Prefabulous + Sustainable: Building and Customizing an Affordable, Energy-Efficient Home

Prefabulous + Sustainable: Building and Customizing an Affordable, Energy-Efficient Home

Prefabulous and Sustainable dispels the negative myths associated with prefab homes and shows the reader how beautiful and remarkably green prefab homes are. In this guide to prefab home-building author Sheri Koones, demystifies the prefabricated house by using 25 unique homes to showcase how factory-built homes are greener, more efficient, sturdier, and more cost-effective than site-built homes. The book is divided into 3 categories—green, greener, greenest—and the homes featured vary in style, design, type of construction, and size. All of the homes included in Prefabulous and Sustainable have been customized to create a level of sustainability beyond the inherent qualities of prefab. Written in an easy to understand and approachable style, author Sheri Koones walks the readers through each of the homes, explaining the materials, strategies, and systems used to create a sustainable living environment. Photographs, captions, floor plans, and sidebars illustrate to readers that green living is not as complicated as one might think, and attainable for everyone. Also included is a resource guide, making this book a hand-on guide for homebuilders.  

Prefabulous + Sustainable: Building and Customizing an Affordable, Energy-Efficient Home

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building 

For seventy-five years, it’s been Manhattan’s richest apartment building, and one of the most lusted-after addresses in the world. One apartment had 37 rooms, 14 bathrooms, 43 closets, 11 working fireplaces, a private elevator, and his-and-hers saunas; another at one time had a live-in service staff of 16. To this day, it is steeped in the purest luxury, the kind most of us could only imagine, until now. 

The last great building to go up along New York’s Gold Coast, construction on 740 Park finished in 1930. Since then, 740 has been home to an ever-evolving cadre of our wealthiest and most powerful families, some of America’s (and the world’s) oldest money—the kind attached to names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bouvier, Chrysler, Niarchos, Houghton, and Harkness—and some whose names evoke the excesses of today’s monied elite: Kravis, Koch, Bronfman, Perelman, Steinberg, and Schwarzman. All along, the building has housed titans of industry, political power brokers, international royalty, fabulous scam-artists, and even the lowest scoundrels.

The book begins with the tumultuous story of the building’s construction. Conceived in the bubbling financial, artistic, and social cauldron of 1920’s Manhattan, 740 Park rose to its dizzying heights as the stock market plunged in 1929—the building was in dire financial straits before the first apartments were sold. The builders include the architectural genius Rosario Candela, the scheming businessman James T. Lee (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s grandfather), and a raft of financiers, many of whom were little more than white-collar crooks and grand

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building

Rock the Shack: The Architecture of Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs

Rock the Shack: The Architecture of Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs

From weekend homes to get-away cabins in the mountains, by the sea, or in the woods, this architecture embodies our longing for lounging in nature. For the first time in the history of humankind, more people live in cities than in the country. Yet, at the same time, more and more city dwellers are yearning for rural farms, mountain cabins, or seaside homes. These kinds of refuges offer modern men and women a promise of what urban centers usually cannot provide: quiet, relaxation, being out of reach, getting back to basics, feeling human again. Rock the Shack is a survey of such contemporary refuges from around the world--from basic to luxury. The book features a compelling range of sparingly to intricately furnished cabins, cottages, second homes, tree houses, transformations, shelters, and cocoons. The look of the included structures from the outside is just as important as the view from inside. What these diverse projects have in common is an exceptional spirit that melds the uniqueness of a geographic location with the individual character of the building's owner and architect.  

