Hideouts – Grand Vacations in Tiny Getaways

Edited and published by Gestalten

Recalling the magic of an afternoon spent in a tree house or a blanket fort, this book celebrates the holiday homes that don’t have all the mod cons but are set somewhere special and away from it all, with everything you need and nothing more. These are rooms that tread lightly on the ground they occupy so that you can leave just footprints behind when you return home.

The idyllic spots range from a remote cabin in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, surrounded by a 400-year-old rainforest, to a pale Scandinavian tower in Sweden, elevated above a birch forest, to the tiny Starlight Room in the Dolomites, which is perched on a snowy peak with breathtaking views of the surrounding mountains.

This book is a delight to leaf through and might have you reconsidering the idea of a five-star hotel for your next break away.

Book review by Camille Khouri

Eco Home: Smart Ideas for Sustainable New Zealand Homes

By Melinda Williams, Penguin Books

In New Zealand, “buildings consume 40 per cent of our raw materials and generate 40 per cent of our country’s waste”. With this in mind, Eco Home will be helpful to anyone who wants to design and build a more sustainable home or renovate an existing part of a home, whether it be redoing the kitchen, the bathroom, the utility space or even the surrounding landscape.

“By changing the way we build homes, we can make a big difference to our resource use and our pollution and waste creation,” states its author Melinda Williams. She takes a pragmatic approach to the eco way of life, realising that the ‘perfect’ eco home is pretty much unachievable. However, by making lots of good ecological choices about which materials and products to buy and using clever techniques to build, we can still have a positive impact on the environment and, as research shows, add value and longevity to our homes. 

Book review by Justine Harvey

Rock the Boat: Boats, Cabins and Homes on the Water

Edited and published by Gestalten

Similar to the abodes of the tiny house movement in that it requires close-knit domestic spaces, a floating home is another answer to the call for more eco-friendly residences. And, indeed, with sea levels rising, it could be the way of the future. This book features cleverly designed, often stylish and always creative houseboats from around the world.

Standouts include the modular, timber-framed homes by Russian company DublDom, which can be both floated on water and installed on the ground. These are delivered by truck, insulated, wired, plumbed and ready to go. Others include impressive floating mansions on the canals of the Netherlands, a stylish and minimalist 80m² home for a couple in Denmark, which floats on two pontoons filled with polystyrene, and a three-storeyed houseboat in California that was built in the 1970s and is still floating today. 

For the full-float lifestyle, there is also Freedom Cove in British Columbia, which is a self-sustaining houseboat complex built using recycled fishing materials and plastic, complete with gardens. This is a fascinating look at some alternative ways of life. 

Book review by Camille Khouri

This article first appeared in Houses magazine.

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