Retreats, hideaways, escape spaces - call them what you will, such havens offer us a personal, private and peaceful place to nest, nurture and take time out. These spaces offer the chance to create a completely unique interior. Be it a simple garden room, a homely shepherd's hut, a yoga-lover's cabin, a fishing lodge or summer house, a treehouse, a circus wagon, a purpose-designed garden smart pod or even a canal boat, the glorious retreats showcased here will provide inspiration for creating your very own place for escape or somewhere to enjoy favourite activities. Author Sara Bird reveals the essential elements of a soulful hideaway, from building materials to decorative details, and then explores 14 remarkable retreats in three chapters: Close to Home, On the Water and In the Wild. These are spaces designed for rest, relaxation, play and daydreaming either alone or en famille, as well as for their effects on our mental and physical wellbeing.

What do exotic area rugs, handcrafted steel-string guitars, and fiddling have in common today? Many contemporary tradition bearers embrace complexity in form and content. They construct objects and performances that draw on the past and evoke nostalgia effectively but also reward close attention. In Rugs, Guitars, and Fiddling: Intensification and the Rich Modern Lives of Traditional Arts, author Chris Goertzen argues that this entails three types of change that can be grouped under an umbrella term: intensification. First, traditional creativity can be intensified through virtuosity, through doing hard things extra fluently. Second, performances can be intensified through addition, by packing increased amounts of traditional materials into the conventionally sized packages. Third, in intensification through selection, artistic impact can grow even if amount of information recedes by emphasizing compelling ideas-e.g., crafting a red and black viper poised to strike rather than a pretty duck decoy featuring more colors and contours. Rugs handwoven in southern Mexico, luthier-made guitars, and southern US fiddle styles experience parallel changes, all absorbing just enough of the complex flavors, dynamics, and rhythms of modern life to translate inherited folklore into traditions that can be widely celebrated today. New mosaics of details and skeins of nuances don't transform craft into esoteric fine art, but rather enlist the twists and turns and endless variety of the contemporary world therapeutically, helping transform our daily chaos into parades of negotiable jigsaw puzzles. Intensification helps make crafts and traditional performances more accessible and understandable and thus more effective, bringing past and present closer together, helping folk arts continue to perform their magic today.