• more houseporn: brown shingles for sale

    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.

  • for sale: real estate update, May 2007

    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):

  • East Bay (California) homes for sale

  • Redfin: find, buy & sell homes online

    Redfin is a real estate listing service with an integrated blog, which gathers neighborhood information, maps, photos and other information on a particular for-sale property all into a nice neat package. They bill themselves as "the industry’s first online real estate brokerage," and brings the whole web 2.0 package to MLS listings. And unlike customer-hostile realtors and newspapers who hide MLS listings behind layers of logins, security measures and other barriers to a halfway decent customer experience, Redfin puts the listings themselves right there in front of you, to browse and bookmark and share as you see fit.

    A recent listing in their San Francisco Bay Area section shows a small, attractive, and – as usual – ridiculously overpriced bungalow in one of my favorite Berkeley neighborhoods. Unlike other real estate tools, though, Redfin is much more upfront and honest about pricing, forgoing hype for honesty; they point out that $602 per square foot is just short of criminal, and present alternatives like this more expensive overall but only $396 per square foot home with a beautiful view just up the hill.

  • Long Beach realtor shows off her community

    Laurie Manny, a Long Beach realtor specializing in older homes and historic neighborhoods, has a nice rundown of those neighborhoods / historic districts on her Long Beach Real Estate blog. The directory includes neighborhood boundaries, a survey of historic home styles in the area, general neighborhood description, maps and plenty of photographs. There’s also a sort of reverse-directory by house style – for example, if you are looking for a tudor revival home, it’ll be in Belmont or California Heights or Bluff Park, but if you want a Streamline Moderne home, it’d be in Bluff or Drake Parks or Wilmore City.

    It’s nice to see a realtor with a genuine interest in community history!

  • foreclosures mounting in Detroit, Michigan

    our friend David forwards us this sad news about the possible upcoming loss of many fine bungalows in Detroit:

    There is a current meltdown of foreclosures in Detroit, Michigan. Some bungalows are selling for $20,000 or less; here is the auctioneers website.

    I’m afraid at these bargain-basement prices and the exodus of renters who can’t find jobs, many out-of-state buyers might chose to tear down the houses and sell the salvaged materials. Or whole neighborhoods could be bought cheap and torn down for future development.