The Codes Guidebook For Interiors, Eighth Edition

Most of us live in a building that is older than we are. How do you show off the best features of a home built for another age, while adapting it for modern living? In Old House New Home, acclaimed interiors writer Ros Byam Shaw looks at the many different ways we can furnish and arrange an old building to suit today’s needs, whether it is a country cottage, a terraced townhouse or a converted factory.

The dwelling is the most fundamental building type, nowhere more so than in the open landscape.This book can be read in a number of ways. It is first a book about houses and particularly the theme ‘dwelling and the land’. It examines the poetic and prosaic issues inherent in claiming a piece of the landscape to live on. It could also be seen as a kind of road map, full of both warnings and encouragements for all those involved with, or just interested in, the making of houses.

Convergence is based on the thermodynamic premise that architecture should maximize its ecological and architectural power. No matter how paradoxical it might initially seem, architects should maximize energy intake, maximize energy use, and maximize energy feedback and reinforcement. This presumes that the necessary excess of architecture is in fact an architect’s greatest asset when it comes to an agenda for energy, not a liability.