Show only some buildings

Question

How do I show only some buildings?

I only need to show 3 cabins in the forrest, but not every house in the whole village around, and the city close by. Maybe some of the symbol buildings in the city area to, but thats less important.
Actually it would be best if the built area could just be gray (with the roads layer on top)(in other words less detailed outside the forrest).

The buildings are made up of 2 layers, lines and areas (color inside the building lines). And one of those cabins need to be a different color than the two other, or it can be a symbol (I have an icon for it if needed, and its even preferable (a (DNT) tourist hut)).

I'm using QGIS Dofour 2.0.1 for this but also have QGIS Lisboa 1.8.0 (which I have used slightly more), but I'm more used to ArcGIS (and the much older ArcView (3.x) (nope not the new one you might think of)).

Answer 1

If you want to avoid redundancy, you can use the Filter option in the contextual menu of the layer in QGIS, which is something very similar to the Definition query in ArcMap.

Answer 2

You don't tell us what datasource you are working with.

If your buildings are polygons, you can select the ones you want to see, export them to another shapefile with Save Selection As..., add the result to the canvas and remove the original layer.

Same should work for contour lines.

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UPDATE

The function has now been moved to Save As ..., [x] Save only selected features checkbox.