The Healing Home

Sacred Spaces: Everyday People and the Beautiful Homes Created Out of Their Trials, Healing, and Victories (Convergent Books)

By Carley Summers

We all think of our homes as sacred spaces. But the designer Carley Summers chronicles 14 houses where the actual rooms and spaces work to heal their occupants. Summers is candid about her own past, so much so that readers know she is a reliable narrator. She writes without restraint or self-pity about her own prior alcoholism and addictions—and how after fully recovering, she understands how interiors can work to solve personal problems, She went on an actual and spiritual journey—North Carolina to California and Canada, abroad to France and Morocco—to interview “everyday” people who have had profound travails in their lives—whether grief, abuse, or illness, personal loss, substance abuse, or depression. By seeing the homes of these people and hearing directly from them, readers learn about the power of design as healer. Summers begins the book with an in-depth interview with an especially thoughtful woman named Page Aman, who happens to be Summers’s mother. This interview establishes the tone for the book in which people open up about their trials and how they made their homes. When Summers’s mother is asked why her home means so much to her, she says, “It’s all the memories I have here. It’s not a big house and it’s not a perfect house. The floors need to be redone; there’s knicks and old walls that crack apart, but I love it. I love where I live; I love coming home.” —David Masello