Wabi-sabi arose from Zen Buddhism but it enables you to live a simpler and less-cluttered life whatever your situation or beliefs. Earlier I wrote about the tokonoma, a special alcove or area that you can have in a room as a focal point, but here I'll deal with surfaces.

In wabi-sabi, it's very basic: you keep your surfaces clear, and if you can't, you limit the number of things on them to three. Just follow this 'rule' and you'll find it all comes together easily.

To start, look around your typical living room and count how many surfaces there are. In mine, which is a living-dining room, there are eight:

* a centrally placed sideboard used as a room divider

* a sideboard in one corner

* a coffee table

* a dining table

* a marble-topped buffet running along one wall

* and three deep windowsills (this is a French house and the windows open inwards)

All of them just asking to get filled up with tat.

The marble-top buffet had all the CDs and DVDs on top of it, which was fine as long as they were neatly arranged in their storage units. Problem is, they never were - they were stacked up 10 deep, constantly waiting to be refiled. My sideboards seemed to have the habit of collecting whatever was meant to be stored in their drawers and cupboards, while my coffee table, like many people's, rather defied description, piled high with books, magazines, coffee cups, wine bottles and God-knows-what else.

All this is by way of saying that I am by no means naturally tidy, nor clean, and that my approach to housekeeping is - um - relaxed, to say the least. Nor do I get much help from the DH in this, as he simply doesn't notice mess.

My biggest sin, though, was one committed by many of us - cluttering the windowsills. Which of us doesn't want more light in our rooms? Certainly not me. My house is old, with thick walls and tiny windows and every scrap of light is precious. Why, then, did I persist in putting pot plants and flower arrangements and candles and wotnot on my windowsills? I suppose I thought it added character. Well it doesn't.

As a first step to wabi-sabi, CLEAR your windowsills. Don't put anything there - not lamps, not ornaments, not candles (and matches and incense-stick holders...). It will take a couple of weeks to get used to how bare this looks, but once you get your eye in, it looks completely natural - you will benefit enormously from the light, and it also makes the windows much easier to both clean and open. Whatever you do from now on, don't block your windows. (For purists, this is in fact more of a Zen approach than Wabi-sabi, but we'll go into that another time.)

From your windows, progress outwards into the room. If there's one piece of furniture that you look OVER as you enter the room, this is the next important thing to keep clear. In my case, it's a green-painted sideboard to the left of the door as you enter the room.

In former days, this usually had three wooden bowls on it. I loved them, but somehow they always collected companions - unpaid bills, bank statements, letters to be posted, gloves, the dog lead. Now I work hard to keep that sideboard completely empty even if I don't have time for anything else. Gloves go in the drawers in the front of it. The dog lead's been given a hook by the door. If my husband dumps a bill or a letter on this sideboard, I immediately remove it to the dining table where it's less noticeable (the dining table remains a bit of a disaster area, as I do my beadwork on it, but nothing in life is perfect).

For many people, the coffee table is just a clutter magnet, so buying a table with two layers is a good move. The detritus that builds up on the top shelf can easily be cleared to the lower shelf each day and then you can deal with the whole mess later in the week. Be practical about this if housework isn't your idea of a good time. A glass top is all very well, but it shows every fingermark and you can still see all the rubbish underneath, whereas if you choose a natural wood finish that is not highly polished, or a white or grey distressed finish, you can hide a multitude of sins. We don't have a two-layer table, though I aspire to one, but we have one with two sliding sections, made by my husband's father, which enables us to hide the remotes, etc.

For surfaces against walls, such as sideboards, console tables or tallboys, you can afford to be less strict. These surfaces are usually not USED as such, but they are in your sightline as you enter a room, or as you sit on the soft furnishings. If you lack the discipline to keep these completely clear, try to limit your items to three in number - for instance a lamp, an ornament you really love, and a flower arrangement that reflects the season. That gives you a simple still-life that adds texture, colour and light to a room without overwhelming it.

In my own home, the clutter on the marble-top unit required the most thought. The problem was really lack of storage, and this was dealt with by the DH taking all our CDs and ripping them into I-Tunes, then discarding the ones that we never played (let's face it, with most albums you only really love a few tracks, not the whole thing). This freed up about a third of the space in the CD racks, leaving plenty of room for a 'refile' section into which I can quickly pop any loose CDs prior to refiling them properly.

Voila, clean surfaces that are easy to dust and wipe down without having to move anything - and that means they get cleaned more often.

Wabi-sabi, of course, arose in Japan, so to apply it in your home, it helps to know a little about what a traditional Japanese house looks like, though very few Japanese still live in them.

