Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art [Hardcover]

Art Boericke (Author), Barry Shapiro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1973

If you have ever thought about getting it all together...time, energy, land, materials...to build something of your very own, this book may entice you to take the fatal step. Author, Art Boericke and Photography Barry Shapiro have traveled for years to the ends of many rural road in order to visit and record the best owner-built structures they could.

These words and images will not telly ou what to build nor how to build it. We hope that the book will show you some neat solutions to old problems, with gorgeous embellishments, and it will tell you that you needn't be a titan of carpentry in order to have a sprightly outbuilding or a snug main house.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 95 pages
• Publisher: Scrimshaw Press; 1st edition (1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0912020008
• ISBN-13: 978-0912020006
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 8.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #624,699 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A visual smorgasbord from a time somehow forgotten, March 28, 2003

By 

Chris Moore (Otago New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art (Hardcover)

I bought this book about 9 years ago in a Wellington second hand bookshop and have been in love with the images contained within ever since.
It provides an inspiration to me of the handmade house as a place of unlimited creative expression and a melding of the function and form of shelter into whatever it's creator is capable of imagining.
Savour the images and let them seep into your subcouncious...who knows what journey they may set you upon.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly a pleasure: folk art and 1960s/70s documentary, January 25, 2004

By 

Quickhappy "quickhappy" (Big city, big country) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art (Paperback)

There is something warm and peaceful about this book. It is a transporter, ready to take you back to Northern California or Oregon of the 1970s. It is folk art and naked children--a time before Martha Stewart. It is an architecture of freedom and spontaneity, earthiness, and autonomy. Here people have put together woody structures of the mind and captured in form the feeling that I remember so well from my Northern California childhood in the 70s.

The book is just photos--no building instructions, no pretense to being authoritative or comprehensive; art homes which caught the authors' eyes.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great for inspiration and wonderful conversation piece, June 29, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art (Paperback)

I found this book several years ago at a library sale and all my friends enjoy the pictures of rustic cabins. It is certainly a picture book and not a how-to book but it has sparked many grand thoughts and converstations over the years. It's worth many a good slow look.