Richard Dodd's May 19 article in the Orange County Register on Brea, California's Union Oil Co. neighborhood is a good one:

The 1882 discovery of oil in shallow wells in Brea Canyon had a major influence in the history and economy of Orange County. Several small oil companies sprang up shortly afterward and in 1890, some of them merged to form Union Oil Co. of California.

Many local communities faced a housing shortage for new workmen during the oil and land boom in the 1920s. Union Oil built 61 homes for their employees in the southwestern part of Brea. This area became known as the "Union Oil neighborhood."

The bungalow period was in full swing at the time. As a result, most of the homes are California, Craftsman and Pueblo bungalows and other variations interspersed with a few provincial revivals.

read the whole thing

I don't want to turn H&H into something especially commercial, and the ads that are here are necessary to pay for our hosting and other such stuff. However, I saw this on one of those "all the deals on Amazon" sites and thought folks here might find it useful or interesting.

This table, while not spectacularly beautiful, looks sturdy and is certainly fantastically cheap. $20! Looks like it's going out of stock, so there might not be many available, but if you need something like this, you won't find a better deal, that's for sure.

One of the most central tenets of the Arts & Crafts movement was the situation of a home in its landscape - even a kit house needed to be picked to be a good match with its surroundings. But better a well-built old house be moved than be demolished for a parking lot, I suppose. It is sad that people would rather go with ugly urban blight than a pretty old house, though, but I suppose we will eventually learn. Maybe.

Here's an article by Brittany Wallman in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel on the upcoming move of a 1916 bungalow which had to be moved once before to make room for a parking lot. No, I'm not kidding. Maybe we do drive a bit too much. Maybe raising the gas tax to $5 a gallon would solve this problem:

Progress is chasing the Annie Beck house around town.

Historic preservationists are preparing to move the 1916 bungalow to its third location, again to avoid demolition. The cottage was home to one of Fort Lauderdale's prominent pioneer couples, Annie and Alfred J. Beck, and is a "traditional Craftsman style, front-facing gable bungalow" characteristic of the vernacular-style houses of early Fort Lauderdale, according to a city memo.

Its original location, before downtown boomed into a high-rise district, was at 334 E. Las Olas Blvd. But in 1977, the house was relocated to 310 SE 11th Ave. to make way for a parking lot.

read the whole article

Plenty of nice stuff out there if you know where to look. Included for your edification, several bits & pieces of Arts & Crafts furniture, architectural salvage and other related items that I've found using the terrific Craigslist search engine Crazedlist.

• refinished Limbert dresser with original copper hardware, $1000 (San Francisco CA)
• document or sample cabinet, $340 (Santa Cruz CA)
• Gustav Stickley ladderback chair, $475 (Santa Cruz CA)
• L & JG Stickley "postal desk" and rocker, $500 ea (Glendora CA)
• set of 4 early Mission Revival / Craftsman side chairs and 1 armchair, $350 (Ventura CA)
• Stickley #729 writing desk, $5900 (Montecito CA)
• round pedestal dining table, $600 (Sherman Oaks CA)
• set of four c1925 Stickley side chairs, $3600 (Las Vegas NV)
• set of two contemporary Stickley spindle-back armchairs, $1300 (Del Mar CA)
• contemporary glass-top Stickley coffee table, $250 (San Diego CA)
• L & JG Stickley armless rocker, $500 (Portland OR)
• another Stickley armless rocker, this one with new-ish leather seat, $250 (Portland OR)
• Stickley Bros. rocker, needs minor repair, $225 (Tacoma WA)
• drop-leaf Mission desk, $275 (Alameda CA)

A recent article by Ellen Tomson in Minneapolis' Pioneer Press describes local historian and author Larry Millett's research and subsequent book on Minneapolis' historic neighborhoods. excerpt:

Larry Millett biked the streets of St. Paul and Minneapolis for three summers to produce his latest book, (the) AIA Guide to the Twin Cities, the first major neighborhood-by-neighborhood handbook of its kind.

