Off the Grid: Houses for Escape

Outstanding, inspirational & brilliantly curated. I hope Dominic Bradbury ‘had’ to Visit all of these... what a great job & thank you for bringing this to all of us looking to make the leap to an eco off grid home (no brained). Many thanks Sebastian & Lizbeth

High quality images and informative text. This is the perfect coffee table book for architects and architecture enthusiasts!

This book is an excellent reference to anybody wanting to escape the rat race. Not only is it very informative it is very well presented and written and has brilliant photography.

Birthday present for architect friend. Great coffee table book!

The houses in this book are a good test of an architect's ability to work outside the normal commercial constraints and concentrate more on the environment and supplying non-commercial utilities. Looking through the book's 310 photos it's clear that lots of clever solutions have been created to provide a simple living experience or in some cases minimal luxury ones, I spotted an Eames chair in one house, Mies de Rohe's Barcelona chair in another and architect Malcolm Davis installed a solar heated outside pool for a property in Sonoma County, California (and I couldn't see a TV or sat dish in any of the book's photos).What I liked about the book is very wide selection of houses the author has chosen from Henning Larsen's Granja Experimental Alnardo, a very contemporary looking farmhouse in Spain that seems quite large to what is basically one-bed transparent cabins designed by Jeanna Berger on a private Swedish island, all the materials had to be brought in by boat.The Introduction sets out the various options for living off-grid: respect for the environment, focusing on renewable sources of energy, landscaping and using timber for construction. One of the joys of living in these houses is the ability to merge into the natural environment and so many of them have large expanses of glass but with triple glazing that cuts down on heat loss.The houses are divided into three chapters: Countryside and forest; Hillside and mountains; Waterside and coast. They are the work of forty-three architectural practices mostly in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand (email addresses are provided). The back of the book has eight pages with a comprehensive listing of what to consider if you are contemplating off-grid living.The owner's of these wonderful houses have shown it's possible to escape from everyday city and urban living and enjoy nature instead.

Beautiful book, very inspirational, but nothing to do with living off the grid!

I offer this as an alternative view..... Nicely put together, good photography, quality hardback, heavy tome that doubtless looks nice on a coffee table...if that's your sort of thingbut ...butNot really so much about living off the grid or the technicalities of off grid housing....just a few pages as an "off grid guide" at the back of the book with very little depth or practical utility. And in terms of low impact living...most of this stuff is generic me too architecture modernist boxes stuck on a mountain, very little of the architecture would seem to be particularly "sustainable" or low impact on the landscapeTo my mind this is not a classic text....its a catalogue for the various architects practices in the featured projects, a fashionable coffee table item for the moment...that will end up in bargain bins in years to come. In terms of visual inspiration, after looking through this book, I decided that I would get more from a free Pinterest account.....so I returned it

Lovely well produced book well photographed and put together. So this is what the 1% spend their money on!! This is as close as I can get to that but an enjoyable book nonetheless

Heavy, thick pages. Beautiful photos. Good information. Not really a full scope guide or anything, but an inspiring coffee table book.

Absolutely beautiful!!

I was disappointed in this book … I was looking for a book about living off the grid, instead this is a coffee table book highlighting various homes that have been built off the grid, basically a picture book.

I leaned a lot and it is a book I will refer to often and will implement some of the ideas.

This book has some neat home designs, however my main disappointment is that this book does not include even minimal floor plans of the featured buildings, and the photographs only show portions of the buildings' interiors and exteriors leaving substantial gaps of information. At best, it's an interesting coffee-table book.EDIT: To be fair, I just noticed that there are some minimal floor plans at the very end of the book. They are very small (5-6 plans each page) and don't give a lot of detail, and I have no idea why these weren't included in the corresponding sections about each house.