I’m always drawn to the orderly, spare, modern designs you see in glossy home magazines and books. But my house is not so spare and not everything is in its place. I’m kind of a pack rat as my wife — and office mates — will tell you. I go through periodic bouts of frenzied cleaning but the tide of newspapers, magazines, and books rises regularly. So I was pleased to come across the ingenious new book by Molly Jane Quinn and Jenna Talbott aptly titled It’s Lonely in The Modern World (Chronicle, 2011), which is an ironic primer on how to navigate the field of architectural minimalism.

These are the people who started the clever blog Unhappy Hipsters, which takes a wry look at ambitiously artful modern homes like this one and the way they’re

portrayed, where the individuals on the stoop seem quite unaware of what’s behind them (or perhaps it’s the elephant on the deck; image courtesy ifound). In these sorts of houses messy realities — like the need for windows and daylight, for example — never intrude, especially in architectural magazines. But spoofs are the sign of a publication’s success. (Remember the Tolkien parody Bored of the Rings by the Harvard Lampoon, and the one of Sunset magazine with a photo of a family picnicking in front of a nuclear reactor.) So I started looking around for ways to be both hip and realistic — i.e hide the clutter in sleek and elegant ways –  like this handsome storage bench from Herman Miller. It would help with all the bags

and blankets at the bottom of our bed. Or maybe we just need a new bed frame that incorporates storage drawers, like this version from Bluedot, which

streamlines a storage idea that was popular in the 1960s and 70s. Then what about a place for charging cameras, iphones and ipads? Bludot’s “Juice box” is

a clever solution in the way it hides the plugs and keeps the wires under control (image courtesy Mashable). This loft bedroom by Jordan Parnass Digital Architecture includes an

especially clever stair/bureau with pull-out storage drawers — though I would

probably need a railing, and I notice that the books seem to be piling up…

So in the end I confess I am impossibly conflicted because I am a huge fan of spareness and the uncluttered look and am always promoting it, while only rarely achieving it myself. Our Plan 491-2 by Braxton Werner and Paul Field

might be one answer to my dilemma — it’s uncluttered but not severe, there is storage, and pillows are scattered on the floor!

I just played the online Color Sense Game by Voice of Color from Porter Paints (part of PPG Paints). It’s a kind of test – your answers to a range of questions like “pick 5 words that inspire you” (out of a given list), or “where would you feel most at home?”(you select one image out of a wide range), or “what animal would you be?” (again from a range of pictures) –  result in your own personal paint palette. It seemed fairly accurate in my case; that is, I liked the color range that my answers produced.

Apparently I’m “Al Fresco” – or is that the brother of Bill Fresco. Apparently it means that I like green tones. You’ll note that there is a little tab on the upper right corner that says “Your Secondary Harmony Family” (this will be news to my wife — and me too, come to think of it!).

My secondary family turns out to be the Whites…It all sounds a little corny, but I think it can help you figure out what colors are meaningful to you. Painter beware, however because if you play again and change one or two answers you may get a very different set of colors…After I switched from tiger to eagle

my secondary harmony family became Desert Spice. I think I like Al Fresco and the Whites better. I guess I’m just a cat after all.

Color is at once very simple and subjective (you instinctively like certain hues) and highly sophisticated and complex (the psychological study of color perception, for example). In the history of architecture there are many color palettes, from the vibrant reds and yellow ochres of Pompeiian frescoes (image below courtesy Natural Pigments)

to the white and intense chromium yellow that Thomas Jefferson used

in the dining room at Monticello. According to retrofit guru Bob Vila, this particularly vivid palette is a relatively recent discovery, thanks to scientific analysis of the original pigments (photo courtesy his website). At the turn of the 20th century architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and the Bay Area’s Bernard Maybeck became identified with an Arts & Crafts palette (from the movement of the same name) and evolved their own set of hues and tones

often with autumnal hues like red, burnt orange, and even gold to complement the use of natural materials like redwood and brick. In fact Wright’s favorite color was what he called Cherokee red (photo of Wright’s Zimmerman house, by David J. Bohl, courtesy Currier Museum of Art, from About.com).

European modernists like Le Corbusier developed their own palettes as well;

his was based on primary colors, but, as shown above,  included a variety of subtle variations. These colors (and the image) are from the website Aaltocolor.com. The elegant palette published in 128 Colors: A Sample Book for Architects, Conservators, and Designers, by Katrin Trautwein (Birkhauser,

Basel, 2010) includes 68 Corbusian hues along with 60 others. Trautwein founded an artisinal paint manufacturer in Uster, Switzerland in 1997. She explains how Le Corbusier’s colors were designed to “remain stable in space to support architecture’s three dimensional effects.” As a painter as well as an architect (remember his Purist efforts,

like this still life of 1922, courtesy Ferris) he knew what he was talking about. He probably was not thinking about tigers and eagles.

It’s not every day that you hear a rapper talk about architecture, let alone a mid-century modern design icon like the Eames house in Pacific Palisades, California of 1949. But that’s what Ice Cube does, deftly and with precision, in a brief new online video (see The Daily Beast and The New York Times) about husband-and-wife industrial designers Charles and Ray Eames (image below, courtesy NYTimes).

A replica of the living room, shown below courtesy F8daily, is in the current “Living In A Modern Way”exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — part of the huge cultural collaboration across LA called Pacific Standard Time — and prompted the rapper’s review.

