easily browsable pictures of houses

April 17, 2007 10:36 AM

Where can I find a lot of easily browsable pictures of both the inside and outside of houses?

My boyfriend and I are planning on building a house. We know we like contemporary style architecture, but saying "contemporary" doesn't mean much in terms of actual designs, so we would like to look at a lot of examples and choose some that we really like, to show them to our architect, when we eventually choose one.

I've seen some of the architectural magazines' websites, but there's a lot of info and text to sort through, and google also brings up more results than I can handle.

So, this place being in essence a filter of information, I'm hoping some of you MeFites know of something similar to what I'm looking for.

posted by CrazyLemonade to home & garden (11 answers total)

How about a real estate site? Realtor.com or one for your area (in Seattle, Windermere.com).

You can set a search for "year built" and price and browse to your heart's content.
posted by GaelFC at 10:48 AM on April 17, 2007

I've used this site a lot lately. The Find a Plan section is handy. Here's the contemporary section, although of course a lot of styles overlap, so you should check every section. This is a site that sells blueprints, so they're not going to give it away by disclosing every detail and measurement, but you can see the full blueprints and renderings of the outsides of the houses, and there are hundreds to look at.
posted by iconomy at 10:51 AM on April 17, 2007

New home builders' web sites are also a good bet. The pictures will be substantially better than those taken by real estate professionals. Try:

KB Home
Lennar
Toll Brothers
Pulte

and the like.
posted by meowzilla at 10:54 AM on April 17, 2007

daddytypes just mentioned something called Normalroom, which I'd never heard of but seems to fit the bill.
posted by mathowie at 10:55 AM on April 17, 2007

Go to flickr and search for, say "modern house"

Go to apartment therapy and just browse.

Check out mocoloco's architecture posts.
posted by adamrice at 11:46 AM on April 17, 2007

Better Homes and Garden Magazine has a website with a huge decorators gallery (which includes many architectural views) as well as literally thousands of home plans, often with photos attached. Look under decorating/remodeling sections. The HGTV website may be of some use to you as well. They have a pretty good and browse-able set of galleries.
posted by theantikitty at 12:14 PM on April 17, 2007

Hmm...I'm using the blue "link" button to create those links, and somehow they're adding the url of the question onto my original URL. Those websites are pretty easy to find, though. www.bhg.com and www.hgtv.com respectively.
posted by theantikitty at 12:18 PM on April 17, 2007

Modern houses. Contemporary houses. The Erwin House, Mies and Carrots, and the Austin Mod House have lots of photos of their projects.
posted by jeanmari at 12:44 PM on April 17, 2007 [1 favorite]

theantikitty, you probably deleted the http part that's already there in the text field when you use the link pop-up. If you paste www.hgtv.com into that field without the http, the resulting url would be http://ask.metafilter.com/contribute/www.hgtv.com.
posted by iconomy at 12:46 PM on April 17, 2007

I like to gawk at houses on homeexchange.com
posted by LoriFLA at 12:52 PM on April 17, 2007

Thanks to everyone who answered.

I didn't have time to look at all the links, so I won't be marking a best answer just yet. Although I do feel honored to have mathowie answer my question.

Oh and, adamrice's flickr suggestion was so simple and very good, I hadn't thought of that. Now I've seen some of the architecture pools in there and there are tons of styles and of course browsing through the pics is very easy.
posted by CrazyLemonade at 9:37 PM on April 17, 2007