Hewn and Hammered

Durham bungalow saved from the wrecker

407 Ottawa in Durham NC was recently saved from death-by-backhoe when neighbors bought off the wrecking company with $900 in cash. Obviously the city doesn't give two craps about historic preservation; at least this neighborhood does.

These people care so passionately about the preservation of their neighborhood, they are willing to personally sacrifice to ensure its viability - a viability that is still threatened on all sides. One neighbor has called up the trustee and offered to pay him $10,000 for the house - primarily to prevent it from being torn down. (I'm sure she doesn't really want another house.)

To be clear, these weren't city bulldozers this time. But the city - council- needs to do more to protect the integrity of the historic areas of our city. This portion of Cleveland-Holloway is not yet a local historic district, although they are working hard to become one.

And that's just it - the citizens, all of whom have jobs and lives to live are required to fight tooth and nail to simply keep the neighborhood they have. The onus is on them, rather than the city making proactive efforts to have preservation be a priority. The departments will say "we can't do [whatever]" - and it's true, because the leadership of this city does not promote historic preservation. My understanding is that the mayor's appointee position on the Historic Preservation Commission has sat vacant for - a year? Members of the council want to eliminate property tax reductions for individual local landmarks. The Historic Commission has been disempowered by a city finding that, if NIS deems a property unsafe, demolition permits can be issued without the consent of the HPC.

Why must citizens like those in Cleveland-Holloway swim upstream constantly to save their neighborhoods? Why is the quickest and easiest way for a property owner to deal with fines from code enforcement to proceed with demolition? Why isn't the city leadership their partner, by creating city policy that protects these resources - rather than making the barriers to preservation ever-harder to overcome?

historic homes in Redlands, California

David Estes, aka Flickr user Cyclotourist, lives in Redlands - a town of about 60,000 near San Bernardino in Southern California. Redlands is not particular noteworthy compared to some of its neighbors, but it does have several attractive neighborhoods chock-full of well-maintained historic homes, including Victorians, Mission Revival and Craftsman - and all sorts of variants, like Tudor, Georgian and Queen Anne - structures. Together with several contributors, Estes has put together a photo pool of close to 150 Redlands historic homes, spanning the full gamut of the area's most popular architectural styles. Unfortunately, the constant encroachment of commercial and industrial structures puts some of the prettiest small homes at risk. I'd be happy living in this one. Or maybe this one, with plenty of work. Just maybe not this one.

beautiful Illinois bungalows slated for demolition

To make room for gardens and other landscaping around a neighborhood drug and alcohol treatment center, several historic properties in Charleston IL will be razed in upcoming weeks. The homes - 5, 15, 21 and 95 Harrison (see photograph by Ken Trevarthan) - are in various styles, 95 being a brick and stucco bungalow of a type common in this part of the state. The neighborhood is not part of a historic district, so the demolition permit has no reason not to proceed, according to local officials. Neighbors are unhappy that the homes are being torn down - especially the two best looking and most sturdy of the structures - instead of being moved or integrated into CEAD (the Central East Alcoholism and Drug Council) plans. Two neighbors noted that the house at 95 Harrison was the most significant (and furthest away from the planned development), and while they did not begrudge CEAD's decision to legally raze the properties, they did suggest that leaving the building intact would greatly increase the neighborhood's opinion of CEAD and this particular program.

new architecture, new materials, new reading

Even though I'm not interested in living in a modern house, I've always been interested in the new materials that contemporary designers use - many of which are much more environmentally sound than the materials of two decades ago - and I find that there's a lot the old-house scene can learn from the various technological tricks developed by today's architects and designers.

Just as Maybeck constantly experimented with new materials and techniques to maintain heat in the winter and cool in the summer, I think there's plenty of room for old-house remodelers and DIY-types to expand our knowledge from the experiments going on in the various alternative-shelter movements.

There are a jillion blogs devoted to experimental architecture and repurposing of various engineering techniques and materials. Here are a few from my irregular reading list; maybe they will be interesting and/or useful to you:

• Materialicio.us
• A Daily Dose of Architecture
• Apartment Therapy - soulless modernism, yes, but it's pretty
• Build Blog
• Curbly - which is more about making your own design objects
• Dwell magazine's daily blog
• East Coast Architecture Review
• Future House Now
  
• Grassroots Modern
• Kelly Hart's Green Home Building & Sustainable Architecture
• leangreen.org - "recycled renovation on a low-budget ration"

A&C home gets modern upgrades in Alameda, CA

Zahid Sardar, the San Francisco Chronicle's design editor, is one of the few architecture journalists out there who understands the Arts & Crafts Movement and its importance to the Bay Area.

Yesterday's paper included the following article by Sardar on a recent remodel of Berkeley architect David Burton's 1908 home; visit sfgate.com for the whole story.

