Customer Reviews

The Home Design Handbook: The Essential Planning Guide for Building, Buying, or Remodeling a Home

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This book looks at home design from a wholistic approach as well as up close and personal. It focuses on your hopes and dreams and the soul of your home to give you true satisfaction with your design. It includes such things as site, energy considerations, family's lifestyle, outdoors and indoors, and budget. With the guidance of this book you can plan to build a house from scratch or remodel an existing house to your taste and needs. Each room in the house is taken into consideration in detail, right down to the storage space, with photos and floor plans. Useful addresses and an extensive bibliography are given for your further exploration. This book is fantastic, especially because it gives you the freedom to custom design your dream house. Much of it is in the form of a workbook, with blanks to fill in. After going through all the forms, it will become clear to you what you need to do to achieve your goals.

We found The Home Design Handbook to be an excellent resource as we searched for our home. The questions and exercises helped us narrow down and prioritize what we wanted (and did not want) in our home. Even the information intended for those who plan to build or renovate a house, covered issues that we found important considerations for anyone buying an existing home. For example, we learned alot about what to watch for to ensure the house was more energy efficient, inside and out. We felt we were better educated buyers with this great book!

This book is an excellent guide to help navigate the hundreds of practical details involved in planning a home.
Every chapter is well-written, and well- organized, with an extremely useful checklist at the end. For example, what about the selection of your vanity in the bathroom? Would you like it to be the age old standard height of 34"? Or would you prefer it to be shorter, or higher? This is a very useful question as the standard height of 34" for the bathroom vanity is not really a comfortable height for most people. My counters, both kitchen and bathrooms, are a height of 37# (I'm 5'5)which is a more comfortable height for me. The depth of my counters are 28" not the standard 24". If you notice your kitchen, once you have the toaster, blender, etc. out, there's little room left for much of anything else. So those extra 4 " in depth really give you a lot more space. Builders want everything to be standard because it's easier for them, but it's your house they are building, and better to get it the way you want it. Another useful question is "do you read in the bathtub"? I do, and that means when designing the bathroom I want a good reading light above the tub at the end where my head lays. Every chapter in this book ends with a great checklist of things you will want to take into account, and prepares you for the highly detailed process of planning a home. It's one of the best on the market, and I think one of most underated ones.

Most of the book is literally pages filled with questions about what you want in a home, with blank space to write in your answers. There are a few suggestions that all somehow end up pointing at similar designs. The filled out book would be given to an architect to start a design. Very good for someone who needs a formal structure to decide what is needed. If you've already throught seriously about what you want, this book will waste your time.

A lot of pages filled with black-and-white large text, lots of white space... and very little design. If you need help thinking through the design process, this might be for you, but if you've already done any kind of interior design or remodeling, you'll want a different book. Unless, of course, you failed miserably and want to go back to basics.