Book Of Successful Home Plans

Select from a catalog of more than 360 expertly prepared plans for building small homes under 1,200 square feet. Easy-to-follow construction blueprints and materials lists are available for each project to ensure success.

Choose from the 375 most popular house plans in North America, with full color renderings and photos. Fully customizable CAD files are available for every dream home plan.

Prepared by Structures Publishing Company in cooperation with Home Planners, inc. Includes index.

Whether you're looking to build a cabin, cottage, small home, or tiny house, you're sure to find the ideal small home with the features that will fit your lifestyle inside The Big Book of Small Home Plans, 2nd Edition. Select from more than 360 plans – including 140 new plans – prepared by expert architects and designers, for building a variety of small homes under 1,200 square feet. Easy-to-follow construction blueprints are available to purchase for each project, both in print and digital formats. The Big Book of Small Home Plans is also packed with advice and useful tips on small home organization, decorating, and storage. Start your search right now for the perfect small home! Newly updated edition also features revisions to existing plans, as well as new photography for newly added plans.

Showcases architecture that's driven by a budget

Strawbale Home Plans is a meditative and conscientious exploration of the innumerable reasons to consider straw bale as a viable building material. Environmentally friendly, super insulative, economical, and natural, straw bale can be used to build everything from garden walls and shed roofs to small homes. The vibrant pages of this practical guide are filled with rich photos of organic, fluid, undulating structures pulsating with subtle creativity. Indeed at once a pragmatic construction manual and a philosophical, artistic guidebook, this handbook provides food for the mind and soul.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

Packed with hundreds of pages of beautiful and inspirational color photographs of homes from around the world, a visually stunning resource and guide—part of the successful 150 Best series—featuring the latest in modern home construction and design. A comprehensive collection of single-family houses created by some of the most distinguished international architects and designers, 150 Best of the Best House Ideas showcase the latest trends and various influences on home design. Incorporating the most up-to-date technological advances in construction and material use, these beautiful dwellings, from cottage-style designs to minimalist geometric constructions, are visually appealing, energy-efficient, and have a low environmental impact. This beautiful compilation expresses the diversity of current building trends and provides an inspirational source of ideas for artists, designers, architects, home buyers and owners, and anyone interested in keeping-up-to-date with contemporary residential architecture.

From the author of the successful 150 Best series comes the debut entry in the forward-thinking Open Concept Houses series, filled with nearly 500 pages of color photos—sure to become the ultimate resource for this fast-growing trend in home design and renovation. One of the hottest lifestyle trends today, open concept living spaces eliminate doorways and walls to create a large combined area for cooking, dining, entertaining, and relaxing. No longer are the kitchen, dining room, and living room compartmentalized. Instead, each space blends into the next to create one large area "separated" and defined by islands, carpets, and furniture. This increasingly popular style provides a sense of expansiveness, connectedness, and flow that traditional architecture and design—defined by spaces broken by walls—lack. This engaging, inspiring, and informative volume brings together a diverse collection of houses from all over the world, including spaces that have been designed from the ground up or have been renovated to reflect this popular trend. Inside Open Concept Houses you’ll find an array of beautiful and creative homes by distinguished international architects and designers who have conceived practical and functional solutions adapted to the specific needs and particular tastes of their clients. Filled with hundreds of full-color photographs as well as sets of floorplans for renovated residences—both the original and remodeled blueprints—this imaginative, idea-filled book is a must-have for architects, designers, decorators, and home owners looking to create or adapt the open concept style in their own dwellings.