Berkeley architect David Burton's 1908 Arts and Crafts house in Alameda, which he and his wife, Jordan Battani, purchased in 2001, had been altered in the shag carpet, avocado green and harvest gold era of the late '70s. Outside, the shingles were painted powder blue.

With new paint to mitigate all that, they made do until five years ago, when they needed more space for Battani's mother, who moved into the 2,700-square-foot home. "It was easy. We felt we are rattling around in a large space," says Burton, 43, whose son was only 3 then.

Burton used to work for Bob Swatt, an architect whose taste for modernism he shares, and so the skylit, eat-in kitchen he and Battani envisioned was to be modern. But, he also wanted it to mesh with their Arts and Crafts home, whose roomy closets, oak floors, dark wood built-ins and leaded glass details are intact.

Anyone who reads this site regularly (OK, I flatter myself, I realize there are only a half dozen of you and my mom) knows that I take a pretty dim view of redesigning old homes in anything but an at least attempted orthodox fashion. However, this is an attractive remodel. For the most part, the materials complement the house's own materials and design, and the architect added light to focus attention more on historic detail, and only in a few cases (such as the removal of dark exposed beams) removed what I consider attractive portions of the original design. All in all, very pretty and very effective.

a very special bungalow in Oakland, California

Stephen Coles (whose eyes, unfortunately, are drawn much more to what I often remind him are the sterile, soulless lines of Mid Century Modern) emailed me yesterday with a heads-up on a particularly pretty bungalow in Oakland, California's Rockridge district, photographed inside and out by Flickr user The Jaundiced Eye, a regular in the Hewn & Hammered photo pool on that site. The house is, of course, TJE's own residence, and it really is an especially comfortable, attractive and well-designed space. It is, in the author's own words,

A Japanese pagoda-influenced California Craftsman. Get a load of the sleeping porch up top. This place is huge, but what makes it really remarkable is how intact it is. No one screwed it up. Not even the kitchen!

And how did he manage to snag such a showpiece home in one of the most architecturally desirable neighborhoods in the Bay Area? Therein lies a story:

This happened very quickly. I found it on the web while I was in Florida visiting my parents and sent Len an email. He dealt with the rest of it himself. When he picked me up from the airport he drove me to the place and parked in front (about 11:30pm). encouragingly, we drew the attention of several suspicious neighbors who actually came out of their houses. I liked that people obviously keep an eye on the neighborhood. The next day Len met the realtors and the owner and brought our house resume that showed all of the work we did on our 1910 Edwardian in SF. The owners really like Len. About two days later they offered it to us. They had rejected over 25 other offers because they didn't think the people understood what the house is, or how to care for it. Fortunately the lease on our SF townhouse expires on April 14th, so we are ready to go. The new house is in Rockridge which is part of Oakland. It is a largely Arts & Crafts neighborhood that is right next to Berkeley, a block away from College Avenue which is a hopping little street with restaurants,clubs and a European style market. I think we will be very happy here. I already have dibs on the top room with the sleeping porch for my office.

ask an expert: caring for hardwood floors

The Cleveland Plain Dealer's always-useful Ask an Expert column dealt this past week with something we all need to be concerned about but often overlook: caring for our hardwood floors.

Q: I have a beautiful 1925 Craftsman bungalow. The house is blessed with wood floors. I have noticed a black spot near the doorway to the kitchen (a heavy-traffic area) and also in the corner of the family room (a not-so-heavy-traffic area). What are my options in dealing with theses spots? And, more importantly, where do they come from so I can stop them from coming back? There are no leaks anywhere near the spots, and the floor is always dry (except when I mop). Do you have any suggestions on types of cleaners I can use to keep the floors looking shiny and new? I've been using Murphy's Oil Soap. - D.W., Bedford

A: From Roger Somogyi of Lamb Floor Fashion Center (30840 Lake Shore Blvd., Willowick, 440-943-6722):

As you know, hardwood floors are natural, beautiful and timeless. Caring and consistent proper cleaning and maintenance will ensure that they remain that way.

As for the black spots, I would have to assume that it is some type of moisture-related problem, possibly pet urine or mold. With your home being a 1925 vintage, it is likely that whatever has caused the black spots has penetrated the surface, and a plank replacement is the best way to permanently solve the problem. The wood planks that show the spots can be removed, new, unfinished planks can be installed, and the new planks can be custom stained to match the color and finish of your existing floor. A reputable wood repair and refinishing company should be able to help.

