Today's discriminatory home buyers want living spaces tailored to the functional priorities of their lives, but that still reflect the multiple roles of a home as a place for community, privacy, ceremony, and outdoor living. In other words, they want designs that are flexible enough to encompass all the facets of their changing lives but with more comfort and convenience!.

That's the focus of the second edition of this best-selling housing design guide, updated and expanded to accommodate the needs of today's new households. Using the home buyer's lifestyle as a guide, component design defines housing in terms of major living "components," which are spaces for eating and sleeping, entertaining, being together, or being alone.

Clearly illustrated with hundreds of architectural sketches and drawings, as well as newly enhanced computer graphics and photographs, this innovative book presents solid guidelines to show you exactly how component design works. Full of valuable market-specific information, it shows you how to: divide the typical home into component zones associated with both emotions and functions - community, privacy, ceremonial events, and outdoor activities; organize these components into a workable plan, balancing their importance to various household groups; create floor plans that respond to various home-buyer market segments and develop rules for layouts that will satisfy new buyer profiles; apply the same method of component design to smaller, multifamily units, as well as to homes specifically tailored to America's changing domestic needs, such as single-parent households, work-at-home professionals, and intergenerational households.