Rock the Shack: The Architecture of Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs

Heirloom Modern: Homes filled with objects bought, bequeathed, beloved, and worth handing down

Heirloom Modern: Homes filled with objects bought, bequeathed, beloved, and worth handing down

A look inside the homes of today’s stylish new "heirloomists." Proclaimed as "the New Antiquarians" in the New York Times, Hollister and Porter Hovey are proponents of an aesthetic that puts Ralph Lauren, the Royal Tennenbaums, and a whole lot of taxidermy into a tarnished silver cocktail shaker and mixes it all up. As the principles of Hovey Design, they work to integrate nostalgia, adventure, and history into the home. In this book, the sisters pull back the velvet drapes on the model ships, antique book collections, and vintage Vuitton trunks that fill the homes of today’s chicest heirloomists and flea-market lovers, and give readers a visual taste of this eclectic, generation-hurdling aesthetic. This book opens up the homes of individuals and couples to show how they use décor to give their residences a sense of history and autobiography. The Hoveys venture into the apartments, cottages, and townhouses of artists, architects, designers, furniture makers, and landscape designers, who seamlessly integrate inherited keepsakes, tag sale curiosities, collections and memorabilia, and contemporary art. Inspiring in its eclecticism, this book introduces readers to a new kind of modern.

 

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Northern Delights: Scandinavian Homes, Interiors and Design

Northern Delights: Scandinavian Homes, Interiors and Design

Its timeless beauty, premium quality, and humane functionality make Scandinavian interior design ideal for homes, restaurants, offices, and any other rooms in which people should feel comfortable. If the goal were to build a house in which everyone would like to live, the architect would likely be Italian, the engineer maybe German, the gardener probably British, and the craftspeople either Swiss or Japanese. The interior designer of that house, though, should--beyond any doubt--be from Scandinavia. Hardly any other interior or product design is so timeless, so functional, so aesthetic, and of such high quality as that of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark. Throughout the years, countless pieces of furniture, objects, and buildings from Scandinavia have become icons of international design and architecture. A current generation of designers from these countries is consciously building upon local sustainable design traditions and further developing them in a way that is consistent, intelligent, and reflects an unerring sense of style. In Northern Delights, design classics meet young talents, individual products meet skillfully staged living spaces. The book's stunning selection of work reveals what makes Scandinavian design so exceptional. The included examples show how the grains of different woods, the clarity of colored glass, the cheery colors of fabrics and patterns, and the overall quality of craftsmanship contribute to creating simple, inviting, and very comfortable living spaces. Northern Delights offers inspiration to designers, architects, and individuals in equal measure. In a Scandinavian dwelling, everyone feels at home.   Preview Now!! Northern Delights: Scandinavian Homes, Interiors and Design

Marrakesh by Design

In a world filled with beige interiors, Morocco is the perfect antidote: a refuge for addicts of saturated color, a haven for devotees of intricate pattern, a destination for admirers of striking architecture. For anyone who wants to add Morocco's spicy design mix into their own home, Maryam Montague, the personality behind the award-winning blog My Marrakesh, explains how to do so with the building blocks of Moroccan design—from the colors, patterns, and textiles to the archways, fountains, gardens, and so much more. With illustrative text and gorgeous photographs, Maryam shows how Moroccan design comes to life in real villas and riads and in her own magnificent home and guesthouse. Eager DIYers will love the ideas presented in sidebars and in how-to projects that can be applied to homes anywhere. Filled with all the richness of Morocco,Marrakesh by Design will transport readers straight to the souks and salons of this exotic city while showing them the multitude of ways to live with the enticing elements of Moroccan design.

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Stephen Sills: Decoration

The first book to focus on the solo residential work of the visionary interior decorator Stephen Sills. Simultaneously classical and modern, Stephen Sills’s design work is a dialogue between past and present. Filled with luxurious fabrics, furnishings from across centuries, and unusual finishes, his work is polished, seemingly effortless, and quietly rich, with a muted color palette that serves as a brilliant foil for modern art. In this striking, meditative volume, the follow-up to his best-selling book Dwellings, Sills presents sixteen breathtaking homes, gorgeously photographed by the legendary François Halard, in locations as varied as a penthouse on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, a modern Aspen retreat, an estate on the North Shore of Long Island, and his own country house in Bedford, New York (dubbed the "chicest house in America" by Karl Lagerfeld). Common to them all is a sense of atmosphere, point of view, and soul—the sense of a master craftsman at work.

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