Cleaning techniques vary depending on the type of finish that is on the uppermost layer of the floor, which is called the wear layer. Knowing the type of finish is important to properly clean a wood floor.

read the entire column with information on caring for a variety of finishes

Crow House named to National Register of Historic Places

American ceramicist and painter Henry Varnum Poor's Rockland NY home - known semi-affectionately as "crow house," after the birds that harassed Poor during the construction of the structure - has been added to the NRHP. Oddly, the town that hosts it - Clarkstown NY - either refused or was unable to purchase it themselves, so a neighbor (either richer or more interested in historic preservation), the town of Ramapo, is in the process of buying it from current owner Arthur Wagner. Wagner bought it a year ago from Peter Poor, son of the artist, for $1.15 million; let's hope he didn't feel a need to make a profit off the public by selling it at a huge mark-up.

The brick home includes some interesting Tudor and castle-like features, including archways, circular stairways, exposed beams, and plenty of hand-crafted furniture made specifically for the site. According to visitors, the hand-made ceramic doorknobs, tiled windowsills and other stone and ceramic inlays are especially attractive; all the decorative ceramics were made by Poor specifically for this project at a kiln on the property. Much of the furniture is American Arts & Crafts.

The New York Times ran an article in 2006 on the race to save the building, which Wagner originally planned to destroy; it includes several photographs.

photo courtesy of the Preservation League of New York State

Bernard Maybeck projects: a map

In the spirit of last May's Greene & Greene map, I've made a map of most of Bernard Maybeck's projects. Right now, I have his projects in California and the midwest; soon I'll add those in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere, and make the list of demolished or burned structures as complete as possible.

view full-size map

Sears kit homes in Minneapolis

Kim Palmer had a good article on Sears kit homes in the Star Tribute earlier this month. Read the entire article on the Star Tribute site.

When Paul Kirkman first laid eyes on the house he bought last year, he knew it was a rare find: a 1917 Arts & Crafts bungalow with all its original woodwork and charm intact.

The house, in Minneapolis' Bryn Mawr neighborhood, had all the features that bungalow fans covet: dark built-ins, wainscoting and moulding, coffered box-beam ceilings and even an Inglenook fireplace.

"I said, 'This is perfect -- the one,'" recalled Kirkman, who had been searching for just such a home for seven months. "I like bungalows, and in my mind, this hits the pinnacle of that kind of architecture. The living room is about as original as you can get."

But Kirkman's bungalow is something even rarer: a Sears kit house, one of about 75,000 sold by mail order between 1915 and 1940.

There were 370 models, representing many styles, but Kirkman's house, the "Ashmore," is one of the least common, with only a handful of known surviving examples, according to Rosemary Thornton, author of "The Houses That Sears Built."

Advertised as "the Aristocrat of Bungalows," the Ashmore was among the largest (2,800 square feet) and most elaborate of the Sears kit homes. "It's a beauty, with a lot of nice features," Thornton said.

And it definitely defies any stereotype that mail-order homes are low-rent, said Tim Counts, president of the Twin Cities Bungalow Club. "Some people think of kit homes as ricky-ticky, slap-it-together, but often they are very high-end homes, and that one is a perfect example."

Blackstar Construction Group

Santa Barbara-based Blackstar Construction Group (probably not named after my favorite Radiohead song) is a general contractor specializing in Mission / Craftsman woodwork, interior architecture and detailing.

While their website does show off some very appealing jobs, many more of their projects are up on Flickr for the world to see, photographed by their friend Justin Wagner - I'm actually surprised more craftspeople don't take this approach - and it's easy to tell that they really take pride in the quality of their wood and skill. Some of my favorites:

• simple critique racks for the Brooks Institute of Photography
• terrific period-tile master bathroom remodel in Santa Barbara
• nice custom handrail for a backyard terrace in Santa Barbara
• contemporary custom A&C home in Santa Barbara [kitchen / deck]
• a kitchen island upgrade / makeover in Santa Barbara [1 / 2 / 3]
• an interesting Mission-style fireplace in Goleta
• very nice built-in shelving

Frank Lloyd Wright house tours in Oak Park

This Old House's terrific Hardware Aisle blog is always full of good stuff - tool and material reviews, pointers to new techniques, and last week an article on Frank Lloyd Wright house tours. Read the whole article on their site:

Why does it captivate us to walk through the homes where legends lived or worked?

It started with Superman's Fortress of Solitude, then Ricky Schroder's sweet living room on "Silver Spoons," and later the suggestive banister at Sigmund Freud's pad.

Come May 17, 2008 architecture devotees will flock to Oak Park, Illinois, which is base camp to explore a cluster of homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and his contemporaries.

The homes range from a Civil War-era Italianate built around 1860 to the Harry S. Adams House (pictured) built in 1913-14.

