cover image Decorating with Funky Shui: How to Lighten Up, and Have Fun Decorting Your Home

Decorating with Funky Shui: How to Lighten Up, and Have Fun Decorting Your Home

Jennifer O'Neil, Kitty O'Neil. Andrews McMeel Publishing, $14.95 (144pp) ISBN 978-0-7407-4199-9

""If Feng Shui is the art of arranging objects to promote harmony, then Funky Shui is the art of arranging objects to make your home and your life fun,"" note the authors of this guide to""playful good taste."" Borrowing from (and merrily riffing on) the lexicon of Feng Shui, the Chinese design philosophy that has garnered so much attention in recent years, the sisters offer a trove of suggestions on how to showcase quirky objects, create themed rooms with kitschy charm and integrate color and lighting to ensure good cheer, evoke pleasant memories and generate a sense of both stabilizing harmony and off-kilter whimsy. Arranging snow globes, stringing twinkle lights and serving chocolate milk in fine china are among their conduits to fun. Each chapter addresses a different room in the home, and offers tips on reinvigorating these spaces with cheeky, winking touches (a surfboard-turned-desk for the home office, silk scarves draped over the bedside lamp, black-and-white autographed pictures for the dining room). Some of the tips are too time-consuming for everyday life, and those who can't stomach the cutesy bits won't want to follow the advice to the letter. But the sisters have included plenty of good ideas for imbue a home (and therefore, they affirm, the life of its residents) with happiness--without spending a fortune.