• Frank Lloyd Wright house tours in Oak Park

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    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.

  • Woodland CA home tours: September 8, 2007

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    Woodland is a small bedroom community just outside Sacramento, and several of my colleagues live there and commute in to the Capitol and other downtown offices. I was gratified to hear that the city is hosting a home tour – I’ve always been very impressed with the number of beautiful old Craftsman homes in the city’s core (although, unfortunately, much of Woodland is now being subsumed by suburban sprawl, identical tract homes in very uninviting gated and anonymous "communities" that are anything but).

    Several free guided walking tours of the town’s several historic neighborhoods, house tours of a number of important houses in the area, music, a pancake breakfast and plenty more (including guides in period costume) are all part of this year’s "Stroll Through History." Home tour tickets are $25 and may be purchased online. Hopefully events like this will revitalize the historic neighborhoods and maybe even teach developers that there’s a market for well-built, non-cookie-cutter homes with quirky inconsistencies, color, and warmth.