Brad Pitt, bungalow aficionado & rebuilder of New Orleans

Many of you probably know Thomas Heinz, Randell Mackinson & Brad Pitt's book on the Blacker House and its restoration. It's an interesting read, and the photographs are surprisingly good. Certainly, Pitt's been one of the more visible old-house aficionados in California, buying up old LA-area Craftsman homes and restoring them when he has the time.

The Los Angeles Times has an article on Pitt's continued interest in architecture - both traditional and contemporary - and his founding of the Make It Right foundation, which aims to completely rebuild New Orleans' extensively damaged Lower Ninth Ward, keeping the neighborhood's character intact and rebuilding homes specifically for their residents. He's said that this effort is different from other proposals specifically because it doesn't exist to make developers rich and homogenize an entire area, but rather rebuild for the benefit of those who live there. Let's hope it works out. Tina Daunt has the full story in her Cause Celebre column of December 5 - read the whole thing there.

NEW ORLEANS – IN Hollywood, causes tend to divide into the popular and the deeply personal. You usually can recognize the difference because the former come from the pages of next month's glossy magazines and the latter right from the heart. …

Over the years, Pitt has bought old California Craftsman houses and restored them, gathering every bit of literature he could find on the Arts and Crafts movement and its most famous local architects, Charles and Henry Greene. The actor became so interested in their iconic homes that he teamed up with scholar and restoration expert Randell L. Makinson to produce the most extensive book to date on the restoration of Greene & Greene's Blacker House, which had been stripped and abandoned. (Pitt provided black and white photos as a visual essay on the Pasadena home's rebirth.)

Pitt has spent time with Frank Gehry at his studio, tinkering with diagrams and models. And last winter, for his birthday, girlfriend  Angelina Jolie gave him a special gift: a private tour of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural masterpiece that spans  Bear Run, a creek that flows through woods about 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

So it's only fitting that Pitt's deep regard for the built environment and his concern for housing as a social cause have come together in his most ambitious project to date – "Make It Right" which aspires to nothing less than the reconstruction of New Orleans' storm-ravaged Lower 9th Ward.

Pitt, along with residents of the area, Democratic fundraiser and movie producer Steve Bing, and a team of world-renowned architects launched a national fundraising campaign this week to help the city recover from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Pitt and Bing have already pledged to kick in $5 million each toward project development and construction. (Another difference between popular and heartfelt causes is their shelf life. Ruined New Orleans may not be an issue in the current presidential campaign, but neither Pitt -- who has a residence in New Orleans' French Quarter – nor Bing has been able to forget that so much of a major American city still lays in ruins.)

"The plan is to start with 150 homes," Pitt told a gathering of reporters and residents on Monday. "But there's no reason why we can't do a thousand homes, or 10,000 ...We can make this happen, but we all need to join together to do this."

finding arts & crafts in unexpected places

One thing we talk about regularly is finding Arts & Crafts vernacular in what can only be called unexpected places. Sometimes the use might be inappropriate but still well-executed; sometimes neither. Reader Jean Emery wrote to tell us about her own experience at finding Spanish Colonial architecture in the last place you'd expect - upstate New York:

This is a visual response to the post about transplanting or recreating the arts and crafts vernacular. I hope this picture comes through. I'm a fourth generation San Diegan transplanted to upstate New York and I've always taken a great interest in a group of about twenty or so Spanish colonial homes built in Albany, probably in the 1920s or so. They're so California!  But, as you can see, they haven't fared very well here. I would love to buy one, but they generally are in pretty poor shape, have been terribly re-muddled. The stucco doesn't take well to repeated freezing and thawing, and the original windows weren't at all energy efficient so have been replaced with ugly double-panes.

Also, the new Stickley arts and crafts reproductions are big here in town because we're near the manufacturer in Syracuse, but they just don't have the soul and the patina of the originals. And American Bungalow has recently had some vulgar, expensive houses with customized woodwork run amuck!

I'm not really sure what the moral of all this is. I do love these bits of Mediterrean architecture plunked down in the snow belt!

Jean notes that one such home - 17 Rosemont Street in Albany (pics) - is for sale at an asking price of $178,900.

Thanks for sharing these, Jean. We do love to see this kind of thing, so if other readers have pictures to share, please do send them in!

Mission Hills Development in Northern California

"Mission Hills Development builds finer homes that are based on the Arts and Crafts movement from the early 1900's. Featured architects are Henry and Charles Greene of Pasadena, CA., circa 1900 to 1920."

These are indeed "finer" homes - finer, by far, than most of the new development I see, and at first glace at least look to be far better designed and constructed than even the chicest McMansion.

Sebastopol, CA - "the World in upheaval" is the site of Mission Hills Development's current project. Situated on 5 acres in a valley between rolling hills, this 6200 square foot house is part Gamble House and part Blacker House. Build with the same detail as these two famous Greene & Greene homes in Southern California, it encompasses five different hardwoods for its central hallways and grand rooms.

