EYE ON DESIGN BY DAN GREGORY

Tub Time

This week, taking a bath isn’t necessarily a good thing, but here’s a way to soothe financially frayed nerves: a soak on the outdoor bathing platform designed by architect Mary Griffin, for her rural California home.

Think of it as a toast to the last day of summer: serenity on a shady slope, with a nod to the Wild West of boardwalks and buckboards. This is a sophisticated simplicity that’s about paring down to essentials — platform, tub, chair — as a way to appreciate and celebrate fresh air and nature. With apologies to Virginia Woolf, everyone should have “an outdoor tub of one’s own.”

All is Vanity

Though unique, Mary’s design illustrates a key point about home building: amenities are important. If you’re paying a lot of money to build a new house you naturally want convenience and a touch of luxury as a reward for all the saving, planning, and just plain hard work that goes into bringing such a project to completion. A quick review of our most popular plans proves the point: almost all include amenities like double vanities in the master bathroom and a utility room or laundry off the garage, as plan 17-174, below, illustrates.

This “divide and conquer” example gives each sink its own private zone. I for one would love to have two vanities — in a similar arrangement  — and I’m sure my wife would too because I’ve noticed that after I’ve been shaving the one sink in our bathroom looks like a California Condor has been showering in it (though I try to remember to clean it up before she comes in).

Or here’s plan 137-188, above, showing a more traditional arrangement that also works well. Another way to go is to treat the vanity as piece of furniture or sculpture. This trend has been expanding fast, as you can see in the following examples.

This sleek floating double vanity, the Fellino from Modern Bathroom, creates an uncluttered look:

Cool New Books About Design

Two recent arrivals are worth your reading time. One is the catalog for a major architecture exhibition now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Home Delivery, by MOMA Architecture & Design Chief Curator Barry Bergdoll and Curatorial Assistant Peter Christensen chronicles the many ways the 20th century dwelling has been fabricated. Brief essays tell the story of Thomas Edison’s early “single pour” concrete prototypes of 1917, Sear’s catalog homes of the 1920s and 1930s, and many other developments all the way to Adam Kalkin’s recent “Quik House” made from shipping containers and prefabricated sheds. Several works commissioned by the museum and built on a lot nearby are included in the book and seem more theoretical than practical (and thus less interesting to me), but the book as a whole stimulates thinking about how to streamline the complicated process of shaping and building a home, a subject that is of the greatest interest to Houseplans.com.

USA: Modern Architectures in History (Reaktion Press) by Columbia professor Gwendolyn Wright (one of television’s “History Detectives”) is a refreshing change from the usual monument by monument domino-theory of American architectural history. I recommend it highly. She follows a compelling range of themes that she sees expressed in our built environment, such as hybridization, environmentalism, and the influence of the media. And she includes a lot about the evolution of our home design. She says: “Less than 5 percent of new home-buyers have any direct communication with a professional designer.(Fees for custom residences run up to fifteen times the cost for stock plans for the same-area house).” Exactly: I’d like Houseplans.com to become the general public’s professional designer — offering superior plans and design advice so that we all can afford better homes.