Eco-Interiors: A Guide to Environmentally Conscious Interior Design

Disappointing Guide to Green Interiors

by Grazyna Pilatowicz. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1995. 170 pages, paperback, $24.95.

Eco-Interiors is a well-conceived book that just doesn’t come through. The idea is great—a guide for interior designers explaining environmental issues and the steps they can take to address those issues. The format also makes sense—opening chapters providing background on global and indoor environmental issues, a main body providing design guidelines and solutions, and several case studies followed by extensive information listings to wrap things up. Unfortunately, the execution leaves much to be desired.

Eco-Interiors is quite short for such a broad topic—its 170 pages contain nearly as much white space as text. As a result, many of the topics are addressed only superficially, without enough depth to fully understand them, much less make design decisions based on the information.

Where more detailed technical information is provided, it is often inaccurate or incomplete. A relatively lengthy section on energy efficient lighting, for example, fails to mention the important benefit of reduced cooling loads. The discussion of window treatments to reduce heat gain mentions the problems of tinted glass and plastic film coatings, but omits mention of low-e coatings. Low-e glazings are mentioned later, but only as a heat-loss prevention measure.

Other weaknesses in the book include charts that bear no relation to the text they are illustrating, and recommendations that are too dated to be relevant. The list of information resources has inaccuracies, such as the inclusion of one publication, Design Spirit, that hasn’t been published for over three years. Pilatowicz clearly has the best of intentions, and her arguments for addressing global environmental issues integrally with the indoor environment are laudable. Her book, however, is little more than a schematic primer on the subject, and an incomplete one at that.