EYE ON DESIGN BY DAN GREGORY

Special Effects

Highly efficient LED (light emitting diode) lights are the eco-friendly choice for brightening the neighborhood. A quick Web look reveals many choices like these lollipop/golf ball lights:

And these stars…

And this light cable.

All three are from Christmas Lights Etc. Next year we should think about asking you to send in photos of your LED light decorations…

Build a Getaway

Let’s defy current events and plan a vacation home: a place to enjoy nature after the holiday frenzy. Here’s one of our newest plans to help you dream. It’s a fine year-round house, too.

The casual restorative air of plan 443-2 comes from its many porches.

There’s the entry porch, the dining porch off the living room, and the screened porch off the bedroom at the rear.

Three more porches are on the upper floor — some designed for sleeping and some for sitting. It’s a great holiday house with ample room for overnighters; there’s even a built-in bunk off the upstairs hall.

Green Delicious

Alexander Girard was an influential mid-century modern designer whose patterns became very popular in the 1960s and 1970s. A colleague and friend of Charles and Ray Eames, he amassed an important folk art collection that’s part of the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. Now Northern California industrial designer Eric Pfeiffer, founder of Pfeifferlab, has created eco-friendly Alexander Girard “Plyprints” for Columbia Forest Products.

The six designs (two are shown here) are screen-printed on handsome square plywood panels — each panel uses reclaimed plywood and formaldehyde-free glue and so are very green. They’re wonderful to see and touch; available from Velocity (a design store) among other sources.

Best Book

On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change, by Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic of The Wall Street Journal (and formerly of The New York Times) is an essential addition to any library. It brings together her columns from both papers along with essays from other sources. She writes with immense knowledge, perception, and verve about the key structures and design debates of the last forty years. Her essays are timeless — though all about moments in time. Included are personal reminiscenses of growing up in Manhattan, her first job working for Philip Johnson when he was the design curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and spending the night at Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Fallingwater. No-one can turn an architectural phrase better than she, as in her description of the Kennedy Center in Washington. D. C.: “It is a cross between a concrete candy box and a sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.”  I found it hard to put down.

Building Blocks

If building a house is difficult at the moment, try using toy blocks to feed your imagination. I’m always looking for great examples — I store mine under the couch in the living room so they’re accessible when the urge to construct strikes, which is usually after the tryptophan in the Christmas turkey has finally worn off. Always take a nap before you build!

Every block collection should start with natural wood blocks like the set by Brio above. They’re good for younger hands and older minds, and excellent for rapidly assembling a “city center” on the living room floor and then adding accents around it. Doesn’t everyone do this? My family joins me (or perhaps “humors me” is more accurate) in making extravagant landscapes…I like to combine many block collections and often use a set of Anchor Blocks, like the one shown below,

which are recent artificial stone versions of toys from the late 19th century. They make handsome castles, towers, and gateways. And I often throw in my set of Bauhaus Bauspiel Blocks (below, and shown on daddytypes.com, a weblog), designed by Alma Siedhoff Buscher at the Bauhaus in Germany in the early 1920s.

These are smooth, small, and precise and form simple buildings, bridges, and boats…my city always needs a harbor or a suspension span (just turn the boat hull upside down).

From all of us at Houseplans.com:

Have a Holiday Built of Comfort and Joy.