From warm weather climates to properties built on permafrost, homeowners everywhere are discovering anew the allure of fire outdoors. With zoning laws, resources, and proximity often limiting the open bonfire enjoyed by our ancestors, fire is being tamed in a variety of attractive ways by creative landscape architects, designers, builders, and manufacturers. Today's outdoor fires radiate warmth for chilly evenings, add an attractive glow to gathered faces, form focal centers for outdoor gatherings, and provide a means of food preparation al fresco. This book presents a wide variety of ideas of outdoor fireplaces, fire pits, and cook centers. Manufactured outdoor hearth products and custom handmade masterpieces address a huge array of styles to satisfy a broad range of tastes and budgets. A selection of outdoor cook centers is also included, complete with wood burning pizza ovens. Over 200 images of designs by professional landscape architects, contractors, custom homebuilders, kitchen designers, and hearth product manufacturers were compiled to provide inspiration and present the most complete book on the subject ever published.
Anyone who thinks the garage is simply a place to park the car will never think that again after a look at this book. Garage takes a look at the last, undiscovered frontier of home design... the most versatile room not in the house. The book explores many uses for this ubiquitous space -- from studio, library, and museum to soundstage, playroom, and greenhouse. Garage takes this space seriously, after all.
-- Includes more than 200 color photographs of over 50 garages.
-- Shows how to create a garage "room" that meets one's needs for efficiency and style.
-- Provides options for using existing space and floor plans for new structures.
This text aims to integrate tiles and their design and manufacture, with the architectural and social environment in which they were used. It concentrates particularly on the golden age of tiles in the 19th century when their production became a major industry.
Creating the Artful Home: the Aesthetic Movement and Its Influence on Home Decor covers the history of a movement that emphasized "art for art's sake"-and the influence it had on home decor. The Aesthetic Movement in America lasted just a few decades (1870-1900), and served mainly as a bridge between the high Victorian sensibility and the radical shift to the Arts & Crafts style. The movement germinated among artists who used opulent color, decorative patterning, and lavish materials simply for the aesthetic effects they could evoke. It was commonly held that a home that expressed an artful, harmonious soul would instill high aesthetic and moral merit in its inhabitants. The Aesthetic Movement in America helped to popularize the idea that everyone should be able to enjoy beautiful, well-made homes and furnishings-not just the very wealthy. Artful homes could be composed from brilliant antique store finds, discriminating department store purchases, and gems hand-made by the ladies of the house. It was the moment when people embraced the idea that only a beautiful home could be a happy home.
Karen Zukowski delves into the movement's establishment, evolution, and main characters, and shows how today's homes can incorporate Aesthetic principles:
Through suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, massive use of symbols, and synaesthetic effects-that is, correspondence between words, colors and music.
How influential designers such as Clarence Cook and Charles Eastlake popularized the idea that beautiful homes with tasteful furnishings could be available to practically everyone
How today's designers, manufacturers, and retailers deploy the very same stylistic markers of the Aesthetic Movement: rich color, layered pattern and texture, mixtures of historical motifs
Treehouses lift the spirits. They inspire dreams. They represent freedom: from adults or adulthood, from duties and responsibilities, from an earthbound perspective. If we can't fly with the birds, at least we can nest with them. With lively writing and beautiful photographs, Treehouses paints a fascinating portrait of this ingenious branch of architecture. It provides a brief history of treehouses, from Caligula through the Medici to Queen Victoria. It shows how to design and build a treehouse, from picking the right tree to shingling the roof. And it tells the stories of dozens of treehouses and the people who built them, from simple platforms nailed together by kids to arboreal palaces constructed and lived in by grown-ups. The centerpiece of the book is a photo essay showing Pete Nelson building a spectacular octagonal treehouse thirty feet up an old-growth fir on Saltspring Island in British Columbia. With two hundred square feet of floor space, cedar paneling, and leaded French doors, the Saltspring treehouse is one of the finest specimens of the treehouse builder's art. Anyone who has ever built a treehouse, or dreamed of it, or read Swiss Family Robinson, will find Treehouses irresistible.
Sarah Susanka's Not So Big Solutions for Your Home explores practical design ideas that can transform any house into a great house that looks, works and feels right for the owner.
Sarah Susanka, whose previous best-selling books showed homeowners how to appreciate and create a house that is beautiful, visually expansive and reflective of how families really live, now offers readers practical, everyday design ideas on everything from selecting a site for a new home to designing a mail-sorting space. Photographs, along with over 150 drawings from Sarah Susanka's own sketchbook, illustrate practical home design ideas for everyday living.
Not So Big Solutions for Your Home is a compilation of over 30 columns written by Sarah Susanka for Fine Homebuilding magazine.
-- Makes architecture and design accessible to people who are not trained in the field
-- Provides a wide variety of practical, accessible, everyday solutions
This is the ultimate guide to creating an outdoor oasis in your very own backyard. Hundreds of images illustrate creative ideas for turning a simple lawn into a fresh-air room. Topics covered include using landscaping to create "walls" and a sense of space. Design possibilities of wood, poured concrete, brick, tile, gravel, natural stone, and concrete pavers are explored. Consider decorating loggias, patios, courtyards, covered porches, decks, lanais, and rooftops, as well as temporary structures. Learn how to furnish an outdoor room. A large section on outdoor kitchens provides ideas for outdoor design's hottest trend. Designers, contractors, architects, and homeowners will love the multitude of ideas for fashioning amazing outdoor spaces.
The Arts & Crafts bungalow has been reborn, in as rich and full an array of iterations as it was in its heyday -- from tight clusters of similar inexpensive housing opportunities to the grand, and arguably borderline, bungalow scale of the "ultimate bungalows" of the 1910s. The New Bungalow is a celebration of contemporary interpretations of this classic house style -- an art form that symbolizes the best of the good life. It offers an alternative solution to the tract development filled with homes appliqued with various random trim details and contrived architectural components. It is a guide to creating a home that has a true, honest expression of style. Given their simple lines, spacious and open floorplans, natural tones, and colors, it is no mystery why new bungalow developments are gaining popularity.
Walk through five centuries of homes both great and small--from the smoke-filled manor halls of the Middle Ages to today's Ralph Lauren-designed environments--on a house tour like no other, one that delightfully explicates the very idea of "home."
You'll see how social and cultural changes influenced styles of decoration and furnishing, learn the connection between wall-hung religious tapestries and wall-to-wall carpeting, discover how some of our most welcome luxuries were born of architectural necessity, and much more. Most of all, Home opens a rare window into our private lives--and how we really want to live.