The Sun Valley Seasons: Greene & Greene-ish in Idaho

The "Sun Valley Seasons" (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter) are four luxurious 4,000+ sq ft single-family homes designed by Ruscitto / Latham / Blanton and built by Intermountain Construction on three lots in Sun Valley, Idaho. What makes them interesting is the level of detail - they were designed and built to resembled Greene & Greene homes, and the gabling, roofline, and much of the interior architectural woodwork is certainly in that vein.

I can't speak to the quality of the homes - I haven't visited them or seen construction pictures - and I sometimes feel a little odd looking at new construction that is so self-consciously "antiqued," in that it's made to look very similar to a particular designer's work in a particular era. However, you can see that at the very least the designers and builders certainly had a thing for the Greenes.

The people who staged the homes and did some of the finishing, though, included a few items that are completely incongruous in such a home - an ornate chandelier and other light fixtures, for instance, that owe more to Louis XIV than the Arts & Crafts movement; white beadboard in the kitchen; fake-paneled appliances, and a fountain that looks like something out of a Berkeley hippie commune. Overall, though, the level of detail is certainly impressive.

design, context & politics - could the Arts & Crafts Movement save us?

I know - "get a blog." Well, I have one, and this is it. For the most part, I try to keep the content here useful and interesting to everyone with tastes in art and design similar to my own. Now, though, I'm going to use it as a place to think a little bit, and I welcome your own opinions on this, and responses to my not-very-well articulated questions.

As a born-and-raised Californian, most of my contact with Arts & Crafts architecture and design has been with two specific variants of the style: the western (and specifically Latin and Italian inspired) Revival styles - with plenty of rough-hewn beams and natural stone - and the very strongly Japanese-influenced Craftsman forms so popular in portions of Southern California, with their emphasis on fine-grained dark wood, lustrous copper and ceramic tile.

My father's house in Berkeley is a very simple Western Stick variant, one of the area's numerous brown shingles, and he's furnished it with Japanese tansu and prints. My mother's house, a traditional Mission Revival one-story stucco bungalow, is also decorated with a lot of Asian art and craft. After visiting their homes recently I was thinking about how well these two styles complement their location, how they complement and maybe even, to some extent, help define the lives of their occupants.

Certainly part of the reason is the philosophical similarity of the Movement and its precursors. Arts & Crafts in the United States - especially the revival of the style in the Western US - takes a lot from Japanese and Chinese carpentry and woodwork both stylistically and philosophically. It tries hard to be as honest as possible about who / how / where it was conceived and built. The mark of the craftsman is everywhere, unlike in a contemporary tract home, which usually shows absolutely no mark of its designers or builders (although I suppose you could say that the substandard materials and poor technique used to construct most of today's overpriced McMansions are a designer's mark of a sort). Toolmarks, human scale and a more ergonomic design are central to both the Arts & Crafts movement and traditional craftsmanship in Japan and other parts of Asia.

The situation of a structure within its landscape is also important, as the Greene brothers learned at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Architects in Northern California had several unique environments to work within, and some of them gave rise to really unique and interesting styles - the coastal bluffs of Big Sur, for instance, and the redwood and oak forests of the Bay Area hills were each perfect incubators for a specific and very unique style of home.

But at what point does style stop being an organic reflection of the outside world and a synthesis of social and aesthetic philosophy, and start being a pretty picture (or a not-so-pretty picture) without any content? If you took one of these pretty Maybeck homes and rebuilt it with new materials in a flat suburban lot, would it still be pretty, or would it be an abomination? Can art or meaningful design exist without its context? What do you think? And how unhealthy is it for your spirit to live in a place where that context is divorced from the thing itself? I'm not sure how long I'd last in a pretty, clean, fancy, pricey suburban mansion. Obviously I can't afford it, but if I could, I wonder what it would do to me, how it would change the way I see the outside world. Would I be so insulated that my politics and ethics would change?

It's an enormous simplification (and not even 100% correct) to say that our self-exile from the natural is the cause for our national malady - the fact that we disagree so strongly, that we can't see eye to eye, that we hate so many for so little - but perhaps it's part of the cause, and one of the symptoms. I'm not sure.

Greene & Greene properties: a spreadsheet

I've been moving most of my text documents and spreadsheets over to the very helpful Google Docs (which also lets you create powerpoint-compatible presentations) - a great app that basically lets you have access to and share all your documents from wherever you are in the world - and just moved this database over. It's a list of all still-extant Greene & Greene properties, including some civic non-residential structures (walls, etc.); this is the same list I made this Platial map from. I hope it's useful to you ... If anyone is interested in helping me make a similar database/map for Maybeck, Frank Lloyd Wright and other architects of the movement, let me know.