But the foundation of his 665-page book was decades of research and writing about the Twin Cities, first as a Pioneer Press reporter, columnist and critic, and then as author of Lost Twin Cities, Twin Cities Then and Now, and Strange Days, Dangerous Nights, all which focused on local structures and events.

"The book is the result of three years of work and, in a sense, it's the work of a lifetime since I've worked here all my life," says Millett, 59, who grew up in North Minneapolis and has spent much of his adult life in St. Paul.

I was going through SFGate.com's home section archive and found this great piece by R.W. Apple, Jr. (the New York Times' architecture critic), originally published in that paper in 2003:

"Westward the course of empire takes its way," wrote the 18th century Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, so the 19th century founders of a little city directly across the bay from San Francisco, almost at the western extremity of the American empire, chose to name it after him.

Many famous men and women have walked its streets -- Ernest O. Lawrence, the remarkable physicist who invented the cyclotron; Clark Kerr, who helped develop the nation's best statewide system of higher education; Mario Savio, the leader of the radical Free Speech Movement during the turbulent 1960s; and in our own day Alice Waters, arguably the nation's greatest restaurateur.

Another -- too little known, at least beyond Northern California -- is the architect Bernard Maybeck, a precursor of the modern movement like Otto Wagner in Vienna, Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, Victor Horta in Brussels and the brothers Charles and Henry Greene in Pasadena.

Much that he saw and so brilliantly succeeded in grasping still stands today in Berkeley, on and near the campus of UC Berkeley and in the hills above it, in the north side neighborhood where Maybeck lived for most of his life (1862-1957). More than anyone else, he made Berkeley one of the nation's architectural treasure-troves.

read the whole thing

My single favorite writer on architectural and design issues is Ted Wells. Unlike here, where I'm constantly filling in the space between interesting issues with notes of very minor importance, Ted's  puts articles up on Living Simple only when he has something to say. He's a really good writer and teacher (and designer, of course; that is his primary profession), and in my few conversations with him I've learned a lot about architecture and our responsibility to art.

Living Simple's motto is "Do your work. Be honest. Keep your word. Help when you can. Be fair." Even when Ted is critical - as he sometimes is, especially of communities (and homeowners) who are unable or unwilling to maintain architectural and aesthetic responsibility or historic character through either a lack of education or simple greed, or historic homeowners who are dishonest or inattentive stewards of their homes - he is always fair, and takes his responsibilities seriously. He even writes on his personal website that his "most important job is helping guide the stewardship of notable historic architecture, art, built and natural landscapes, and thought and culture."

Ted has a new book coming out next year with Gibbs-Smith, one of the world's best publishers of books on American architecture and design. Ted and John Ellis are currently finishing up work on the book, which is about the mid-century modernist architect Harwell Hamilton Harris. Twenty-two of Harris' homes will be profiled in the book, which will be published next year.

The unpainted (or brown-painted) brown shingle is one of my favorite types of house. Usually taller than a one-story ground-hugging bungalow, built in either a Craftsman style or Western Stick variant (which often incorporates more rustic and cabin-like features, like rougher beam endings and less-symmetrical eaves), and are less often Craftsman-fied Queen Annes, with glossy trim and a bid of beadwork around the windows, these houses always seemed warm and friendly to me - partly because I grew up in Berkeley, CA, which is full of such homes, and partly because my father lives in a very warm & comfortable house built in this style. Some are raw wood or brown-painted wood shingle, others use wood siding or brown-painted wood siding; all share a sort of undecorated honesty of design. (There are also quite a few very modern brown shingles, built in the angular "Northern California" style that owes far more to Sea Ranch than Maybeck; these are mostly in the Eucalyptus woods of the upper Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco Hills, and while I am sure many of them are fine homes, they're not especially interesting to me, or - I imagine - to you.)

Here are a number of attractive brown shingles for sale. As you can see, the style is most popular on the West Coast, specifically in the Bay Area; I doubt wood shingle would last nearly as long when exposed regularly to snow, wind and ice.

