Overview
Sarah Susanka's Not So Big Solutions for Your Home explores practical design ideas that can transform any house into a great house that looks, works and feels right for the owner.
Sarah Susanka, whose previous best-selling books showed homeowners how to appreciate and create a house that is beautiful, visually expansive and reflective of how families really live, now offers readers practical, everyday design ideas on everything from selecting a site for a new home to designing a mail-sorting space. Photographs, along with over 150 drawings from Sarah Susanka's own sketchbook, illustrate practical home design ideas for everyday living.
Not So Big Solutions for Your Home is a compilation of over 30 columns written by Sarah Susanka for Fine Homebuilding magazine.
— Makes architecture and design accessible to people who are not trained in the field
— Provides a wide variety of practical, accessible, everyday solutions
Synopsis
Full-color photos, along with over 150 drawings from Susanka's own sketchbook, illustrate practical home design ideas for everyday living in this compilation of over 30 columns from "Fine Homebuilding" magazine.
Library Journal
Dubbed "America's Favorite Home Architect" by Fine Homebuilding magazine, where her "Drawing Board" column appears, Susanka here presents a small compilation of 31 essays from the column that offer a number of solutions to household design problems both big and small. Throughout, she stresses the importance of practical designs that increase a home's aesthetic appeal and allow homeowners to use their houses in the most efficient way. Susanka offers an eclectic mix: tips on site selection, mud room design, planning to fit specific furniture, creating a family room that works, personalizing with tile, and planning window seats, pantries, TV placement, and floor plan changes. Most of the projects are major undertakings, but several could be done inexpensively. Certainly, most homeowners could find something in this title to increase their enjoyment of their home. Susanka's previous two books have sold over half a million copies, so there's sure to be reader interest in this title. Recommended for most public libraries. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewSarah Susanka's follow-up to The Not So Big House is without a doubt the definitive anti-MacMansion manual. Written in an easy journalistic style, Solutions is chock-full of illuminating information and expands on Susanka's underlying concept that adding the least space is often the best way to preserve your house's personality and proportion.
The essentials are all covered: the importance of varying ceiling heights to add personality; how to create a house with flow by rethinking furniture placement; and how to prevent "wall acne" [the poor placement of wall switches and outlets]. Susanka ably leads readers through the baffling choices in lighting options, fixture types, and much more. Of special interest are the chapters on setting up a mail-sorting space and a mudroom. To avoid jamming up your living room table or kitchen counters with masses of mail, Susanka recommends that you dedicate a special area and rename it "the command center," with mail slots for each family member, a bulletin board, a recycling basket for catalogues, and a trash can for junk mail. The mudroom chapter outlines basic and not-so-basic requirements for this increasingly popular spot. The author details the organization of a mudroom, from the smallest and simplest space intended only to store wet shoes to the English country manor version equipped with a dog shower, a tray to catch drips, individual lockers, and windows.
Not So Big Solutions for Your Home is required reading for those who want maximum effect as well as the most bang for a buck. Vivian Kelly