What do you do when your house blows up?

You rebuild, of course. Dave Premer, of Huntington NY, rebuilt his 1830s farmhouse - leveled by a gas explosion and fire caused by a contractor who severed a gas line - as a very attractive Craftsman bungalow. Energy efficiency and other modern touches were important to Premer, whose 4 bed / 3 bath home should be ready next month, just about one month after the blast.

The story itself is not especially noteworthy, although we certainly wish Mr. Premer the best. It is interesting to note, though, that he was able to cut the energy footprint of this rather large house - at 2,600 square feet, it's almost double the side of my perfectly livable Mission Revival bungalow here in Sacramento - by half, without going over budget. You can indeed build "green" - as long as you have some sort of focus - without breaking the bank.

The bungalow concept with energy-saving features began to take shape in late February, after his insurance company, Allstate, referred several contractors for the project. Armed with a set of plans from a local architect, Premer selected a project bid from a national firm with a franchise in Brentwood. Mark Gunthner, owner of Paul Davis Restoration & Remodeling of Long Island, Huntington architect Pete Smith and Premer worked together to revise the original house plans.

The result will be a residence using about 50 percent less energy than a traditional home its size, about 2,600 square feet.

read the full article at Newsday

EcoTop: a truly green countertop material that you can afford

Regular readers know that I'm not a fan of modern architecture, but that I love modern materials - especially those that aren't visibly avant-garde and can work in old homes just as well as new. That is, green materials - not just greenwashed products, but truly enviro-neutral or -friendly materials. One of my pet peeves is building materials that are recycled or recyclable - one or the other - but not both; many of these materials are lauded in the popular press for being "ecological," but aren't really.

Joel Klippert, a young man living just outside of Seattle, has really turned this specific market around. With a little help from some very talented research chemists and materials scientists, he's created the very  first recycled, renewable and fully-recyclable countertop material. EcoTop, a successor to his extremely successful PaperStone product, is 50% pulped bamboo paper fiber and 50% recycled wood - sometimes called "urban timber," the structural wood salvaged from demolished buildings. He's worked for years to find a non-petroleum resin that was UV resistant, so that he could avoid using only dark colors (the resin used in earlier materials had to be dark to avoid the yellowish cast that would develop over years of sun exposure). Now that he's found that and reliable sources for his two structural ingredients, EcoTop can hit the market - in a range of colors ranging from white to black, with an enormous range of shades of green, tan, red, brown and gray in between. In fact, Joel says he can match any PMS (Pantone Matching System) shade that a client can specify, if the order is large enough.

EcoTop is not only a beautiful, extremely durable and truly green material - right at home in any kitchen or bath, new or old - it's also really affordable and easy to install, competitive with natural stone and significantly less expensive than concrete installations. If anything, I think that materials like this are even more apropos in an Arts & Crafts home than stone or tile: their makers take their responsibility to the outside environment just as seriously as their responsibility to the inside of your home, something that is much more in line with the tenets of the movement than nonrecyclable materials which, no matter how green their production process, end up filling a landfill when you (or, in the case of something like EcoTop, which will last generations, when some far off future owners of your home) are done with them.

Note that this material is also available as an exterior cladding for large residential and commercial / industrial applications.

preservation status debated in Decatur

Paul Donsky has an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the seemingly endless conflict between preservationists and those who fear that historic status will restrict their ability to alter their own property:

Residents in the Oakhurst section of Decatur are proud of the tidy bungalows that line the neighborhood's streets.

Run-down homes, many dating to the early 20th century, have been painstakingly restored, preserving the clean lines and sturdy porches that typify the Craftsman bungalow style.

Some residents say the modest, boxy houses are such an integral part of the neighborhood's character that they must be protected, particularly at a time when "teardowns" and "McMansions" have become part of the real estate lexicon.

Now, three residents have filed papers asking Decatur's Historic Preservation Commission to make part of Oakhurst a historic district, which would prevent most of the older homes in the area from being knocked down. Several old homes have already been bulldozed, they say, and many others are at risk.

But others in the neighborhood say the protection would come at too high a price. They worry that new rules might prevent them from expanding their homes as their families grow, and they grouse about the prospect of having to get approval for run-of-the-mill home improvement projects.

read the entire article

Payson Denny Architects in Santa Monica, CA

Ken Payson is an architect in the Santa Monica area (his firm, Payson Denny, also has an office in Santa Fe NM) who mainly works on residential projects. While Payson Denny do build many modern / modernist homes, they have sometimes produced very attractive and historically-accurate Craftsman structures; they've also been responsible for some really stunning restorations and remodels of historic structures throughout the Los Angeles area.

