The Big Book of Small House Designs: 75 Award-Winning Plans for Your Dream House Paperback – Illustrated, September 7, 2011

Very interesting, some are very creative and interesting, some are more typical in outside design and would fit into communities easily. All require a more down sized mind set. Beautiful, stuff of dreams that could be the stuff of reality.

Oh, I so wanted to like this book. 75 award-winning plans for houses 1200 square feet or smaller. But the majority of the designs were for houses around 1200 square feet and the those designs! I think knowledgeable builders might love all those strange views and floor plans, but I was totally frustrated because they were too small on my Kindle and too esoteric for this reader. There are better books on small house design, ones that really feed the imagination and thinking, many that have great floor plans that are totally decipherable. This one just seems for builders with all the odd views. But looking top down never made sense to me!

I knew the book wouldn't be a great resource but I thought it might have some reason for having been published other than the author and publisher just trying to cash in on the "not so big" / "green" trend.There is really no redeeming quality in this book. Most of the houses are severely outdated and are poorly proportioned. Except for one or two, they don't even look designed by an architect, they just look like run-of the mill cracker boxes, some with poorly planned additions. There's no useful information on how to best economize space or anything. The "design" information is useless because the illustrations are so bad they are painful to look at. Some are so muddy, it looks as if the book were published using water damaged drawings and a broken Xerox machine.I apologize for not editing this review, but this book has already wasted enough of my time. If you're looking for something more current, try James Grayson Trulove's 25 Houses Under 1500 Square Feet. It's more design oriented, even if does have a lot of filler. It's not a 5 star by any stretch of the imagination. At least his illustrations are legible and the photos make the book look produced by professionals that actually care about design and architecture.

Great book, gives great ideas for smaller homes and it shows how to get the best maximum use of space in a small area.

I am pleased with the contents of this book. It was purchased as a gift for a grandson, who will soon receive it. I hope he enjoys it and will put some of the information to good use.

the houses were indeed small, but the designs were weird, monotonous and not really something I would like. However, it would appear that other people would like it

The book was very useful . It should be more explicit about the limit on the size of homes.

Not what I expected. Did not show actual dimensions. Drawings could have been better. Would not recommend.