Grand Designs Handbook: The blueprint for building your dream home - Hardcover

McCloud, Kevin

3.71

55 ratings by Goodreads

9780007225941: Grand Designs Handbook: The blueprint for building your dream home

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007225946 ISBN 13: 9780007225941

Publisher: Collins, 2006

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TV's architecture and design guru Kevin McCloud shares his passion and expertise in this brilliant guide to designing and building your own home, illustrated with the most memorable houses from the award-winning Channel 4 series.

The book goes way beyond the confines of the usual TV tie-in. Over the 8 years that Grand Designs has been on our screens, Kevin has had plenty of opportunity to formulate his own strong views on what makes truly brilliant architecture. For the first time he can share those views fully, showing that ‘houses too can be architecture’ and giving any aspiring self-builder the maximum number of tools to ensure that their vision becomes reality, with the minimum amount of heartache along the way.

Through three main sections – ‘Thinking’, ‘Dreaming’ and ‘Doing’ – he guides you through each stage of the self–build process, from working out what you really want, to finding a plot, obtaining planning permission, commissioning and briefing architects and builders, and implementing the build itself. Structured around fundamental locations – urban, suburban and rural – Kevin presents his own compendium of houses from across the UK which he finds exciting and exemplary. Some of the most successful projects from the TV series are featured, including Monty Ravenscroft’s innovative house in Peckham with its retractable roof, a reinvented violin factory in Waterloo, a converted barn in Ross–on–Wye, a spectacular loch-side house on the Clyde estuary and a glass pavilion on a beach near Exeter. As Kevin says, ‘ Green is no longer a weird colour to be’ and running throughout the book is the theme of sustainable building and how to achieve it – not as some minority issue only of interest to those who knit their own sofas but as something which is increasingly central to how we will design, build and live in our homes.

Passionate and opinionated, this book is always highly readable and engaging. For anyone who cares about design and for everyone who has ever thought about building their own home it is essential and truly inspiring reading.

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Review:

...a barrage of new projects to inspire us...tips, hints and ideas
about building, renovation and decorating. -- Wells Journal, 21st September 2006

A must-have for fans of the Channel 4 series...has masses of
glossy pictures... -- The Mail on Sunday, 17th September

Don't miss. A self-build bible. -- Grand Designs Magazine, October 2006 issue -

It's not a manual, it's more of a manifesto... -- The London Paper, September 2006

brilliant guide to designing and building your own home...highly
readable and engaging...essential and truly inspiring reading. -- In Dublin, 14 September 2006

About the Author:

Kevin McCloud is best known as presenter of Channel 4's BAFTA-nominated ‘Grand Designs’, now in its seventh series. He writes books and articles about decoration, design, lighting and colour, and is editor-at-large of Grand Designs magazine. In addition, Kevin is a product and lighting designer and has produced ranges of furniture, lighting and tableware for high street names such as Debenhams, as well as a range of paint for Fired Earth. In September 2005 he launched his own homeware brand, Place.

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