We've created a small Flickr set with a few high-res images of these recent projects.

a visit to the Lodge at Torrey Pines

Given that the New York Times recently opened up their archives, I've been spending lots of time looking for interesting A&C related articles. Just found this gem by Barbara Lazear Ascher, dated September 2002. The first few paragraphs are below; visit the NYTimes site to see the full article.

I'm driving down a twisting, clinker-brick driveway banked by boulders, wildflowers and rare Torrey pines. Ahead is a green-stained, cedar-shingled building, which from my East Coast perspective resembles an Adirondack lodge. Then I am reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie houses with their celebration of the horizontal line. An outward sweep of unpainted, broad roof overhangs, projecting outriggers, and rafter tails appear to dance with the light.

This isn't Surfin' Safari, Southern California. John Ruskin, William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh have come to La Jolla.

I'd heard about the recently opened Lodge at Torrey Pines from my stepdaughter in San Diego. Tucked between the Pacific Ocean and Torrey Pines State Reserve by the 18th green of the South Course of the famed Torrey Pines Golf Course, the hotel is a result of its owner William Evans's love affair with California's Arts and Crafts Movement.

I'm curious how a hotelier in the Era of Asphalt will interpret the movement's reverence for nature and craftsmanship. How will he tip his hat to Ruskin, whose espousal of the meditative and redemptive qualities of crafting and living in beautiful surroundings inspired the movement in England? And how is it possible to integrate into a 175-room hotel the intimate details of Mr. Evans's inspiration, the 1907 Blacker and 1908 Gamble Houses designed by his idols, the Pasadena architects Charles and Henry Greene?

I drive beneath the port-cochere composed of massive timbers stacked horizontally on one another like a bird's wing feathers, which impart an ironic sense of lightness, as though the entire lodge could be carried skyward on these outstretched wings.

photo of the Torrey Pines Lodge courtesy of Flickr user John Koss

Arts & Crafts gems from the New York Times' archives

The New York Times recently decided to open up much of their historic archives for free, finally realizing that the ad revenue generated by increased access is far higher than what they could make in fees or subscriptions. As a result, there are plenty of interesting articles suddenly available to all of us that we'd have had to pay for in the past. I spent the morning searching for various Arts & Crafts related keywords, and here's what I turned up:

• R. W. Apple's Journeys column on Berkeley, California, with quite a bit on Maybeck and other local architects and artists;
• review of the 1997 Boston Arts & Crafts exhibit at Wellesley college;
• 'travel advisory' on Greene & Greene's wonderful 1909 Thorsen House in Berkeley;
• profile of a Sacramento-area family who did an extensive green remodel of their Craftsman bunglaow;
• article on the continued popularity of Rookwood pottery;
• visiting the Grove Park Inn, the site of Asheville NC's annual Arts & Crafts conference & show;
• Eagle Rock, Mount Washington and Highland Park: NE Los Angeles' Craftsman hideaways;
• 36 house in Pasadena, California's most (famous) bungalow-centric town;
• Spanish Colonial Revival "fixer-upper" in Mar Vista, CA;
• Arts / Artifacts column on California' contributions to the Arts & Crafts Movement;
• four interesting architecture-centric walking tours in San Francisco;
• Living In Forest Hill, NJ - an unlikely enclave of Arts & Crafts architecture; and
• a Maybeck home is sold in 2003 - but the focus here is the wonderful garden.

Design Works Architecture, Pittsford New York

Design Works Architecture specializes in timber frame structures - resort buildings, grand mountain estates, big giant Craftsman palaces - as well as renovations of similar types of buildings. Given their location in woody upstate New York (just east of Rochester, near the Canada border) this is not surprising; there's a very strong Craftsman influence in the area, with the Roycrofters just down the road in East Aurora.

Principal Charles Smith started the firm just a few years ago, after a history of working with other architects in the New York City area; he started out specializing on the "adaptive re-use of under-utilized structures" and that and his interest in historic renovation paved the way for his current emphasis on the Craftsman style (take a look at the "boat house," a rather unassuming name for a big, beautiful structure, which won an AIA award in 2007). His staff - project managers, architects, interior designers and construction specialists - all seem to be just as dedicated to this site-specific aesthetic, and it really shows in their work.

We've created a Flickr set of images of those projects of theirs that fit most firmly within the Craftsman aesthetic - take a look.

