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The Big Book of Small House Designs: 75 Award-Winning Plans for Your Dream House, All 1,250 Square Feet or Less

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Manufacturer: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers

List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $9.12
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Average Customer Ratings:

The Big Book of Small House Designs is a collection of more than 500 drawings illustrating all aspects of 75 small homes of various styles, from a New England farmhouse to a sophisticated steel frame to a Santa Fe ranch. Each design includes detailed floor plans, section drawings, elevations, and perspectives, as well as a description of the materials used and landscaping around the home. Keeping in mind that a chief priority for a small home is often energy efficiency, most of the plans incorporate some energy-efficient element. There are dozens of plans suitable for every environment and climate in the country. The designs are all a direct result of several international competitions that solicited from architects the best homes of 1,250 square feet or less. Contact information for the architects is provided in the back of the book.


PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS:

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 728.370222
EAN: 9781579123659
ISBN: 1579123651
Label: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Manufacturer: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 368
Publication Date: 2004-01-04
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Studio: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers


SIMILAR ITEMS:

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CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

GLASSES PLEASE -
The type and drawings in this book are so small you need a magnifying glass to read it. This book might be more suited to the classroom.

Colors please -
When I buy a book I either want to learn or relax. In this case I wanted to learn and had to really concentrate because of the lack of pictures in it. Great plans, great book but the lack of pictures makes it difficult to read.

Waste of Time -
I knew the book wouldn't be a great resource but I thought it might have some reason for having been published other than the author and publisher just trying to cash in on the "not so big" / "green" trend.

There is really no redeeming quality in this book. Most of the houses are severely outdated and are poorly proportioned. Except for one or two, they don't even look designed by an architect, they just look like run-of the mill cracker boxes, some with poorly planned additions. There's no useful information on how to best economize space or anything. The "design" information is useless because the illustrations are so bad they are painful to look at. Some are so muddy, it looks as if the book were published using water damaged drawings and a broken Xerox machine.

I apologize for not editing this review, but this book has already wasted enough of my time. If you're looking for something more current, try James Grayson Trulove's 25 Houses Under 1500 Square Feet. It's more design oriented, even if does have a lot of filler. It's not a 5 star by any stretch of the imagination. At least his illustrations are legible and the photos make the book look produced by professionals that actually care about design and architecture.

The cover fools you -
Be warned. This book contains only 2D home plans. Their are no photos besides the one on the cover.

Drawings - not pictures -
The book have a lot of good ideaas for how to draw / design houses. There is a lack of pictures of the actual solutions, in order to give a good idea of how the the solutions actually work.
Jan T.

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