Eco Design Outside: Green Outside the House

A practical guide to outdoor features and landscaping for the green home.

Following the book Eco House, which concentrated on intelligent solutions for the home interior, this book concentrates on the exterior of the home with solutions and objects demonstrating that a home's new ecological era is not only found inside but can reach every corner of the land on which it is built.

Eco Design Outside features dozens of photographs of cutting-edge designs in real-life context with informative captions, house and garden plans, and electrical, water and lighting schematics. Combining ideas with achievability, the book is more than inspiring; it is eminently useful.

Some of the topics are:

• Lighting -- Room orientation to the sun, solar tubes to redirect sunlight indoors, home-security lighting automation interfaced with communication needs
• Water Conservation -- Rainwater collection and recirculation systems, solar showers, efficient watering devices
• Landscaping -- Living walls, green roofs, natural pools ("biopools"), xeriscaping garden plans and plants
• Ecological Building Materials -- Furniture, benches, decking and fencing, natural oil treatments, paving and stonework.

Successful television shows like "World's Greenest Homes" on Discovery's Planet Green TV and "Eco House Challenge" on HGTV prove that people want this information as they undertake greening their home. Eco Design Outside is a comprehensive source of design inspiration and expert advice that will be of practical use and inspiration for homeowners, designers and students of design.