uneasy feeling is hard to name until someone names it for you.

This book names it. That alone makes it worth your time.

The Anti-Decorating Philosophy Behind the Book

Khemsurov and Singer have deliberately positioned How to Live with Objects as an anti-decorating book. That framing is precise, and it matters. Traditional decorating is outward-facing. It optimizes for appearance. It asks: Does this look good? The Sight Unseen philosophy is inward-facing. It asks: Does this mean something to you?

This shift is not anti-aesthetic. The book is spectacularly beautiful. Its 320 pages are filled with real homes that are visually arresting, eccentric, and layered with texture and history. But none of them looks like a showroom. They look like someone actually lives there — someone with opinions, obsessions, and taste developed over years of paying attention.

The Sight Unseen Aesthetic Framework

Throughout the book, Khemsurov and Singer operate with what functions as a consistent aesthetic philosophy. I’ll name it here as the Authentic Density Framework — another editorial construct drawn from the book’s recurring arguments. It holds three principles.

First, density matters more than minimalism. A carefully chosen abundance of objects communicates personality far more effectively than an edited-down emptiness. Second, friction is valuable. Objects that slightly clash, that create visual tension, that don’t obviously belong together — these create the sense of a lived-in, thinking space. Third, legibility is the goal. Your home should be readable as yours. A visitor should understand something true about you just by looking at your shelves.

These principles run through every home tour and every interview in the book. They’re not stated explicitly in this language, but they operate like a design grammar beneath the surface.

How to Live with Objects: What the Book Actually Covers

The book is divided into several distinct modes. First, it establishes philosophy — the foundational arguments about why objects matter and how our relationship to them has been warped by consumer culture and social media performance. Then it moves into methodology: how to find objects, how to evaluate them, how to acquire them intentionally.

The vintage-hunting section deserves particular attention. Khemsurov and Singer treat vintage collecting not as a budget alternative to new furniture but as a discipline with its own skills and rewards. They argue that searching for objects — at flea markets, on eBay, through dealers, at estate sales — develops your eye in ways that browsing a retail site never can. The hunt is pedagogical. It teaches you what you actually respond to, separate from what you’ve been told to want.

Object Resonance vs. Object Compliance

Here, I want to introduce another framework that emerges from the book’s logic: the distinction between Object Resonance and Object Compliance. Both are editorial constructs to clarify the authors’ implicit argument.

Object Compliance is buying things that comply with a pre-existing aesthetic plan. You have a mood board. You source objects that fit it. The result is coherent but closed. Object Resonance is buying things that genuinely resonate — that produce a reaction in you that you didn’t entirely predict. The result is messier but alive. Khemsurov and Singer consistently advocate for resonance over compliance, even when it creates visual friction.

This matters practically. It means you should probably trust the ceramic vessel that makes you feel something strange over the lamp that matches your sofa. Furthermore, it means your home can hold contradictions. And it means you don’t need a coherent style identity to have a meaningful interior.

Why Sight Unseen’s Approach Is Different from Traditional Interior Design Advice

Most interior design content operates on the assumption that aesthetics are learnable formulas. Layer textures. Various heights. Use odd numbers. These rules are not wrong, exactly. But they treat the home as a visual problem to solve rather than a relational space to inhabit.

Sight Unseen’s editorial perspective has always pushed against this. Since Khemsurov and Singer launched the magazine, they have focused on the story behind objects and the people who make and collect them. That human-centered lens is fully present in this book. Every home tour includes conversations with the residents. Every object has a context. The book communicates, consistently, that design objects are not inert — they carry meaning, history, and intention.

The Role of Creatives in the Book’s Narrative

The interviews with figures like Misha Kahn and Lykke Li are not celebrity endorsements. They’re case studies. Khemsurov and Singer use them to demonstrate how creative people — people who think professionally about form, material, and meaning — actually live with objects in practice.

The results are instructive. These are not pristine, curated environments. They are densely layered, sometimes chaotic, deeply personal spaces where every object has earned its place. That portrait of intentional living is more useful than any styling tip. It shows you what it looks like when someone has genuinely developed their relationship to objects over time.

How to Use This Book as a Collecting Guide

One of the most practically useful aspects of How to Live with Objects is its guidance on developing a collecting practice. Khemsurov and Singer are not prescriptive — they don’t tell you what to collect or how much to spend. Instead, they give you a framework for making better decisions.

The core argument is that collecting develops your eye. The more objects you evaluate, handle, research, and compare, the more calibrated your sense of quality, originality, and personal resonance becomes. This is what distinguishes a collector from a shopper. A shopper makes decisions based on availability and price. A collector makes decisions based on accumulated knowledge and genuine desire.

Building an Object Biography

Here I want to introduce one more original concept drawn from the book’s logic: the Object Biography. This editorial construct describes the history of ownership, use, and meaning that an object accumulates over time. Khemsurov and Singer are deeply attentive to this. They advocate for objects that have lived — vintage pieces, handmade items, things that carry the evidence of their making or their past.

An Object Biography makes a piece more meaningful to live with. You know something about where it came from. You can trace its material, its maker, and its journey to your shelf. That knowledge changes how you perceive the object. It becomes a node in a larger story rather than a static possession.

This is why the book argues for slowing down the acquisition process. The more you know about an object before you acquire it, the richer your relationship to it will be.

The Broader Cultural Significance of Meaningful Interiors

It would be easy to read How to Live with Objects as a design book and miss its cultural argument. But the book is making a point about identity, authenticity, and resistance to consumerism that extends well beyond interior design.

