Residential Books

An absolutley wonderful book, very inspiring!
Surely, I would like to have a house like this in palestine :)

If you are an architect or if you are building a mexican style house, you should buy this book. I built my house in Mexico City back in 1995 and took many ideas from this book. This is real mexican colonial architecture.

while designing my home, I wanted ideas for the details like wall finishes, stairs, colors, etc. to get a real Mexican feel in architecture. It's all in the detail....

I purchased this book when in graduate school in Chicago, Ill. Along with Caribbean Style, which is by another publisher and still in print, this book offers beautiful color photos of the real Miami "style". If you are looking for the tropical look this book is an excellent reference as well as the variety of architectural styles prevelant in Miami. It is also a nice reminder of the residential lifestyle of Miami not often seen by the tourist. Along with Caribbean Style, this book ranks high on my list as a book I keep pulling off my book shelf.

There have probably been more fortunes made in real estate than in any other area, quite likely more than in all the other areas put together. This book, as you can see from the title is on investing using real estate as the medium. It begins with the basics of using your own home as a starting point.

You can buy a house with quite a small down payment, perhaps fix it up a bit, and as the price of houses in the area goes up, sell it making a very nice profit on your initial investment.

To do this, the author starts with the very simple basics from how property is described to financing. He then leads on to more complex things like building your own home using contractors, subs, and the whole gamut of specialists. There is certainly nothing wrong in the way he lays out this investment strategy.

I would only add a few minor points:

1. Investing in real estate is like any other investment, you have to work at it. It's not a passive activity.

2. To learn more about the whole business, I'd suggest that you become a real estate salesman. Get your license, go to work for a broker in your area. You'll learn a lot, and you may even make some money.

3. Not everyone makes a fortune in real estate. Sometimes prices go down. I live in an area where the demand for housing depends on what the local economy is doing. The local economy is based on gold mining. When gold is at $300 an ounce, you can find abandoned property all over the place. Right now gold is at $550 and there are no houses available. Likewise an earthquake or a hurricane can really mess up a good plan. Housing is cheap in New Orleans right now.

Made me feel like a glutton after buying an 1200 sq. foot condo... what a waste of space! An excellent book showing you don't need an 8,000 square foot mansion to live comfortably. The book is also great for anyone interested in minimalism interior design as many of the homes don't allow for much clutter or adornment.

This is a really amazing book. I recomend it to all interested in architecture, interior architecture and design. It is filled with fantastic pictures of great projects. Buy it now!

This book is big and heavy but as a results you get nice selection of interiors which are dedicated to minimalism in both decorating and architecture. Beautiful homes and even if you're not a fan of the style - this is nice to flip thru!

Check out publishers page for this book here where you can flip some pages.

This beautiful book full of striking photographs takes you everywhere from a nobleman's Alpine retreat to a humble Slovak village home. The creative building styles, combined with the trappings of everyday life along the Danube - make for a very engrossing read. It's like a National Geographic story, only in book length. Unfortunately this excellent book is out of print, but hopefully it will not remain so.

College-level students of architecture, design, and social issues will find a fine study in THE MODERN AMERICAN HOUSE, which considers how home designers worked to enhance spatial perception in middle-class houses. The idea and enactment of spaciousness has been linked to financial limitations and the evolutionary structure of domestic architectural standards as a whole: chapters consider real estate, architecture, law, and economics in a wide-ranging survey of how visual space became entwined with cultural values.