The Distinctive Home: A Vision of Timeless Design

FROM OUR EDITORS

What is a distinctive house? According to architect Jeremiah Eck, whose firm has designed over 200 homes, it is a house that achieves a balance between site, floor plan, exterior elements, and interior details. In The Distinctive Home, he describes how these four elements blend to make a habitation as attractive as it is functional. To translate his points into three dimensions, the Boston-based designer presents photographs of 50 houses that he believes are exemplary. If you are planning to buy a house or just willing to dream, this book is a great mental trampoline.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Jeremiah Eck believes that a distinctive home is the result of a balance between site, floor plan, exterior elements, and interior details. In The Distinctive Home, he describes the significance of each of the four elements and provides numerous examples of good design for each. Included are images and descriptions of 50 houses (ten of them the author�s own designs) that cover a wide range of styles, regions, and budgets. A final chapter unifies the four elements in detailed profiles of several of these houses, examining how their components work together to attain the status of �distinctive.� 360 color photographs and illustrations are included. �Jeremiah Eck gives ... wise advice and beautiful examples.... The best book on domestic design since Christopher Alexander�s A Pattern Language.� � Witold Rybczynski, author of Home

SYNOPSIS

A practicing architect and former architecture lecturer at the Harvard Design School, Eck presents an inspiring text for architects, their clients, and homeowners. He offers an alternative approach to the repetitive housing design of the past thirty-plus years, arguing that the key to distinctive domestic design lies in a subtle balance of four key elements: the site, the floor plan, the exterior elements, and the details. Beautifully- illustrated with color photographs of houses recently designed by American and Canadian residential architects. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The first volume in the joint imprint launched by Taunton Press and the American Institute of Architects, this exploration of distinctive and timeless homes proves that good design can be very human design. While upscale shelter magazines seem to delight in houses laid out for visual effect the living room as graphic design more than functional interior the homes Eck features here illustrate the enduring, comfortable qualities of the genuinely livable home. An architect and landscape painter, Eck identifies four primary tenets of a pleasing home its site, floor-plan, exterior face and details and demonstrates how they should balance each other and the world around them. (As Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen said, Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment. ) When these four elements are carefully considered, Eck believes, they result in atmospheres of sustained pleasure and character. He roams the country for examples of the distinction he prizes, finding it in Rhode Island beach homes and California bungalows, New England farmhouses and suburban custom jobs, all of which harmonize with their surroundings and within their parts to provide their tenants with daily domestic gratification. Copiously illustrated with architectural drawings and photographs of inviting interiors and intelligent facades (and occasionally enlivened by asides lambasting the thoughtless placement and stingy finish of contemporary home architecture), this unpretentious and impressive project will provide food for thought for anyone looking to buy, renovate or build a house. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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