We are surrounded by systems designed to homogenize our taste. Algorithmic recommendation engines surface the same objects to millions of people simultaneously. Fast-furniture brands offer the illusion of style at the cost of individuality. Social media rewards aesthetics that photograph well over those that actually function as lived environments. Against all of this, Khemsurov and Singer argue for the radical act of developing your own eye.

The Post-Algorithm Interior

I’d predict that the Post-Algorithm Interior will become a defining aesthetic movement of this decade. This is my own editorial forecast, not a claim made explicitly in the book, but it builds directly on the authors’ logic. As AI-driven recommendations grow more powerful, the homes that resist algorithmic curation will become more culturally significant. The ability to furnish a space with genuine personal intention will be increasingly rare — and increasingly valued.

Khemsurov and Singer’s book arrives at exactly the right moment to prepare us for this shift. It gives us the vocabulary, the methodology, and the inspiration to build homes that are authentically ours.

Who Should Read How to Live with Objects

The book explicitly addresses collectors, design lovers, and complete novices. That range is genuine. You don’t need a background in design to benefit from this book. You need curiosity and willingness to pay attention to your own responses.

That said, certain readers will find it particularly resonant. If you’ve ever walked into someone’s home and felt immediately that you understood something true about them — that’s the experience this book teaches you to cultivate in your own space. If you’ve ever bought a “safe” piece of furniture and quietly regretted it, this book will help you understand why and what to do differently next time.

It’s also genuinely useful for people working with limited budgets or spaces. Khemsurov and Singer are explicit that intentional living with objects has nothing to do with how much you spend. Some of the most compelling homes in the book are built around flea market finds and inherited pieces. The principle is always the same: choose things that mean something to you, and learn to display them in ways that honor that meaning.

How to Live with Objects: My Take as a Design Critic

Personally, I find this book significant for a reason that goes slightly beyond its practical content. It’s one of the very few interior design books that treats the reader as a thinking person with their own developing taste, rather than as a consumer who needs to be pointed toward better purchases.

The design publishing space is crowded with books that are essentially extended product catalogs — beautiful objects photographed in beautiful rooms, with shopping information attached. There’s nothing wrong with that genre, but it doesn’t actually change how you think. How to Live with Objects tries to change how you think. That’s a harder and more valuable project.

I can imagine that some readers will want more systematic guidance — clearer principles, more explicit frameworks, step-by-step processes for building a collection. Khemsurov and Singer resist that kind of prescription, which is philosophically consistent but occasionally frustrating if you’re looking for concrete starting points. Then again, the resistance to formula is the whole point.

What stays with me most is the book’s core argument that your home is not an aesthetic project — it’s a biographical one. The objects around you are, collectively, a portrait of who you are. They deserve the same care and intentionality you’d bring to any other form of self-expression. That’s a genuinely useful idea. And it’s delivered here with intelligence, warmth, and extraordinary visual power.

Book Details: How to Live with Objects

Title: How to Live with Objects: A Guide to More Meaningful Interiors
Authors: Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Publication Date: November 15, 2022
Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 978-0593235041
Dimensions: 9.29 x 1.3 x 12.24 inches

Frequently Asked Questions About How to Live with Objects

What is How to Live with Objects about?

How to Live with Objects: A Guide to More Meaningful Interiors is a book by Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer, cofounders of the design magazine Sight Unseen. It argues for a more intentional approach to acquiring and living with objects, focusing on personal meaning, emotional resonance, and the development of a genuine collecting eye. The book includes home tours, interviews with creative people, and practical guidance on vintage hunting and object styling.

Who are Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer?

Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer are the cofounders and editors of Sight Unseen, one of the most influential independent design publications in the United States. Both were formerly editors at I.D. magazine and have contributed to publications including T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Elle Décor, W, and others. They are also curators and creative consultants based in New York City.

Is How to Live with Objects a decorating book?

Khemsurov and Singer explicitly position it as an anti-decorating book. Rather than prescribing aesthetic formulas, the book focuses on developing your own eye and building a meaningful relationship with the objects in your home. It prioritizes personal resonance over visual coherence or trend-driven choices.

Is this book useful for people on a limited budget?

Yes. The authors are explicit that intentional living with objects has no required price point. Many of the homes featured in the book are furnished with vintage finds, inherited pieces, and handmade objects. The focus is on the quality of your engagement with objects, not on how much you spend on them.

What makes an object worth having, according to the book?

Khemsurov and Singer argue that an object is worth having when it produces genuine personal resonance — when it carries meaning, emotional charge, or visual interest that sustains your attention over time. This is distinct from objects acquired to fill space, match a trend, or complete an aesthetic plan. The book encourages readers to develop this discernment through experience, research, and the practice of intentional looking.

How does this book relate to the Sight Unseen philosophy?

Sight Unseen, the magazine Khemsurov and Singer founded, has always approached interiors through a human-centered lens — focusing on the stories behind objects and the people who make and collect them. How to Live with Objects extends that philosophy into book form. It brings the same depth of attention to individual homes and objects that Sight Unseen has applied editorially for over a decade.

Where can I buy How to Live with Objects?

The book is available from major booksellers, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookshops. It’s published by Clarkson Potter (ISBN-13: 978-0593235041) and available in both hardcover and digital editions.

Find other books on art and design here at WE AND THE COLOR.

New on Instagram: "'Till Wrong Feels Right" - Lyrics and more by @iggypopofficial - Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 2019 New York.
Now marked/owned by my cat.

#TilWrongFeelsRight #iggypop #iggyandthestooges #musiclyrics #ClarksonPotter #RandomHouse #hardcover #cat https://instagr.am/p/CqQp706uaQv/