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General

Village home in Yorkshire

A diversion, but with reference to earlier blogs.   I usually buy the Times on Fridays for the excellent property section 'Bricks and Mortar' which has been running for quite a few years now. Unfortunately they operate a paywall, so it's not so simple, and annoying, to quote from the paper, I find.   However in the recent edition (3 November '17) in the section called Prime Properties, they briefly review a 17th century cottage, a true doll's house, with the 'Downside comment

Poche`

Ha, French for pocket: Not a term much used in building or design.   A few blogs ago, I described a way of considering garden design as an alternative to creating borders and cutting shapes out of a lawn, or indeed starting in one corner and making shapes, of just planting specimen plants towards another corner. This is a more holistic approach based on listing all conditions of the garden (see site analysis blog), then listing wants, needs, desires, uses of spaces etc for the proposed

MVHR Install

I will write about the install of my MVHR system, as this is something I have done myself (with help).  Theo house is being built by my contractor, supervised by my Architect and QS (who is the CDM).  As I am remote from the location I can only watch what happens on CCTV.  When I was last there the old house was standing and we had disconnected the services. 6 Months later, I have a new house, Weather tight shell, Windows and doors in, sarking and felt on, and tiles and PV being fitted.  I am do

A demanding request by any standards

Aye...Most of the commentary, ideas and thoughts, in these blogs are based around traditional thinking, based on some, in my opinion, of many of the most interesting architects of the last 150 years. My constant references to Baillie Scott, Arthur Martin, and thoughts about Arts and Crafts houses, must highlight this. References and quotes from Pattern Language, and even Charles Moore, do hark back to tradition. However tradition is well and truly part of the works of Aalto, Scarpa Hans Scharoun

Gardens

Hello, I touch on this subject again because it can be and should be as important as the house. I looked at this a few years ago, on another forum, in response to a member who had been asked to submit a rough design for the front garden and, by his own admission,  had no idea where to start. I mention in the book an approach to garden spaces by listing likely activities, desires, wants etc all dependent on relationship to house, climate, sun angles, overshadowing etc, but this blog is more about

Buildings in the landscape

Apart from 'A Place of Houses, see earlier blog and several Frank Lloyd Wright books, I don't seem to come across many American house design books but I recommend William Turnbull's 'Buildings in the Landscape'. He worked Charles Moore et al on the Californian Sea Ranch project back in the 70s. OK there's lots of land there and plainly rather less planning restrictions, but the buildings are most interesting...double height living and circulation spaces, timber frame, with timber cladding in mos

Kettles Yard

Aye, a bit of a diversion here. One of my students alerted me to this place a few years ago. It is an expanding arts centre, now owned by Cambridge University, but set up by Jim Ede and his wife. in the 50s. It started as a cluster of small cottages, converted to a home, gallery and workshop to display the couple's interesting collection of 20th century art. The point is that the cottages were tiny and the whole now is an interesting exercise in creating the best from a finite space. The Univers

Decrements

OK I admit, I had to web-search the opposite of 'improvements'. My Chambers dictionary suggests ''to decrease the value of, by a given amount' .   You may well ask where I'm going with this. I sometimes do wonder, when I see extensions and, er, improvements if some people are obsessed with decreasing the value of their property! Plainly  not, but I feel that some don't give as much thought and design attention to detail, and ask questions that they might if building from scratch. The c

Windows (not the computer ones)

Modern Houses, especially developer built ones, seem to have extremely mean windows...not helped by extremely thick frames and mullions. Consider the room you're in now. What effect would it have if the sill(s) were 18" higher or indeed 18" above floor level. The former would be be rather depressing, the latter quite enlivening, particularly if you have an interesting view, or likely to collect winter sun.   Our old friends Chris Alexander et al in A pattern Language have much to contr

Details and Joinings

Ok, Spell check always pulls me up when I use the word 'joinings', but it is the most succinct and appropriate word for how materials, and planes meet...OK it's a clumsy and ugly word, but then...Are you ahead of me here? So many of the inelegant bodges you can get if you leave it to chance. I would have to say that if you involve an architect on your project, you should end up with no visual nasty detailing, junctions and the "how the hell do we get round this" type of phone call.  

Passing inspection.

