If you’re the kind of person who loves watching Grand Designs whilst dreaming of the day you get to ‘project manage’ your very own custom built castle, then do I have a double whammy of futuristic house porn for you. First up is the third volume of Taschen’s Architecture Now! Houses book, offering a tour around 60 of the world’s most impressive new gaffs, featuring the kind of Playboy shoot meets Dr Evil’s lair type residences that’ll have Kevin McCloud writhing around in architectural ecstasy.
Once you’ve checked out these new residential upstarts it’s time to delve into Taschen’s second offering, The Architect’s Home which fully dispels the myth of ‘the cobbler’s children having no shoes’ by way of an A-Z of influential architects and a look at the home’s they created for themselves. It’s nigh on impossible to look at these insanely cool cribs and not become a little fucked off by your own surroundings, unless of course you live in a chrome and marble, art-deco lighthouse just off the coast of Brazil. However jealousy is a small price to pay for a good nose around some of the coolest houses ever built.