Good week. This week's H&H is a great read for us city bound cliff dwellers, and it only suffers for lack of anything green (the garden pictures and stories are SO important for our spirits). Since this is shopping season, good buys take over inside.

• Green Acres, One Piece At a Time: This is a fascinating story of how a NYC family shipped a prefab house from Austria to their little piece of heaven in upstate New York. While we find the house extremely ugly on the outside (sorry), the idea is great and we respect that the owners really love their design (they need more landscaping at least!).

  Specs: 1,300 sq ft.
  Rooms: 3 bed, 2 bath, open livingroom/diningroom area
  Designer: Oskar Leo Kaufman (OLK)
  Type of Design: AS.SYS (Open Architectural System)
  Price of house: $230,000
  Total price of project: $300,000 (includes landscaping, foundation, etc)

  Before and After Slideshow

  

• Picking a Renovator With Legs: Title says it all. Some tips on what to look for and why not to beat yourself up if it doesn't go perfectly. It's just hard.

• Moving On Up, Same Address: Accounts of people preferring to move within their building when needing a bigger apt. Why? Easier move, lower costs and no need to change your address on all your stationary.
  

• Gifts for Dreamers, Oglers and Scholars: Neat, new, big coffee table design books to look for when you go to Barnes & Noble, have coffee and read for a few hours.
  

• Some Currents:
  
  • Campbell's Soup Cans with Warhol labels
    
  • ugly dishes designed after an ugly building: 2 Columbus Circle
    
  • Catherine Malandrino's wild new shop in MePa
    
  • New design: Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam
  
  
  
  
  
• Personal Shopper: Eight ottomans that are shockingly unattractive
  (Illustration by Matt Collins, Top photo by Matthew Hranek)