A small book in size though not in length, Wooden Homes is a simple yet charming celebration of houses, structures and furniture built from timber. With minimal text and a focus on images, the book does not immediately grab the reader, with little of the close examination that is seen in most architecture books. However, the simple pleasures of each of these houses, all of them lived in and loved, grow throughout the 500 pages to create a surprisingly touching sense of warmth and comfort.
Wooden Homes is a very accessible read due to every piece of text being reproduced in eight languages. The text is never excessive, usually a single paragraph is sufficient to describe each of the included houses, and so this replication allows speakers of French to engage with Wooden Homes as easily as speakers of English, Swedish or the five other languages. This is not a particularly useful feature and does take up a lot of space, but it contributes to the sense of inclusion that Wooden Homes tries to foster.
In terms of the structure, Wooden Homes is divided into the four main sections of ‘Wood Homes’, ‘Wood Constructions’, ‘Wood Furniture’ and ‘Wood Catalogue’. Each of these looks at a variety of examples of houses, apartment buildings and installations, furniture and species of wood respectively. The catalogue is a really nice touch, explaining various details about the 35 woods used most in the projects that the book looks at, including the size of the tree, where they are typically grown and their common uses.
Because the descriptions of the houses are quite limited, the text is very simple and does not go into too much detail, but that does not mean that the book also limits the celebration of each separate house. On the contrary, the photos that have been taken of each home are the dominant focus of the book and are enormously engaging. One of the main reasons for this is their domesticity.
These houses are not display homes, not uninhabited and certainly not unused or unlively. There are people in the photos: lying down reading a book, gathered around a dinner table, kids jumping on the bed. Bookshelves don’t have their contents arranged for effect, kitchen benches have bottles of dishwashing liquid on display and a jumble of pots clutters the verandah. These houses are lived in and are not presented merely as objects of design. This is the strength of Wooden Homes and it is why the first section is engaging because of its simplicity, not despite it.
‘Wood Constructions’ looks at some less conventional architectural creations, such as a bamboo room in a Taipei city square (344) or a beach hut built entirely from willow (355). There is also a very interesting series of artist retreats on an island in Newfoundland (290), each one standing in almost complete isolation as a black-and-white figure on the cliffs. Again, the focus is on the imagery and not any descriptions, inviting the reader to fall into these far less familiar types of buildings, and again each building is inviting in its own idiosyncratic way.
The section on furniture does not include any text with the images at all. There is a list of each piece’s details at the end of the section, but they are presented stripped of anything except their form so that you can enjoy them on that basis alone, and it is a remarkably effective presentation. In a cosy nook between catalogue and gallery, this section offers nothing to detract from the simple pleasures in the shapes, textures and colours of the furniture.
Overall, this book is a deceptively simple read, but the way in which the writing is far less of a focus than the images actually makes the reader look see a novel perspective, linger over images a little more and derive a different type of enjoyment from Wooden Homes as they might from other architectural books. It is light and inviting, eager to be flipped through over a cup of tea, or slowly savoured with a glass of your favourite wine.