Need some ideas for designing a solar home or to make your space a little greener? "A Place in the Sun: Green Living and the Solar Home" could be a helpful guide -- and Archinect is giving away 5 copies to our readers.

Released this past April, the 228-page hardcover book by green-living writer and advocate Stephen Snyder includes an intro by John Hix of John Hix Architect Studios, over 200 color illustrations, and 28 featured profiles on green residences.

To enter this random drawing, fill out this survey by midnight Friday, July 11. Winners will be selected at random. Good luck!

Here's more detail into the book:


"The book vividly demonstrates that living green does not have to mean sacrificing comfort and living with less...Snyder demonstrates that the new solar home is also the new energy-efficient home, the new geothermal home, the new rainwater-harvesting home, and even the new recycled home. This generation of sustainable residences applies earth-friendly techniques throughout—in preliminary planning, in construction, in interior decorating, and even in maintaining a healthy home."



"Incisive text offers profiles of the twenty-eight featured houses through interviews with the homeowners and among them are a cache of inspiring green residences--a prefab house with a central 'dogtrot' that opens to the exterior on two sides, a hundred-year-old Craftsman bungalow updated to engage the natural environment, a complex of four 'off the grid' pavilions on a small island in the Atlantic, a five-story mixed-use building with a dramatic double facade that can be adjusted from within, and a sturdy yet luxurious eco-tourism retreat in Puerto Rico--all display a range of environmental technologies, each suited to the natural setting (from city to country, oceanside to mountaintop) and to homeowners’ tastes and budgets."

"Readers will benefit from practical advice derived from the experience of homeowners, builders, and architects, who have achieved the dream of creating not only a solar home but a home that is green inside and out."

To enter this random drawing, fill out this survey by midnight Friday, July 11. Winners will be selected at random. Good luck!

Click the thumbnails below for more photos.