Designing Your Perfect House 2nd Edition: Lessons from an Architect

Freshly updated, Amazon#1 Bestseller, Designing Your Perfect House is in its 2nd Edition. With tons of priceless advice and color illustrations, this essential guidebook for navigating the mystifying process of house design, remodeling, and building will save you many times the price of the book. It's now better than ever with a Bonus Lesson, Building Green, Naturally. Architect Hirsch draws on decades of experience and uses his enjoyable, easy to read writing style to convey sage advice guaranteed to help you design or remodel the perfect house for you, while controlling the process and saving money along the way.
Learn architectural design secrets, spatial concepts, making a house "feel like home," use of scale and daylight, unifying the design, flow and proportions. Concepts that are too often overlooked in today's homebuilding. Hirsch says, "A great house doesn't have to cost more. It just needs to be thought through properly." He'll help you select the right building site, control the budget, develop the program, schematic design, style and room relationships, work with design professionals, select a builder, understand methods of contracting and more.

"This author leaves no paving stone unturned in his careful assessment of the particulars of superior home design. His experience working with first-timers and sensitivity to both architectural concepts and emotions involved in home design make this an excellent read for those in the trade and would-be home owners."--Foreword Magazine, 2008.
The premise of the book is that there is no such thing as the perfect house, only Your Perfect House. Each of the twelve "lessons" is written and illustrated to highlight key concepts in the design process. You will learn how to evaluate your needs and work towards creating a suitable design. Hirsch also includes advice and checklists to help making the selection the home site as well as the architect,and builder.With the valuable advice this book provides, the experience of designing and building or remodeling your home becomes controllable, gratifying and enjoyable.