Showing titles in Home Design & Renovation

If imagining a life of energy independence by harnessing the sun's power to light your home excites you, this book is for you! Discover how to achieve energy independence through off-grid solar power with this modern, updated guide. Learn how anyone, regardless of technical experience, can understand and implement off-grid solar power. Whether you’re a hands-on DIY enthusiast or an eager beginner, this book is tailored for you.

In the decades before the First World War, the owners of the nation’s stately homes revelled in a golden age of glory and glamour. Nothing lay beyond their reach in a world where privilege and hedonism went hand-in-hand with duty and honour. This was a time when the ancestral seats of ancient nobility stood side-by-side with the fabulous palaces of Jewish bankers and Indian princes, when dukes and duchesses mixed with aristocratic society hostesses who had learned to dance in the chorus line and self-made millionaires who had been raised in the slums of Manchester and Birmingham.

Critical Path is Fuller's master work - the summing up of a lifetime's thought and concern - as urgent and relevant as it was upon its first publication in 1981. Critical Path details how humanity found itself in its current situation - at the limits of the planet's natural resources and facing political, economic, environmental, and ethical crises.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction.

Like many Brits, Dick and Angel had long dreamed of living in France, but where others might settle for a modest bolthole in the French countryside, the Strawbridges fell in love with a 19th-century fairy-tale chateau, complete with 45 rooms, seven outbuildings, 12 acres of land and its own moat. Throwing caution to the wind, Dick and Angel swapped their two-bedroom flat in East London for an abandoned and derelict castle in the heart of the Loire valley and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime with their two young children, Arthur and Dorothy.

With this updated edition of his earlier book, A Place of My Own, listeners can revisit the inspired, intelligent, and often hilarious story of Pollan’s realization of a room of his own—a small, wooden hut, his “shelter for daydreams” — built with his admittedly unhandy hands. Inspired by both Thoreau and Mr. Blandings, A Place of My Own not only works to convey the history and meaning of all human building, it also marks the connections between our bodies, our minds, and the natural world.

In January 2015, Dick and Angel Strawbridge embarked on the journey of a lifetime when they swapped their cosy two-bedroom flat in East London for a derelict château with 12 acres of land in the Loire valley. Where Sunday Times best seller A Year At the Château told the entertaining and heartwarming beginning of the family's French adventure, as they found their forever home and began to restore and renovate the dilapidated castle, Living The Château Dream is about the years of hard graft that followed.

We may have learned how to use a scientific calculator in school or read a periodic table, but what about lessons on unplugging the sink or changing a light bulb? Musician, influencer, mother of three and stepmother of two Myleene Klass shows us how she builds independence and resourcefulness in her children in this guide to over 100 of the most vital skills, challenges and scenarios that school didn’t prepare us for.

Clean in a Flash: Smart Solutions for Parents on the Go is a practical guide tailored for busy parents who need efficient and effective cleaning strategies. This book offers a range of tips and solutions to help maintain a tidy home amidst the chaos of family life.

Castles in the Air is a beautifully written, autobiographical story of rescuing an ancient mansion. Gwydir Castle was inhabited by ravers and rats until Judy Corbett and her husband Peter Welford found and acquired this 500-year-old house mouldering in the foothills of Snowdonia. Despite the toads, strange smells and squatters, they decided to mortgage themselves to the hilt to bring the castle back to life.

Many of us dream of a renovation project, but few would be brave enough to take on a 8,200-square-foot, 30-room, 5-storey Georgian mansion on only a shoestring budget. But that's exactly what Greg Penn did, buying the near-derelict Admiral's House and embarking on an ambitious restoration plan. In this inspirational, informative book, Greg tells the story of his remarkable home, its journey to restoration and the deep history the house and surrounding area offer, alongside snippets of advice, budget-friendly tools and hacks and an exploration of each room as he's unlocked history.

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.

Moving house has never flustered author Jane Christmas. She loves houses: viewing them, negotiating their price, dreaming up interior plans, hiring tradespeople to do the work and overseeing renovations. She loves houses so much that she’s moved thirty-two times. With humour and irreverence, Open House reveals that what we think we gain by constantly moving house actually obscures the precious and vital parts of our lives that we leave behind.This is a memoir that will appeal to anyone whose pulse quickens at the mere mention of real estate.

When it comes to truly finding out who you are and what makes you tick, there is one thing that needs no online subscription to a cloud-based server with a password you keep forgetting. That, my friend, is a shed. Your shed is your refuge. It's the place where you go when you need a break from this mad, crazy world. Once you're inside the four walls of your shed, you can do whatever you like. You're the king in there.

As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation's stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in 20th-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that so many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants' balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers.

What will it take to restore balance to our world, repair past injustices, and support future generations' survival? Looking deeply into the web of life that created and supports us, and drawing inspiration from diverse cultural traditions and perspectives, spirited thinkers Michael Pawlyn and Sarah Ichioka propose a bold set of regenerative principles with potential to transform how we design, make, and manage our buildings; infrastructure; and communities.

It is ordinary homes, not grand public buildings or the mansions of the rich that have all the best stories. The rises and falls, the shifts in the fortunes of neighbourhoods and whole cities are here, tracing the often surprising journey one single house can take from elegant dwelling in a fashionable district to a tenement for society’s rejects. Packed with remarkable human stories, it is a phenomenal insight into living history, a history we can see every day on the streets where we live.

Throughout her life, Sarah Beeny has been obsessed with the idea of home. From her childhood growing up in a countryside cottage to renovating her very first flat in London to restoring a stately home in Yorkshire, she has never been afraid of the hard work needed to turn a house into a home. Now, in her most recent adventure, Sarah and her family have moved to a former dairy farm in Somerset to build the home of their dreams.

Wildly irreverent and warm, this is a story about practice, competence and failure, told through tales in a world most of us never see. Glamour, luxury and refinement are products of a flawed, human process, of missed deadlines, overrun budgets, heated tantrums and scrapped blueprints. Throughout my career I have observed, erred, learned, finessed, apologised, and resisted the urge to say I told you so. I offer these tales from the trade in the hope that others might find them amusing, instructive and inspirational. There are many good reasons to work. Here are a few of them.

Blending memoir and nature writing at its finest, Ingrained is an uplifting meditation on the challenges of working with your hands in our modern age, on community, consumerism, and the beauty of the natural world – one that asks us to see our local trees, and our own wooden objects, in a new and revelatory light.