• What do you do when your house blows up?

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    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

  • 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:

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

    • Cheshire Demolition "offers one of the biggest salvage and reclamation yards in the North West. They offer everything from reclaimed doors to fireplaces."
    • 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.

  • 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 (or harder to pigeonhole) styles.

    John Hudson Thomas grew up in the Bay Area and returned to Berkeley after graduating from Yale. While in the Architecture MA program at Berkeley, he studied under and became friends with both Bernard Maybeck and John Galen Howard, and worked for Howard for a few years after graduation.

    A member of Berkeley’s Hillside Club, he socialized with Maybeck, Julia Morgan and others, and certainly elements of their own styles are visible in his early work. He was especially interested in the tall, thin and somewhat whimsical forms of European designers like Mackintosh and Voysey, and incorporated these lines – along with those of the fledgeling Prairie movement and those of the Viennese Seccessionists – into his own style, which in more recent years been called part of the "First Bay" school. Eventually, his work became a bit softer and more orthodox, but he still kept his knack for interior architecture – lots of detail – and tall structures with long uninterrupted lines well into the 1920s and 30s.

    By this time, he was working for more established clients, on more complex and high-paying projects – mostly large homes – but his attention to landscape, environment and view was still paramount, and slightly odd or purposely out-of-place elements – friezes, odd finishes, unexpected combinations of materials, nooks and crannies and whimsical woodwork – remained. Luckily, many of his best buildings are still standing; a few are listed below:

  • Arts & Crafts gems shine in Berkeley’s velvet hills

    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

  • if you live in Wisconsin, turn on the tube tonight

    The always-dependable Douglas Anders notes on his Frank Lloyd Wright Newsblog that there will be two good FLW-related documentaries on Wisconsin Public Television this week, one tonight and one Wednesday:

    Expo: Magic of the White City
    is on tonight at 8pm. I saw this documentary a few months ago and it’s
    not bad (despite the cheesey historical re-enactments). Some of the
    photographs and other images are jaw-dropping awesome — including some
    of the Japanese section (the Ho-o-den) that so influenced Frank Lloyd
    Wright.

    Frank Lloyd Wright’s Buffalo will air
    Wednesday, March 21 at 7pm. this hour long documentary follows the
    friendship of Wright and Darwin Martin, and the buildings that they
    built in Buffalo. This is worth watching, but I thought that it was too
    short — an hour isn’t long enough to do justice to the three buildings
    Wright build for Martin (the brevity of the Larkin Building segment
    will make you weep). But it is still a good effort, and great
    introduction to this aspect of Wright’s life.