Homeward Bound

Emily Grosvenor explores a new kind of feng shui in Find Yourself at Home.

BY MICHELLE KICHERER IG: @MichelleKicherer

Six years ago, author and Oregon Home magazine editor Emily Grosvenor found herself on the floor. After a nerve injury left her unable to sit without severe pain, she spent a lot of time lying like a slug in front of the fire (her words).

One day, “I suddenly felt the room begin to vibrate,” she writes. “I looked around and realized that while my mind was overwhelmed with a running commentary of everything that was wrong with me, my situation, and the world, there was nothing wrong, per se, with the room. I felt held.” A glorious sunlight poured through the windows—and highlighted a layer of dust coating the room’s surfaces.

“Then I did what generations of grandmas have done whenever times get tough. I puttered,” Grosvenor writes. It’s with this sense of humor, place and storytelling that she wrote Find Yourself at Home (Chronicle Prism, 240 pages, $22.95), a book about caring for yourself by caring for your home space. It reads like part memoir and part how-to guide, with a refreshed and more nuanced look at decluttering than Marie Kondo’s “Does it spark joy?” methods as seen in books like The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

Grosvenor explains to WW how her fivestep decluttering and rearranging methods—or as she calls it, “shaping your space so it shapes you back”—are different from Kondo’s. “It opens you up for a wider range of reflection and a wider range of emotional responses to the things that you have,”