Customer Reviews
McCloud is TOO enthusiastic - By: M. Keogh, 20 Feb 2008 
As an architect, & a die-hard modernist, I often find the TV show Grand Designs infuriating. Clients either fire their architects early on & have no concept of how to a) design, b) cost-manage or c) run projects on-site, thus build fairly horrendous homes.
There are a few rare gems but more often than not the projects go way over budget & clients decisions are simply baffling. If there is ONE message to anyone thinking of building their own home, be it a chic 2-bed mews or a grand country home...PLEASE PLEASE look at architectural books, see how good architects do things & then decide on what you want.
Find an enthusiastic architect with prior experience & trust them to design a good home.
McCloud often waxes lyrical about fairly mediocre designs, which bugs me. These designs often do not deserve the attention they are given, & a good architect will avoid the high drama that Grand Designs depends upon to make it interesting.
If you are planning a building / extension project, then read this first. - By: Mr. P. Stewkesbury, 28 Dec 2007 
I read this book because we're planning an extension, & I found it to be extremely helpful.
Kevin rationalises the emotive process of designing your own dream. He provides loads of tips & many helpful checklists.
More than anything he provides a compelling case for finding good architects for your project & working closely with them - he makes a convincing case to illustrate that their work will effectively cost you nothing.
Grand Designs Review - By: L. J. Wilson, 04 Mar 2007 
I am interested in architecture & plan to study it at university - my passion is based upon the dream of building & designing my own home & this book reallly helped me with ideas & practicalities. There is a lot of writing (which can be a bit boring & repetitive) but there are some great pictures.
Useful volume - well worth reading - By: Mark N. Bolton, 10 Jan 2007 I think the review by D. Lundholm says almost everything that my review of this book would say.
Just a couple of additional observations:
* This is more of a how-to (think about & then build your own home) book than a book of ideas you can directly use. Not a bad thing, there are plenty of other glossy books to get ideas from.
* Related to that, there are no floor-plans for any of the designs referenced. Personallly, I would have preferred to see some, but it doesn't reallly detract from the usefulness of the book.
* It is an engaging & thought-provoking book - certainly well worth buying at half-price!
* My only real gripe is the way the text references pictures of properties that are not adjacent to the text. i.e. reading page 100 you might be referenced to pictures of the building concerned on pages 94 & 115-117.
Overalll, highly recommended for both dreamers & those seriously planning to build their own home.
Thoughtful, inspiring book for grand design builders and extenders - By: D. Lundholm, 09 Sep 2006 This is an intelligent, thoughtful book by one of the most articulate commentators on modern architecture & building design. For many UK TV viewers, Kevin McCloud's regular Grand Designs programmes are compelling viewing, illustrating both the practical issues that self-builders & developers face, as well as challlenging the motivations that inspire people to create their own homes. This is far from just a "book of the series". It's a guide to building your own home - equallly of value for extenders, developers or those thinking about how to improve the design of the space they live in - written in three sections - thinking, dreaming & doing.
Thinking challlenges lots of the traps self-builders & remodellers falll into - in a way that engages you & walks you through the process of trying to identify what we want of of our homes. I guess there's a danger post Grand Designs that we alll tend to think it's easy to articulate exactly what we want, & what we need, & that programme only engages after the thinking has been done (and it probably doesn't make for great television either, seeing people try to figure this out). But (from personal experience) it's actuallly the most difficult bit, yet the bit that makes it more (or less) likely that you're going to end up with a house that truly delivers what you hope it will.
Once you kinda know what you want, & you've engaged with an architect (a theme that runs very strongly throughout is to seek professional advice, at every stage), the dreaming section illustrates 5 different approaches to build - from New Urban, New Suburban, New Rural, New Use (eg change of use from industrial to home) & New Life - renovation & repair. Amply illustrated with houses from Grand Designs, & others, you get lots of helpful comments that don't just detail what the owner/architect has done but also explain why it delivers more light, adds more space, gives more connection with the outside. Even if you think you know why you "like" what you see, having it explained in this way helps you identify whether it would work in your planned home.
The final "doing" section is lots of practical "how to move you through the phases - from initial plans, the dreaded planning application, working with drawings, building regulations & how to manage the project & its finances. Well organised, step by step, guidance that I suspect I'm going to refer to again & again.
Throughout, there is plenty of checklisted, "think about this", do this & don't do that, stuff, & there are several hundred illustrations, mainly of homes featured in Grand Designs.
IMHO, it's an opinionated, highly approachable guide, written with clarity, laced with wit & Kevin's laconic observations.
If you like what you've seen on Grand Designs, you enjoy Kevin's style, & you're considering extensions or self-build, I'd recommend this very highly.
If you don't like him, or Grand Designs, he does forewarn you: "You might find the range of my choice [of homes] rather limited. But if you don't like any of them, you probably don't like what I have to say either, & so shouldn't have bought this book in the first place".
Quite.
