• A New Focus for Hewn & Hammered

    I want to start out by apologizing for the infrequent posts here in the last six months. Family responsibilities have kept me (happily!) very busy.

    Thus, in an attempt to increase the amount of interesting, useful, readable content here, I've decided to change the focus of the site somewhat. While we will still focus on architectural and design issues, we'll expand a little bit – we'll still include content related to old homes & the modern and historical Arts & Crafts Movements, but I'll also be posting regular articles on more contemporary, non-A&C work.

    Modern furniture, architecture and design objects – still, always, with an emphasis on the wood, the hand-made, the product of skilled craft – will become a big part of this site. I know some of you are not nearly as interested in this sort of thing, but I hope this will bring a large number of new readers here. I promise to keep posting things that fans of Arts & Crafts will appreciate, though!

  • Hume Castle in Berkeley, California

    note: article updated with new image & details
    Screen shot 2010-10-06 at 12.42.27 PM

    2900 Buena Vista Way in Berkeley, California is home to a rather unique property, one which many local residents don’t even know about given its location on a hillside high above street level and the fact that it’s almost completely shrouded in olive and pine trees.

    Originally built in 1927 for Samuel James Hume and Portia Bell Hume – the former professor of theater arts at the University of California and the latter a pioneer in the field of community psychiatry – Hume Cloister was designed by John Hudson Thomas based on a very specific 13th-century Augustinian monastery in Toulouse, France.

    I’ll try to get some pictures from the inside – maybe the owners have a few photos they wouldn’t mind sharing with us. All I know is that the interior details are pretty incredible – enormous wrought iron chandeliers, a deep wishing well, a beautiful cloister, spiraling stone staircases. It sounds terrific!

    There aren’t many images of the house available online, and not many other textual references either; this fellow lived in the area and writes a bit on it, and includes some maps and pictures; the home sits on a tract of land known as La Loma Park; finally, Hume may have been involved in this staging of Henry VI, which took place on the property. I’ll post contemporary pictures if I can find some!

  • for sale: restored Knoxville shingle bungalow, $289,000

    Knoxville is a great town with some really terrific old neighborhoods, and for the most part, citizens who delight in historic preservation and are trying consistently to keep chains, strip-malls, big boxes and other detritus out of historic districts full of pretty old homes.

    Knox Heritage is the most active of the city-wide architecture rejuvenation and conservation development companies, regularly buying old properties and cleaning them up for resale as part of their Vintage Homes Program. They also regularly offer neighborhood tours, raise money to preserve endangered properties and keep track of threatened structures throughout the region.

    Metro Pulse, Knoxville’s alt weekly, recently ran a note & listing for one such home that has to change hands due to an unfortunate job relocation – the owner, Amy Quimby (who knows old homes – she’s an executive at Home & Garden Television) – is very sad to leave it, but she’s got to move on to Denver.

    The 2650 sq ft, 4 bed, 2.5 bath home – at 321 E. Oklahoma in Knoxville – is going for $289,000, and it’s gorgeous inside and out.

  • photography bits & pieces

    To fill a few minutes while I’m off recovering from the holidays:

  • 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."

  • Frank Lloyd Wright house tours in Oak Park

    Flw_harry_s_adams
    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.

  • Mission Hills Development in Northern California

    Missionhillsrosenhouse
    "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

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    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.

  • Los Gatos historic homes tour

    We are reminded that this year’s Los Gatos historic homes tour is coming up this weekend (Nov 3 & 4, 2007). A $30 ticket (a tax deductible donation to the History Museum of Los Gatos) gets you an all-day (10 am – 4 pm) tour of six outstanding historic houses in Los Gatos’ historic district. If you live in the Bay Area, this is quite a treat; the small and very well maintained historic community may not be well-known outside of the Peninsula, but it should be – this neighborhood has some of the prettiest historic homes in Northern California.