Architectural Salvage VI

Given the seemingly endless popularity of the DIY movement, awareness of green practices and recycling as parts of the design/build process and the high cost of new materials, salvage businesses continue to thrive:

• Chicago-based Salvage One, established in 1979, sells ... well, everything. And anything. Arts & Crafts furniture & fittings, A&C stained glass, fountains, doors, bath fixtures and columns - and that only scratches the surface.
• Minneapolis' City Salvage has a large stock - especially of art glass - at their First Avenue warehouse; they also have a blog "for the edification and enjoyment of all."
• Recycling The Past in Barnegat NJ has a good stock of the usual ephemera, plus lots of Indian salvage, tilenew furniture made from recycled / reclaimed wood and iron.
• The Old House Parts Co. in Kennebunk ME specializes in hardware, but they also have a ridiculously large stock of woodwork, fixtures & millwork.
• In Susquehanna PA, we find Conklin's barnwood & hand-hewn beams, which sells just what you'd expect. Whether you're looking for flooring or decorative and structural beams, they have one of the largest stocks I've ever seen, in a dozen different types of wood.

and in the UK, where architectural salvage is a way of life:

• The Salvage Doctor specializes in the "reclamation and restoration of cast iron architectural salvage and antiques," and carries an extensive range of radiators (cast iron, school- / hospital- /column- style, etc.), fireplaces & surrounds, woodburning stoves, rainwater systems (guttering, downpipes & fittings), gates and railings. They are located in Horsham, West Sussex.
• In Situ trade out of their Manchester ex-pub warehouse and studio. They keep a large stock of the usual - with attention to fancy pavers, lighting, glass, flooring, entryways and doors / door furniture.
• Cox's Architectural Salvage has operated their 12,500 sq ft covered warehouse in Moreton-in-Marsh since 1992. They are one of the largest Victorian ironmongers in Britain, and also refinish and sell their own line of nickel plate and brass hardware.
• Toby's Architectural Antiques has shops in Exeter and Newton Abbot. They carry a wide range of exterior detail - gates, ironmongery, roofing, slate, stone, water features - as well as kitchen materials, doors, light fixtures etc.
• Park Royal Salvage at the Lower Place Wharf in London sells everything from building materials, doors, windows and reclaimed plumbing to doors, windows, fireplaces and other old house parts.
• Robert Mills Architectural Antiques are one of the more specialized shops of their kind, with an especially large stock of architectural woodwork, mainly panels, columns, balustrades, mouldings and friezes, window frames, etc.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Kentuck Knob (1954), Ohiopyle PA

This wonderful FLW property - built in the "deluxe" Usonian style on a beautiful 80-acre lot - is just a few miles from Fallingwater. Along with the extensive sculpture garden, it is open for public tours.

The House on Kentuck Knob was designed in 1954 and completed in 1956 for I. N. and Bernardine Hagan, friends of the Kaufmans, for whom Wright built Fallingwater. The home, build of tidewater cypress, glass and 800 tons of local sandstone - and a very striking copper roof - is situated in western Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands, and includes a gorgeous view of the Youghiogheny River gorge and the surrounding hills.

The Hagans lived in the house for 30 years, and sold it to Baron Peter Palumbo, an English developer, art collector and architecture conservationist, in 1986.

• slideshow of images from Kentuck Knob and its sculpture garden, including a few of Fallingwater

Thanks to Douglas Sanders' wonderful Frank Lloyd Wright Newsblog for reminding us of this very pretty and unique home!

Oaklawn Portal, South Pasadena

Greene & Greene's 1906 portal to the Oaklawn neighborhood in Pasadena; found in mins3rdkid's Flickr photostream. Unfortunately, this pretty bit of stonework, wood and masonry is often overlooked in books and studies of the work of the brothers Greene; local artists, however, know it well - here's Liz Reday's painting.

"one beautiful bungalow" in Sacramento CA

Gabby Hyman at RenovatorsPlace.com had the following story about Don Fox, who lives not far from me in Sacramento. Read the whole article here.

When Don Fox took his first look at a 1910 Craftsman-style bungalow in Sacramento, CA, he knew he had found his long-sought fixer-upper. The home had "good bones," Fox said, but it was in miserable shape. A homeless man was sleeping on the porch, the windows were shattered, and there was so much grime on the kitchen walls that it "smelled like a restaurant grease trap." After gutting the home to bare studs and rafters, Fox and his wife, Amanda, completed a renovation project that won an award from the Association for the Preservation of Historic Homes.

The remodeled kitchen, bathrooms, and living room were the true stars of what the Sacramento Bee called "One Beautiful Bungalow." An Italian-American from Brooklyn, Don has a particular fondness for the kitchen renovation, which resulted in a room where he spends a lot of his time whipping up traditional culinary faire.

"The house felt good when I first saw it," he explains. "It was a spiritual feeling. That's despite its having been sad, neglected, and uninhabited for years." Fox, a former journeyman carpenter, furniture-maker, and aficionado of period architecture, saw the potential to create a showpiece.

John Hudson Thomas

There's been a resurgence of interest lately in one of my favorite Bay Area architects, a fellow who was just as comfortable with classically Arts & Crafts structures as he was with Art Deco, Mission Revival and less orthodox