Two weeks ago today our stonemason started and poor guy it rained heavily from the very first day! In fact, so bad on the first day that I fully expected him to give it a miss, but there he was when I got home from work, grafting away on his own.  Being a SIPs build, the roof is already in place, so of course all the rain falling on the surface area of the roof flows straight off - directly onto where he is building the stonework below. So this weekend, I managed to get the fascia board and soff

Case Study: Water stains on a brick wall

A perennial problem with walls is water or other staining.   Yesterday I was walking past a fairly new wall, built perhaps 15 years ago. There are an interesting number of white stains now running down the wall.   What is the cause? My candidate is probably the weep holes, and also the 'shadow' from the road sign (which should be a few inches further out). I wonder if it also cheap bricks, or an insufficiently considered design. In any case, if stains show up this prominently

Character and Value

Greetings all,   I am assuming that everyone who gets involved in renovation, extensions, self design, custom design and self builds wants to to build-in character and therefore add value. Estate agents, property journalists, design magazine editors often pepper their writings with descriptions such as 'oodles, bags, loads of character' etc.  Mind you the description is oft applied to holiday cottages Cornish villages, Tuscan streets and squares. So it's maybe so overused that it'

I just wanted to buy a garden but had to buy the house!

Well, that's been an interesting few months! I've been hoping for the last 18 months to buy the side garden off my landlord (I've been renting there 8 years) and go straight to building. But, nothing is ever that easy! I was asked for plans, which required a bit of homework, an Architect or two and pre-planning. All worked out and I shared the sketches here previously. But when crunch time came the landlord found it too difficult to sell off part of the site as he had an existing mortgage on the

Delight

Aye, undoubtedly a personal, subjective area of thought, and one you rarely hear in relation to houses unless you are visiting the landscaped gardens of some stately home or hall, yet it could equally be applied to many of the modest gardens, and associated houses in the National Garden Scheme, a very clever charity, mentioned in an earlier blog. The clue really is to do with the setting, relationship of the house to its surroundings and the 'repose'... a term used in several design books, Arthu

Site analysis

Covered in detail in an earlier blog, and in the book, but it is/was the mantra of a former colleague and tutor Par Gustaffson, a Swedish Landscape architect, who undoubtedly brought a logical approach to the design table. Essentially, to avoid confusion, mistakes and oversights, you should divide a garden or landscape overview into three separate themes.   1 A survey of the physical and factual site elements, including topography, planting, existing structures, weather across the seas

Book, The Sensual Home

I have mentioned this book in other blogs...The sensual Home by Ilse Crawford...a former Editor of Elle Decoration, arguably the best regular Interior mags on the UK market. I found the Continental issues even more interesting! When I recommended the book a while back it was available on ABEbooks for about £2.50 + P+P, sadly since she's been involved in a Stateside TV show, it changes hands for at least £65 ( Time for a reprint it seems to me), it's a very useful guide to following your senses f

How and where to start your design

My old tutor used to say 'a design is like the old joke about a spittoon...it's all in one' Dreadful I know. but I say this because it's difficult to isolate much of the reasoning behind decision making...you could be forcing the impact of a preconceived idea around the design but discounting relevant derived thinking from a site analysis. See later blog  For this reason I am not a fan of plan books, certainly they may spark off a new direction of a way of handling circulation but are limiting..

A different approach if you've got mental block

I have mentioned in my design guide, that a way of building up a brief, or what you want, is to assemble a file, portfolio of images and references of likes and hates as well as must haves, desires and 'if the budget stretches to it' themes and thoughts, but you could approach the brief making with just descriptions and words. I daresay it depends how your mind works, and this is not the place to explore that, even I knew where to start. I've mentioned where this came from in another blog. Some

House form...fundamental stuff

This is something fundamental to the approach to his design...getting rid of or reducing prejudices of what a house looks like. Houses, along with all buildings to my mind, should be designed from the inside out...sort out the needs, wants, desires, must haves and so on with as few preconceptions as possible.For many this is impossible and undesirable, but it does help to free up the thinking at the early stages. Ask serious estate agents and they will tell you that, given a choice, more people

Kitchens, the hub of the house?

I recently came across a Facebook article on kitchen design tends for 2018...well according to the article, there doesn't seem to be any new ideas. A larger sink was mooted, but the one illustrated was long but single...what? Surely that's pretty old thinking (You have a sink full of washing up and somebody waltzes into the kitchen with half full teacups, and err! I'm not a fan of dishwashers, especially for small loads...that's not my point: double sinks minimum please. I suppose there must be

1 year Progress Photos

Haven’t really kept this blog going as I’ve been flat out working on things myself, was much easier to blog when the builder was doing all the work! We passed a year since we broke ground on 27th September and should be in well before Christmas so I’m very happy with progress.    Kitchen being fitted on 16th Oct and then a few days of joinery work. Then gloss like mad and we should be somewhere close to moving in. Can’t wait!    

Corridors and passages

This a subject that will crop up in every house design from entrance to back door as well as room linking. If you need to develop a long thin house or long thin extension, it should be a priority to consider the nature of the links or corridors as much as the rooms themselves. That may seem obvious, but I'm sure we've all been in offices, hotels, guest houses and even recently designed homes where evidently no consideration has been paid to the links and passages. There should at least be a natu

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