First Ideas
This section is about all the inspiring information you can find, much of it on the net. Collect all the best ideas you can -
- Remember how past experiences felt. For instance on holiday or when you were a child. Try to remember specifically what made you feel good about certain houses and places, and what to avoid
- Collect cuttings from magazines and newspapers. Collect photographs of houses and aspects of houses that inspire you
- Get hold of videos, e.g. Grand Designs
- Visit houses you like and photograph them. Talk to the people.
- Visit exhibitions and shows
- Go on courses
- Inspirational books
With all this, create a kind of scrapbook visual presentation so that when your architect asks you what you want you can come up with your most important ideas.
Books
Although there are plenty of American selfbuild books on the market they tend not to be of much use in the UK context for several reasons
- Planning and Building Regulations differ greatly between the UK and the US.
- Building methods also differ greatly with the US having a long tradition of building in timber and the UK only recently getting into it seriously.
- The general approach to aesthetics diverges considerably
- The high density of population in the UK contrasts with that in the US and this creates a different use of space.
- The green movement in building is proceeding in a different manner in both areas
Having said all that, some of the US literature can be quite inspiring in freeing up the imagination. Most of the books on this web site are chosen for being relevant to the UK.
There is an excellent range of green build books in Germany for anyone with the language.
General books
There are a few books which are ’standards’ on selfbuild in the UK
All About Selfbuild by Robert Matthews is an excellent book and with well over 500 pages of dense information is excellent value at a little over £20
The Housebuilder’s Bible by Mark Brinkley is also a stalwart. It is aimed at small building companies first and foremost but is excellent for self builders because it goes into costings quite thoroughly.
Building Your Own Home by David Snell. A very good introductory book to Self build.
The Green Self-Build Book by Jon Broome. An excellent book for the self builder by an architect who has been involved with green self build for as long as the concept has been around.
An interesting book (but now slightly dated) is:
The Self-build Book: How to Enjoy Designing and Building Your Own Home by Jon Broome, and Brian Richardson. It documents the building of a timber frame, Segal method, house and also goes into some community self build initiatives. There is very little written about self build timber frame in the UK (unlike say the US where it is usually the starting point).
Inspirational books
There are lots of books to get your creative juices flowing though many of them may not be entirely appropriate to the UK context. A good one to find out what is happening with eco-housing on the continent is
Living Space: Ecological building and design
For sheer mind stretching imagery you can do a lot worse than Lloyd Kahn’s book
If you want to get behind the ‘coffee table book’ effect of pretty images and slick photos and find out what really creates good design then maybe you should take a look at
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. This book explains in depth what makes for long lasting and effective and creative design in buildings
