OPENHOUSE

Annual Open House Weekend Event

18 & 19 Sept, 2004 – All over London

The Annual Open House Weekend will give us all a good opportunity to rummage around in strangers’ homes and see how they live their lives; what furniture and design choices they’ve made; what stuff they have and the lifestyles they have created for themselves.

Although we may not admit it, the sustained popularity of television programmes of “Changing Rooms” and “Home Front” suggest that many of us have a strong interest in home we design and decorate our homes.

The London Open House Weekend, organised by London Open House, provides an excellent opportunity for us to gain access to many homes of architectural and community interest that are usually private buildings. This not only includes houses and homes, but many industrial and commercial buildings of interest that usually remain behind closed doors.

To see the full detail of the buildings open for this year’s weekend –many in west London- take a look at the list on the Open House website.

If the weekend manages to inspire you to think about your own home or perhaps even considering a longer-term plan as a designer or architect, then there are a broad range of learning opportunities in west London that can help you on that path.

Why not take a look at these…

In Hammersmith - an interior design course...
In Ealing - architecture in london
In Brent - basic diy for women
In Harrow - interior decoration

If you want to learn more about the world of architecture, here are a couple of good places to start...

The Architecture Centre
good list of links for all things architectural

archpedia
an interactive architectural encyclopedia

It's your space
If you care about parks and public space this is the site for you.

If seeing other people's houses inspire you to get the paintbrush out and do a spot of DIY, the boom in home decorating is reflected on the web with a number of useful sites...

The "home" section of the BBC site
has many useful features and "how-to's"

This section
shows you how to transform your home with colour.

House & Garden magazine
has an extensive list of suppliers of everything the budding home improver could need.

Visualise your colour ideas on-line with MousePainterTM
a fun online tool from Dulux that allows you to try different colour schemes on a room in your house to see how they look. Beats buying those little pots of test paints!