From Architectural Digest:
Welcome to the Ennis House, one of the Los Angeles Hills' most legendary homes. At $23M, this Mayan revival Frank Lloyd Wright house has been featured in movies like 'Blade Runner' and is full of furniture designed by Wright himself. Join real estate agent Rayni Williams as she takes you on a tour of the entire house.
My parents met while students at UC Berkeley and I was born while they were in graduate school; my father stayed on at the university, eventually becoming a faculty member and administrator there. It's no surprise, then, that I spent a lot of time roaming libraries and their stacks.
One of my fondest memories of that time is of the wooden card catalogs that used to document the holdings of the graduate and undergraduate libraries – vast, long room-fulls of tiny little drawers, all in cases polished smooth by generations of student fingers and hands.
Since then, I've always loved these things; it might be that they offer an ideal of secure compartmentalization of everything, with each item having its own correct place, certainly an ideal for a perfectionist like me. Or it could be the inflexible grid that they are designed along, which appeals to my technician side. The grain of the wood, the warmth of it, always seemed to match that beautiful Craftsman finish, the fumed oak look that has become the hallmark of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Whatever the reason, these things are beautiful, and you don't find them in good shape all that often. Certainly, you get them more often than a decade ago, with so many libraries going all-digital, but they're still hard to find.
Here are a few that are up for sale right now:
Rago Arts & Auctions recently updated and enhanced their website, offering a more complete catalog of available "passed lots" – items not sold at previous auctions – as well as memorable highlights from recent auctions. Some amazing stuff, there; kind of neat to see price records for really excellent examples.
The most recent Early 20th Auction was this past Friday, October 1 2010. Some highlights are pictured above.
The 300 square foot, 1 bed / 1 bath "bungalow" at 128 Day Ave. in Toronto is that city’s smallest house, and at $600 per square foot, quite a bit over the average for the neighborhood. It’s also currently for sale at the price of $179,900. The lot itself is 824 square feet, and includes two parking spots in back (front-to-back, one would assume). If you want a really small house, though, you have plenty of other options.
A note to real estate agents who do this: what do you think is more important to buyers, a picture of the house or your glamour shot? I realize that you always wanted to be a model, but this is just ridiculous.
Dug these up from classified sections, Craigslist(s), flyers, redfin & other sites over the weekend. Lots and lots of beautiful old houses all over the western US:
from Nicole Serrin:
historic 1912 bungalow in the Roosevelt historic district: 3 bed, 1.75 bath, 1702 sq ft; carefully restored. $775,000 [48 W. Willetta St.]
1930 Tudor Revival home in the Medlock Place historic district: 2 bed, 2 bath, 1795 sq ft, with a separate 532 sq ft studio or guest house. Lot is big – just under half an acre. $747,000
1935 Tudor Revival with some Mission features in the F.Q. Story historic district: 2 bed, 1 bath, 1152 sq ft; lots of neat detail. $330,000
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.
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):