• 2/2, San Francisco CA: $550K
• 2/2, Oakland CA: $699K
• 3/2.5, Oakland CA: $749K
• 4/3.5, Sausalito CA: $4M
• 2 units: 2/1 + 1.5/1, Berkeley CA: $1M
• 3/1.5, Berkeley CA: $795K
• 3/2, Berkeley CA: $860K
• 3/1, Oakland CA: $789K
• 3/3, Oakland CA: $740K
• 3/2, Oakland CA: $769K
• 3/1.75, Phoenix AZ: $775K
• 3/2 + 24 acres in Rome ME: $415K

Carol Lloyd has a good article at SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle's site) on extremely tiny homes:

Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.

This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer, who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and magazines -- many featuring his house on the cover. And from the old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting: an apple orchard in full bloom.

But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better, calling Shafer's home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron. Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square feet -- smaller than many people's bathrooms. But Jay Shafer's dream isn't of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then writ tiny.

Read the whole thing.

from the Usenet group alt.home.repair:

I have a modest 90yr. old Craftsman bungalow that I have owned for over 15 years. I recently bit the bullet and took the time (months!) and  money (you don't even want to know) to have the old composite shingle  siding removed to expose the original redwood clapboard. My
painter/restorer filled every nail hole, scraped every nook and cranny,  carefully and conservatively sanded off every layer, repaired every  corner of old window frame, etc. and finally completed a new coat of  paint that does my little place justice. It is constructed of solid old  growth redwood and feels like it will go another 90 years, no worries.

Until today. My roofers came out today. This is a company I have used before - they re-roofed my detached garage a few yers back. I don't have any leaks, but I'm trying to be proactive and not wait for trouble, so I signed up for a new 30 year shingle. After about two hours of banging I decided to go out and have a look at progress. I was stunned to see two workers in the process of nailing up a dinky piece of pine in the place where my front fascia used to be. This was a 12
ft. long 2x8 that completed 1/2 of my front roofline - nice and wide with an angled rafter end tail. Gasping, I asked "What have you done with my redwood "Oh, there was some dry rot on the end" Well, I had known about that - my painter had informed me and we felt that during
the re-roof would be the time to address it, repair and repaint. The involved area was about 1-2" deep along about 6" of the rafter tail.

For this they removed the WHOLE thing. Just ripped it off - and were nailing up a piece of typical modern day lumber - in other words, too small in two dimensions. A 2x8 doesn't measure 2x8 these days, but my old one did. Can you imagine how inadequate that was? I felt like someone had cut off my foot - being a preservationist is not easy. They looked at me like I was cockeyed, I was trying not to shoot anyone. :)

My contract specifically notes that the owner is to be informed immediately if any latent damage is discovered, requiring any wood work. What happened!?! They acted as though they were doing me a favor - "Oh, we thought you'd want to go with the lowest cost option" Ack!
Removing an irreplaceable lengtht of redwood is an option?! Gawd, if they'd only asked me first.

Read the full article and folks' advice for fixing this enormous cock-up.

Brett Weinstein and Hal Feiger sell real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their firm, Realty Advocates, advertises "full real estate services at reduced fees," and they really do approach their jobs as a trade and craft and not just a get-quick scheme - Hal is very active in the development of non-profit affordable housing in the area, and even found the synagogue I grew up with (Rabbi Burt officiated my Bar Mitzvah!), Kehilla, a permanent home in the East Bay. Brett, on the other hand, has worked as a carpenter and general contractor, and knows a lot more about quality construction than most of the agents I interact with. Basically, I'd buy a house from these guys.

Recently, they added a blog to their site; one recent article caught my eye. Read the complete article at their site:

You know the practice: suggesting, or going along with a seller’s idea, that the best way to obtain the highest price in the sale of a house is to deliberately ask a price that is well below what you expect it to sell for. A more odious variation: agreeing to list a property at a price the seller has told you he would not accept. You figure this is pretty safe: everything gets bid up these days. The SF Chronicle recently dubbed this the “under-pricing epidemic.”