A traditional Japanese house is modular and most of the wall space is taken up either by floor-to-ceiling built-in furniture that stores the family's clothes, bedding, etc, or by sliding doors. The doors, called fusuma, can be opened up to create one big space, or closed to create smaller spaces.

This modular construction has affected the way rooms are decorated. You can't hang paintings on a wall of storage furniture, and large sliding doors tend to look rather boring left as they are. Therefore the Japanese paint their doors, as you can see at right, rather than hanging paintings on the walls, while the walls are left entirely empty - no pictures, no paintings, no photos of loved ones.

This can leave an interior looking very bare to a Western eye, which is more accustomed to having something - or preferably lots of things - to look at, but the Japanese attitude to art is different. They don't keep their things on permanent display. Instead, they take them out and use them and put them away again.

As an analogy, think of how you take out the Christmas decorations each year, and how pleased you are to see them and how nice the living room looks when the decorations are up. Think too of how bare the room looks without them when you put them away again. But very quickly your eye adjusts to it and you get used to the room looking as it usually does.

In order to have somewhere to display art, the Japanese came up with an alcove known as the tokonoma. This is based on the shrine found in Zen temples, which would contain a statue of Buddha, with offerings and candles etc. The tokonoma is basically just one corner of the room set aside. Sometimes it has a rough wood pillar at the open corner, and the floor is often raised like a dais.

Here, the Japanese display a hanging scroll with calligraphy and perhaps a painting relevant to the season, and an ikebana flower arrangement. Sometimes there might be a bowl or a statue or a bonsai tree, but usually there are no more than three things. They then change these items on a monthly, weekly or daily basis.

The tokonoma idea is one that can easily be incorporated into a Western home, and here's how to do it.

Remove all your paintings, pictures, wall art and photographs from a room, and set aside one area - preferably a corner. You could choose to paint this area a slightly different colour from the rest of the wall, or mark it off in paint like a frame. Place a table, or buffet or a chest of drawers there, and on it place a vase of flowers picked from the garden. Behind, hang your favourite painting or photograph. That's it - nothing else.

Now look at it. When it's the only thing in the room to fix on, you'll find you pay much more attention to it. But after a week or a few weeks, you'll also realise that you're looking at it less. This is the time to change the art, just as you would change the flowers as they dry and wither.

Try this approach at home and see how you get on - by cycling the things you own, you'll generally find that you need fewer things but that you build a deeper appreciation of each one individually.

Many of us long to have a home that is more streamlined and less cluttered, where you can cross the living room without stepping over the kid's toys, and can prepare a meal without having to clean off a kitchen surface first. But we make the mistake of thinking that if we just lived somewhere bigger, or had more money, then we'd magically achieve that clutterless environment.

Since the 1950s, the average house has accumulated junk like a dog picks up fleas. Bikes, computers, Ipods, music systems, kitchen gadgets, toiletries, printers, fax machines, answerphones, clock radios - the list is endless. And yet despite all these artefacts, our levels of wellbeing have not improved. Meanwhile, as we have gained more stuff, our houses have actually gotten smaller - the English now build the smallest houses in Europe and not unless you own an older property is your house likely to be in any way spacious.

But the real problem is not that our houses are too small - it's that we have too much stuff in them. Here's where we can take a tip from the Japanese, who have less square footage to live in than just about any nation on earth, and yet who have very high levels of wellbeing.

One reason for that may be wabi-sabi.

Wabi-sabi is an ancient Japanese philosophy that arose out of Zen Buddhism and it subtly influences Japanese life at an almost atomic level. You don't have to be Buddhist to follow it, though - in fact you don't have to have any kind of belief system at all.

Wabi originally meant 'poverty', but over time began to pick up connotations of 'willingly impoverished' - ie: people who deliberately make do with less. Sabi orginally meant 'solitude' but began to pick connotations of 'an impermanence that leads the viewer into a state of contemplation'.

However, these days the terms are used together in a primarily aesthetic sense. They imply an appreciation of the old, the used, the subtle, the natural and the slightly offbeat. When applied to your home, this means having a home with heart rather than a showcase, a home where there are fewer but better things, a home that is sparely furnished rather than sparsely furnished.

Space is the key

Remember that feeling when you first walked into your new, empty house, and that joy you felt at the space all around you? That space is the key to wabi-sabi. So often we feel our space with needless clutter because we live in a society that judges us by the things we accumulate. The more things we have, ipso facto, the more successful we must be. And so we collect.

Wall to wall photographs that show how many people love us, armies of china animals to display our artful taste, a dozen cushions on a sofa that was already comfortable to start with, a library full of books to show how intellectual we are. All things that need dusting and caring for and washing and cleaning. Things that, if we are not careful, become a burden to own.

