Inside the Not So Big House: Discovering the Details that Bring a Home to Life (Susanka)

I bought this book because I am looking to renovate my house and I found it very useful. There are plenty of photos of the various details in the houses and a great explanation of how to achieve a similar look. It is an excellent source of ideas if you're looking to transform your home.

This is one of my favorite books. I love Susanka's style - modern, but also friendly and warm. The layout of the book is excellent too, lots of photos with helpful annotations.

Absoultely amazing insight ....worth every penny; the quality of the photos alone will justify the purchase....it will be the single best expenditure that you can make in building a new home or remodeling an existing area. Makes things so clear that everyone will get it. They say "You don't know what you don't know"....after reading this book and her others in a series....you will know what you did not know that you did not know...Just buy the book and you will understand what I am saying

I bought and then gutted a 1960s, three-story, 3,700 SF office building. Serving as my own architect and general contractor, I completed the two lower floors as offices for my professional engineering firm. I then turned my attention to converting the third floor into a luxury two-bedroom apartment. <br /> <br />Although my original intent was to make the apartment a rental space, family circumstances of a regrettable but common kind will soon require me to make the apartment my own residence. With the floor plans nearly completed, I realized that the "oh my God" reaction from first-time visitors that I was seeking required great attention to detail. <br /> <br />During the design of the office portions, I had studied about a dozen design books from Amazon and now wanted resources for the architectural details of the apartment. (Architectural details include windows and doors, floor, ceiling, and wall finishes, cabinetry, molding and other millwork.) With architectural details well done, the apartment or home looks inviting and interesting even before furnishings and decorator items are added. <br /> <br />This book was the third to arrive of the ten I ordered so far. The first two were entirely forgettable, but this one yielded a dozen good ideas. <br /> <br />The 210-page book has a chapter for each of twenty-three projects, each by a different architect. Most projects were renovations of a home of 1,200 - 2,100 SF. Architectural interior detail styles range from craftsman and usonian, to contemporary and gentle modern. Each project is notable more for the interior design details than for the building exterior or site. <br /> <br />My favorite, but not my only source of ideas, was a Block Island cottage by the Newport architect, James Estes. My apartment, located at a charming 1900-vintage village center of a NYC suburb is 15 miles from the nearest salt water, but the quiet serenity and color palettes of an ocean-front cottage had been in my mind as an organizing concept for some time. No matter that the large band of windows on the east end overlook a parking lot instead of beach and ocean. <br /> <br />The Amazon listing shows the cover photo, a project not to my liking. You can page through the other pages available on Amazon for other samples. Note the excellent color photography and the expert and well written commentary of Sarah Susanka, the principal author of the many volumes of the Not So Big House series. Co-author Marc Vassallo is an architect, and he now writes fulltime, including fiction. <br /> <br /> <br />