Sometimes this practice is blatant, as when the agent puts in the confidential remarks section of the MLS: “seller reserves the right to reject any and all offers.” Other times, it is hidden, as when offer day comes and you, the buyer’s agent, deliver the only offer. You are then countered at a price ten of thousands, and sometimes, hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the asking price. In essence, the buyer is being told to bid against himself.

So, I've created a map - using social-mapping tool Platial - of all the existing Greene & Greene properties I've been able to find record of. I'll also be adding a new layer of no-longer-standing Greene & Greene projects, but that's a few weeks off.Take a look, and let me know if you like this style of map and if the tool is easy to use; if so, I'll revive our Craftsman Home Registry (above) using this, so you can all add your own homes.

A few homes that struck me as I was browsing new (to me) search engine Oodle, which lets you look at classifieds at almost every major newspaper in the US (and plenty of not-so-major papers):

• just under a million dollars gets you 2,300 (very pretty) square feet in Pasadena CA;
• about the same amount brings a 4,200 square foot maple, cherry, oak, pecan, stone, brick & stucco bungalow on 100 acres in Royal AR;
• ...and a bit under $200,000 gets you a beautiful wood-shingle bungalow in Coos Bay OR;
• a big, beautiful bungalow with two rental units in Long Beach CA for $939,000;
• modest 1922 bungalow for $340k in St. Petersburg FL;
• an equally pretty two-story bungalow for only $76,000 in Fort Wayne IN;
• another one of those just-short-of-hideous faux-Bungalow McMansions; this one is $1.7 million in Chevy Chase MD;
• nicely-restored bungalow for $718,000 in "mid Los Angeles" CA;
• updated & restored bungalow with nice landscaping for $549,000 in Portland OR;
• modest stucco Spanish Revival bungalow in Tucson AZ for $275,000; and a
• very representative stucco Craftsman bungalow in Oakland CA for $539,000.

A few new houseblogs with interesting and / or useful content:

• Breathing Treatment: notes on landscaping, electrical updates, water-permeable paving and more
• 201 Oregano: the construction of the Grant family home
• 1921 Highland Park Craftsman Bungalow: a collection of home-improvement projects
• Life in the Prairie Box: paint stripping, wood refinishing, paint and other labors

A number of books which look like they'd be very interesting to Craftsman (and other old-home) aficionados have been released recently. I'll try to get my hands on copies of some of these for full reviews. If you are a publisher and would like to have your book reviewed here, drop me a line.

• Vintage Cottagesby Molly Hyde English
• Dream Porches and Sunrooms by Michael Snow
• The Green Self-Build Book by Jon Broome
• Arts & Crafts Furniture by the editors of Wood Magazine
• Cabinetmaking: Design & Construction by William P. Spence
• The Homeowner's Guide to Managing a Renovation by Susan Solakian
• The Reclaimers: A Complete Guide to Salvage by Sally Bevan
• Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Complete Furniture, Furniture Drawings & Interior Designs by Roger Billcliffe
• Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings by Edward S. Morse
• California Mediterranean by Melba Levick
• Rustic Fireplaces by Ralph Kylloe
• Wooden Houses by Judith Miller
• The New Bungalow Kitchen by Peter Labau
• Wood: Contemporary Houses in Wood by Joaquim Ballarin
• Creating a New Old House by Russell Versaci
• Craftsman & Other Timeless Dream Homes by Designs Direct Publishing
• California Romantica by D. J. Waldie and Diane Keaton

• 3BR/1BA Temescal-area Victorian / Craftsman highwater, $725,000: 671 61st St., Oakland CA
• attractive Mission Revival bungalow in Alameda's historic East End, $661,000: 1127 Broadway, Alameda CA
• pretty Edwardian cottage in North Berkeley's "gourmet ghetto," $725,000: 1834 Cedar, Berkeley CA
• a big brown shingle in Rockridge, $749,000: 5935 Keith Ave., Oakland CA
• very representative bungalow (i.e., tiny but well-made), bright & sunny (with pretty built-ins), $419,000: 993 Arlington Ave., Oakland CA (on the Emeryville border)