Wabi-sabi means kicking back from all that, and only having what you need and actually use. It means treading the fine line between having things and being burdened by the things you have. It means allowing the space and light in a house to take primary place.

In a wabi-sabi room, you might have only one piece of artwork on the wall, and change this every week, rather than covering the wall with art that you then forget to look at. You might leave a third of each bookshelf empty. You might have one chair for each person in the house, and no more - no extra furniture for your occasional guests that then sits empty the rest of the time. It means getting rid of rugs and carpets, so you can sweep instead of using the vacuum cleaner. It means getting rid of curtains and instead using blinds or opaque glass for privacy. It means lining your cupboard drawers with cork to minimise sound.

What wabi-sabi is

Wabi-sabi is a relaxed philosophy. With wabi-sabi you have well-worn, comfortable furnishings that can cope with kids and animals. It means having old chintzes, crockery that doesn't match, rusting fire irons. It means having things that grow better with wear, like natural fabrics and wooden furniture, and things that are handmade, like wooden bowls, so they contain a subtle human spirit. It means keeping loose covers on the furniture and a changing display of your kids' art pinned to the fridge. Wabi-sabi is is loose and easy to live with. It is a very long way from smart.

Wabi-sabi celebrates ordinary things rather than valuable things. Earthenware dinnerware that shows off the food to perfection, recycled glassware that doesn't hurt the environment, flowers that you picked from the garden rather than hot-house blooms. It says dust once a day and then leave the room as it is. It does not care what other people think.

What wabi-sabi is not

Wabi-sabi is not minimalist. Minimalism in itself is a way of trying to impress people, and it results, very often, in environments that are as cold and sterile as a hospital ward. A minimalist house is hostile to children and animals and takes too much discipline (or more likely hired help) to keep clean and clutter-free.

Wabi-sabi is spare, but not spartan. What it really hates is the new, the synthetic and the shiny. The industrial coffee table of chrome and glass, the International Modern look, laminate and melamine, acrylic carpets. It's also antithetical to the very grand - to the designer sofa that looks great but is purgatory to sit on, to the Venetian mirror and Swarovski chandelier that fill your living room with glittering light, to everything matching, to conspicuous consumption, to 'bling'.

However, although it may embrace the well-worn thing, wabi-sabi is a long way from dirty. A wabi-sabi tablecloth is not covered with set-in egg yolk, but is flawlessly washed and ironed, even if darned. Wabi-sabi is not the unmade bed and the uncleaned house - in fact, Zen buddhists start each day with meticulous cleaning. Instead it means buying quality things and then respecting and maintaining them.

Wabi-sabi in real life

Wabi-sabi is not difficult to accomplish, and starts, for most of us, with a process of letting go which can be very liberating. If you want to try it, start first by emptying out a room and then replacing in it only exactly what you need. In a living room, this is perhaps one piece of seating per person and somewhere to put a coffee cup, or in a bedroom it's a bed and perhaps a chair.

Put the wardrobes in another room, if you can, or in an alcove. If you need more wardrobe space, consider getting rid of some clothes instead and making do with the storage you have. Keep the floors easy to clean - tile, cork, wood: don't add carpets and rugs. Avoid needless cushions and ornaments. Clear your surfaces and keep them clear - no clocks, paperweights, bowls and knick-knacks. Create a sense of temporariness by covering your furniture with slip covers rather than grand upholstery. And make room somewhere for one vase of flowers to bring nature inside.

Try to acquire the art of looking at things without judging their material value. Whe aluminium was first discovered, it was the most precious metal in the world - until we discovered that there were tonnes of it. But the metal itself did not change - only our attitude to it. When the things you own have no intrinsic monetary value, you can accept their loss lightly when you break them or chip them or damage them. This way it becomes easier to have only objects in your house that you actually use.

Focus instead on what you yourself value - the patchwork quilt your gran pieced together, the pressed flower card you made at school, the clock your father left you.

In the past two years the DH and I have discarded almost half of what we formerly owned, and with each piece of furniture we sell (as needed) or give away (better karma), the more do we appreciate the extra space. My husband no longer has to maneouvre around the furniture, getting irritated by bumping into things. Meanwhile, having empty surfaces means less housework, and as your eye adjusts to these more spare surroundings, you realise there is space in your heart for other things - for learning, for study, for new experiences.

The great thing about wabi-sabi is that you can increase your commitment to it as you go along, starting with one drawer in one cupboard, and gradually moving to the entire house if you so please. This might mean embracing a new way of living, but like everything that entails some difficulty, the result is very definitely worth it.