• recent Craftsman kitchen remodels on Flickr

    My constant urging to check Flickr out for design ideas is probably getting pretty old at this point – sorry about that. Here are three attractive working kitchens, wholly or partially documented in photographs on Flickr:

  • 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:

  • historic window workshop in Sacramento, CA

    Sacramento’s Sierra Curtis Neighborhood Association and the Sacramento Bungalow Heritage Association are fighting a winning battle against cheap, unsightly and – in the long run – inefficient and environmentally damaging vinyl, aluminum and composite windows. Their solution? Fix your old wooden windows before switching over to something that seems like a good deal – but actually isn’t.

    This coming October 6 and 7, they’re offering two workshops on the basic repair, maintenance, weatherization and repair of historic wood windows.

    Volunteer instructors from the community will demonstrate how they worked on their own windows, preserved the character of their historic homes, and saved their pocketbooks!  Historic windows were made to be taken apart and repaired, and with basic guidance, anyone can make their windows work as they originally did – with ease of operation and weather tight – and beautiful!

    We ran a short piece about these workshops and the woman behind them two years ago; again, much thanks to Janice Calpo not only for the heads-up, but more importantly for making Sacramentans aware of the benefits of our old homes’ original windows!

  • “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.

  • Eco-Friendly remodel in Austin TX on This Old House

    Photos_kenny_braun
    The Healthy House Institute has an interesting article on a recent series of eight episodes of This Old House devoted to the "greening" of a 1926 Craftsman bungalow in Austin, Texas:

    Taking on its first-ever project in Austin, Texas, This Old House shares
    strategies and solutions for transforming a historic house into a low
    maintenance, healthy, and comfortable eco-friendly home.

    The renovation of a 1926 Craftsman-style bungalow for newly married
    homeowners Michele Grieshaber and Michael Klug will be “green” in
    nature, while making room for a growing family — including Michael’s two
    young sons, Sam and David — with the addition of two bedrooms and a
    modest full bath on a new second floor.

    By using
    technologies that conserve energy and water, and opting for durable and
    sustainable materials, This Old House is taking an outdated house and
    giving it an energy-efficient future, while showing that “green” does
    not have to be experimental, or expensive.

    Since this ground-up remodel included low-maintenance, low-water xeriscaping, that became one episode all by itself;  another was dedicated solely to the planning process – something worthy of extra attention whenever you’re working with new and unorthodox materials and techniques. The episode also generated plenty of materials for articles on subjects as varied as lighting and remodeling with and for families with children on the TOH website.

    photograph by Kenny Braun for This Old House

  • Rich Baumhofer & Cindy Bechtel’s Curtis Park firehouse, part II

    Yesterday, HGTV ran an episode of their reZONED program on Richard Baumhofer & Cindy Bechtel’s beautiful Curtis Park home in a remodeled and restored firehouse, which we originally wrote about this week last year. Marybeth Bizjak has more on the house in her September 2006 article in Sacramento Magazine. Later in the article, Rich notes his favorite northern California salvage yards – which happen to be mine, too – Ohmega Salvage and Urban Ore, both in Berkeley:

    Vision. Some people have it; some don’t.

    Rich Baumhofer and
    Cindy Bechtel fall squarely into the “have vision” category. When the
    couple stumbled upon a dilapidated old house in Curtis Park, they could
    see it had major potential.

    Their friends told them they were
    crazy to consider buying the structure, which had been built in 1917 as
    a fire station and later converted to a private home. But buy it they
    did, setting out to restore its “firehouse charm.”

    They
    succeeded so spectacularly that HGTV will feature their house on an
    upcoming episode of “reZONED,” a show about people who turn commercial
    spaces into one-of-a-kind homes.

    “My intention was to
    rebuild in the spirit of the original firehouse,” says Baumhofer, a
    builder and general contractor who has worked on many old houses. He
    kept the shell of the Craftsman-style building intact while gutting the
    inside to create a spacious, family-friendly home.

       

    Congratulations to both Rich and Cindy – it’s nice when the rest of the world acknowledges all your hard work. And thanks, too, for sharing your home with all of us!

  • Alfred Faber, Portland architect

    James Heuer has put together several SmugMug photo galleries, including one on homes built by Portland-area architect Alfred Faber, who was active as a residential designer from 1904 to 1917. I stumbled across that gallery this morning, and was struck by the level of detail and the tight symmetrical grids that Faber seemed to enjoy. I was very surprised that he dropped off the map, as it were, after moving to Los Angeles for a very early retirement, right when these elements were very much in demand by builders throughout the Los Angeles area.

    The M. B. Nease House is a particularly attractive example of Faber’s work, with all kinds of attractive woodwork – builtins and other architectural detail – still intact.