Kevin McCloud’s How to Make Your House a Home

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Kevin McCloud’s How to Make Your House a Home
Kevin McCloud

Collins Shorts – insight in an instant.Kevin McCloud’s advice for setting up or doing up your home. Kevin will show you the things worth spending your money on, and the things you might cut back on. Helpful and incisive advice on design, construction and style from the foremost voice in modern architectural design.Collins Shorts are a fresh look at the ebook short, with the emphasis on vibrant design, animated content and expert authors who can provide accessible insight. They satisfy your thirst for knowledge without the need for time commitment.This ebook will work on all e-readers but delivers its full punch on devices that support colour and animation. Please note the extent is between 20 to 40 pages, depending on your settings.

Copyright (#u4dddf6ba-507c-5cb5-838f-e257f00c921f)

How to Make a House a Home contains material first published in Kevin McCloud's 43 Principles of Home by Kevin McCloud, first published in 2010 by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Text © Peter Miller 2012

Illustrations © HarperCollinsPublishers; Shutterstock.com

Kevin McCloud asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of his work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Hardback ISBN: 9780007265480

Collins Shorts ebook edition © NOVEMBER 2012

ISBN: 9780007506842

Version 2018-07-16

Contents

Title Page (#u107a3f9c-12c4-59c6-a89f-cbb4c812b26a)Copyright (#u34083547-a58e-587b-9316-5d3f9ce51524)Introduction (#ulink_1d8017d5-b39f-5361-9202-0ff27ed6350c)Chapter 1 (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Touch is a much underrated sense. Whether you’re a child in a toyshop or an adult in a china shop, or you’re in bed with your lover, the temptation to touch is too great to resist.

Retailers place the emphasis on the visual: we’re encouraged to look but not touch, and window displays are kept out of reach behind glass. Yet the tactile is fundamental to our full experience of the world around us. If you ask any architect where the money on a project should go, they will tell you that it’s worth investing in 1) the bare bones of the design and a good quality of construction and 2) the things you touch.

So, because you touch them everyday...

I don’t mean this in the way your dowager aunt might in dismissing anything designed after 1915. I mean furniture that is made with love and care. It is probably going to be expensive but it will reward you, I promise, in the fullness of time with a longer life and more use and somehow a livelier character, because you know it well and the factory it came from and maybe even the person who made it, thanks to a little brochure that came with the furniture that you may end up keeping as long as the furniture.

I think of every decently made object I’ve seen or picked up, from lamp posts and bridges to spoons and eggcups, as a physical embodiment of human energy: the magical ability of our species to take raw materials and turn them into things of use, value and beauty.

The action of something like a light switch should not only feel crisp and easy, it should feel the same way thousands of uses later. This is down to the quality of the components and the quality of the assembly. In the case of lighting, we’re used nowadays to being able to buy a bedside lamp for around £5 in a DIY store. But because it’s cheap, that doesn’t mean to say it’s disposable or planet-light. The environmental impact of lighting is heavy, because each fixture comprises many components from many materials that have travelled many thousands of miles before being assembled. The average bedside lamp might contain five separate types of plastic, a spun aluminium shade, brass and steel components, PVC cabling, copper wire, silicone gaskets, rubber sheathing, ceramic lampholder and fuse; and, in the bulb, rare gases, glass, tungsten or rare metal phosphors, mercury, electronic components and a circuit board.