• Charles Rennie Mackintosh(esque) kitchen remodel in W Virginia

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    Monongaehala PA cabinetmaker Pat Herforth recently channeled the spirit of Charles Rennie Mackintosh to build a new kitchen for client Carrie Russell’s 1920 Tudor/Craftsman home in Morgantown, West Virginia.

    Once in a great while, if you’re very lucky, you’re sorry to see a work
    day end so soon. Pat Herforth felt that way when he created a kitchen
    for Carrie Russell.

    "I was at work eight hours, and it seemed like 15 minutes," said the Monongahela woodworker.

    "I didn’t sleep at night — for excitement."

    The thrill was in building cabinetry, trim, light fixtures and
    furniture in the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a Scottish
    architect/designer whose take on Art Nouveau jelled with the European
    Arts & Crafts movement near the turn of the 20th century.

    photograph by Darrell Sapp for the Post-Gazette

  • a modern Craftsman kitchen

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    Taunton publishes lots and lots of good books devoted to historic architecture in general and the Arts & Crafts movement specifically. I was happy but not surprised, then, to pick up a few back issues of The Inspired House, an (unfortunately out of print?) at a local used bookshop.

    The magazine seems to have halted publication mid-2006, but mining their online archive yielded lots of good stuff, including this article by Debra Judge Silber on a very modern yet classically attractive Craftsman kitchen remodel in a 1915 historic foursquare:

    When they found their brick foursquare in the
    mid-1980s, Ed and Kathy Friedman couldn’t believe their luck. They’d
    spent 10 years building a collection of Arts and Crafts furniture and
    decorative objects, and here was the perfect home in which to display
    it. The 1915 foursquare, with its built-in benches and bookcases, was
    as well preserved as if it had been locked in a time capsule.

    Except for the kitchen. Remodeled in the ’50s, the boxy room had plastic tiles running halfway around it and
    white metal cabinets backed awkwardly against the walls. Not just
    outdated, it was completely at odds with the purposeful beauty of the
    rest of the house.

    Visit their site for the full article. Floorplan by Martha Garstang Hill, whose illustrations and architectural drawings adorn many Taunton books.

  • another reason for old homes: the hidden costs of commuting

    Reader Joel McDonald is a real estate agent in Boulder CO and wrote the following for Hewn & Hammered. Please note that this article’s copyright belongs solely to its author, and may not be reproduced without his written consent. He makes good points: while many people lust after the big lots and imagined superiority of new construction (which we know is a myth 99% of the time) and imagined safety of the suburbs or the (also sometimes imaginary) superiority of schools, the increasing cost of fuel – something that won’t decrease in price anytime soon – will often make exurban living much more expensive.

    In my own community – Sacramento, California – the oldest neighborhoods inside the city limits are Curtis, McKinley and Land Parks. They are also the most desirable. I doubt anyone, no matter how stunted their aesthetic taste, could argue that new tract homes in even the ritziest suburban neighborhoods hold a candle to the beautiful and sturdily-constructed Craftsman, Tudor and Mission Revival masterpieces of the urban core.

    If you’re not careful, you’ll spend more in gas than what you save in mortgage payment.

    One of the most common decisions we see buyers make is to buy 10 or 20 miles from the town they plan on working in because the price of homes in that area is 10% or 20% less out that way.  Boulder real estate company owner Joel McDonald points out that the biggest factor homeowners don’t take into consideration is what their own time is actually worth, the wear and tear on their car, and of course, the cost of gas (which ain’t cheap these days).  That’s not to say that buying a home in a less expensive area that isn’t in town isn’t a good idea, but more often than not, it’s not saving as much money as you might have initially thought.

    Let’s say you’re contemplating buying a $450,000 home in-town, vs buying an otherwise similar home for $400,000. Let’s also say the $400,000 home is 18 miles from the town you plan on working in 5 days a week.  That $50K in savings might be attractive to you because if you take out a loan for the difference, you’re looking at a monthly savings of between $320 and $370 a month.  The key in making the best decision, however, isn’t whether or not you’re saving a few hundred bucks a month on your mortgage payment — it’s how much you’re spending every month by commuting into town.

    Let’s say your car gets 20 miles a gallon.  At $3 a gallon, you’re looking at about $6 a day to drive into town.  Every mile you drive on your car typically represents about 20 cents in wear & tear.  (Those oil changes, new tires & every mile put on your car depreciate your car’s value, and those expenses are usually more than the cost of gasoline!)  36 miles round-trip times twenty cents is another $7.20 a day in expenses.

    Last, but definitely not least, you’ve got the most expensive part of the equation to weigh: your time.  If you have a $40,000 job, your "on the clock" time is worth $20 an hour.  Believe it or not, your "off time" is twice as valuable as your "billable time".  If you don’t buy into that logic, think about how valuable vacation time is to you, or think what you’d pay on Monday morning if you could just have a third day off.  Your "billable rate", by the way, assumes a 40-hour work week.  The more hours you work per week, the more valuable your off-time is, so $40 per hour could even be underestimating what your time is actually worth.  For the sake of this argument, however, let’s just say that if you earn $40,000 per year, your time is worth $30 an hour.  By living 18 miles from work, you are spending an average of 4 extra hours per week commuting!  That’s $120 per week (or $24 per day.)

    When you add all 3 variables up, and consider that you commute to work an average of 22 times a month, let’s see what you’re spending to make that commute:

    • $6 in gas 22 times a month is $132
    • $7 in wear & tear 22 times a month is $154
    • $24 in lost time 22 times per month is $528!
    • Add it all up, and your 18 mile drive is going to cost you $814 a month!

    Even if you don’t value your off-time at $30 an hour, or you enjoy that drive time because you get to listen to a good book-on tape, you’re still looking at $286 in car expenses every month.  Next time you find yourself grappling with the issue of whether to buy in town vs. commuting into town for a less expensive home, be sure to not to ignore the extra expenses you’ll be picking up in trade for what you save in monthly mortgage payment.  Your "more expensive" home could be several hundred dollars a month LESS expensive, when you factor in all of your peripheral expenses.

    This article was contributed by Automated Homefinder – your Boulder CO real estate experts.

     

  • Floorplanner.com – the single most awesome thing I’ve seen all week

    I guarantee you will be as hooked on this as I am. Floorplanner takes those mediocre house-plan / design packages out there (including the really crummy online, browser-specific, super-crashy versions like Home Despot’s) and puts them all to shame. First of all: it works. All the time. In every browser I’ve tried it in. It’s fast, colorful, has an enormous number of colors and patterns available, lots of furniture, easy wall / door / window / angle drawing tools, and it’s just so much darn fun! Plus they are constantly adding new tools and objects. Play with it and email me your best Craftsman creations – I’ll put them up on Flickr!

  • delicious del.icio.us: Craftsman links from all over

    Delicious is a great way to keep track of your bookmarks between machines – and between people. I’ve been steadily adding to my own bookmarks, and hopefully will soon have several hundred links – furniture makers, blacksmiths, tile dealers, sellers of architecture salvage, antique buyers’ guides, auction notices, do-it-yourself directions and lots more.

    Eventually, I’ll get around to organizing it all, but until then, I’m sure you’ll find plenty to browse.

  • for sale: homes in Phoenix, Arizona

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    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

  • Bungalow Relocation in Fort Lauderdale

    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

  • 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