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Good House Cheap House: Adventures in Creating an Extraordinary Home at an Everyday Price
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| List Price: | $24.95 |
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Average customer review:
Product Description
From a Texas farmhouse to a loft in St. Paul, to a prefab cabin on the Wisconsin prairie, these houses, in which anyone would feel at home, display a wonderful mix of design smarts and budget savvy. ""Good House Cheap House" is chock full of great ideas and creative solutions for those of us on a budget-but even the less financially-challenged can learn a thing or two about stylish and innovative design."
--Charles Burbridge, designer, HGTV's "Design on a Dime" "The cookie-cutter house trend has been around long enough. With its outside-the-box ideas and great resources, "Good House Cheap House" proves you can build a unique space without emptying your bank account."
--Amber Jones, Editor, "do! Magazine"
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #25758 in Books
- Published on: 2005-09-28
- Released on: 2005-10-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 185 pages
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Kira Obolensky has written for print, film, and stage. She co-authored Sarah Susanka's national bestseller, The Not So Big House. Kira's book, Garage, was published in 2001. She has received a number of writing awards and fellowships, including the Kesselring Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She lives in Minneapolis.
Customer Reviews
Should add to title "And Owners who did a lot of work themselves"
Lovely book, love the idea, got some great ideas for my remodel. However, the author makes clear that one of the most cost-savings measures the owners took, house after house, was to do the work, or some of it, themselves. That's great, if you already work with concrete or metal or can use autoCAD, but for the rest of us, it makes some of the ideas as expensive as before. In addition, the author relied on pictures in the book, which is always great, but the text didn't really cover all of the cost-savings ideas seen in the pictures. Going through the book, I kept wanting more and more detail.
Also, the plywood, IKEA cabinets and concrete are used over and over. Now, I love and plan to use all three, but it's not like the author shows us new ideas with each house.
OK, but . . .
Good pictures and layout. This book does give some good ideas, still, like many home picture books, it's a great photo portfolio and not entirely practical for the ordinary person. Also, lack of room/house plans makes it difficult to see how everything works and makes it difficult to copy a particular layout.
Good House Cheap House Great Book
This is a lovely book both in its content and its presentation. Each of the homes selected has unique, intriguing features, about which Obolensky writes with flair and enthusiasm. The writing style is uniformly crisp and elegant; and the content moves at a lively pace between different interesting details in different houses. The photographs are gorgeous, showing a variety of perspectives in beautiful light. The presentation and organization (choices of colors for borders, varying the shapes of photos, written inserts) are also visually pleasing and inviting. It is a great coffee table book, but it is not just a "picture book". It provides useful information, in that it provides examples of inexpensive, creative ways to improve our own living spaces - useful, especially, to those of us who are not so creative ourselves. The optimistic message is that almost any house can be made "good".