In the video, Ice Cube, who studied architectural drafting before becoming a rapper, says that growing up in South Central LA you learned to “use what you’ve got and make the most of it” then walks into Charles’ and Ray’s famous house made of prefabricated parts, sits down in their iconic lounge chair and praises their resourcefulness with everyday materials, how “they were doing mash-up before mash-up even existed,” and the way their house “made structure and nature one.” That’s one of the best descriptions of the Eames approach that I have heard.

A longer but equally interesting discussion of Eamesian design and how they created a studio full of talented designers who worked around the clock in order “to make the best for the most for the least” can be found in the fascinating new documentary film Eames: The Architect and The Painter by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey. Charles was trained as an architect; Ray as a painter. The film makes one realize that with their omniverous curiosity about the world and how to represent it — especially in a film like Powers of Ten explaining the notion of scale — Charles and Ray were much more than chair designers: they were Googlers before Google.

If 20th century modernism is your gift-giving sweet spot, browse the Eames Gallery for a variety of design-oriented stocking stuffers,

from reproductions of the folk art black bird that resided in their living room

to coffee mugs patterned after some of their fabric designs.

The Eames House was part of the Case Study House Program sponsored by Arts + Architecture magazine, which expressed an avant-garde modernist esthetic in its layouts and covers as well as subject matter. The magazine is no longer in print but you can purchase cover prints like these –

the one on the left shows biomorphic paintings by Ray Eames — and other so-called “retro-edge” items like graphic tees from the Arts & Architecture Collection during their holiday sale.

For your holiday bookshelf: a new volume on a glass and steel house by architect Thomas Phifer that has a distinctive Case Study feel, though built recently by former museum director Tom Armstrong (who ran several institutions including the Whitney in New York and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh),

is unusual in that it describes the design and building process in the client’s own words (image courtesy The Quantuck Lane Press). The previous house on the site had burned, which gave Armstrong the opportunity to realize a long-held dream to create a way to live in a garden surrounded by modern art.

(photo courtesy Thomas Phifer and Partners). He wanted landscape, house, furniture, paintings, and sculpture to be part of a single architectural composition — like a latter day reinterpretation of Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, shown below.

(The Glass House was built at the same time as the Eames house, but on the other side of the continent; photo by Paul Warchol, courtesy The Glass House).

The program for the Armstrong house seems a little self centered to me — with only one bedroom there is no room for the Armstrong’s children or grandchildren but but lots of space for modern paintings and sculpture — yet the story is fascinating because Armstrong tells how he was able to achieve  his vision. He died earlier this year so this book is a poignant record of an architectural dream: his home was his last museum.

If books aren’t enough, you can browse historic modern layouts like our Plan 529-1, which is Case Study House #3 by Wurster & Bernardi, 

with it’s rear elevation opening to a private outdoor world; or Eames-inspired designs by architect Gregory La Vardera, such as Plan 431-5

with it’s bright, loft-like two-story living room. As Ice Cube says in his Eames video: “You always gotta have a plan.”

Ice Cube’s Video Celebrating the Eames

Big news! We are very excited to welcome the Katrina Cottage plans — from a team of designers and architects led by Marianne Cusato — to our Exclusive Studio. Prices start at $850. Years ago I saw one of the first examples, at the Home Builder Show in Orlando (shown below, courtesy James Hardie), and was very impressed. Here was an innovative solution to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina that could apply to housing needs in general.

I especially liked the efficient layout (this example is only 300 square feet), well proportioned double-hung windows, and front porch with built-in benches. I thought then, and now even more so, that this little house would dignify any neighborhood. To my mind it is a highly evolved descendant of the charming wood-framed “earthquake cottages” built for San Francisco’s homeless

after the disaster of 1906 (photo courtesy National Park Service, Presidio). Fast forward to today and our expanding collection of Katrina Cottage designs, like Marianne Cusato’s Plan 514-5, shown below.

The 544 square-foot, two bedroom, one bath house includes a galley kitchen

and a front porch that’s 8-feet deep so it can be used as an outdoor room to expand the house in good weather. Here it is as built.

(Photo courtesy Cusato Cottages.) The house is only sixteen feet wide but has a strong presence thanks to the welcoming front porch. Marianne calls this “vernacular Gulf Coast” architecture but I can see it working in places like the Northeast and Midwest as well.

Envisioned as a dignified alternative to the FEMA trailer, Katrina Cottages have been hailed for their design, durability, versatility and, affordability in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, on CNN and in all major news outlets nationwide. The Katrina Cottage concept is the vision of architect Andres Duany, partner in Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism and designers of hundreds of pedestrian-oriented communities including Seaside, Florida. The cottage idea was first developed at the Mississippi Renewal Forum in October 2005. The goal was to create a safe, affordable, livable home that can be built quickly and that ultimately becomes an enduring contribution to the neighborhood — not a temporary, often stigmatized, and possibly unhealthy solution like a FEMA trailer.

Plan 514-10 by Eric Moser, of Moser Design Group, is 20 feet wide and includes a buffet bar/peninsula in

the kitchen.

A shed dormer brightens the loft. Plan 514-11 by W. A. Lawrence of

Period Style Homes is 25 feet wide and includes an option for adding a third bedroom. Marianne Cusato’s Plan 514-18 is the largest so far,

at two stories and 1,200 square feet. Two bedrooms and a second bathroom are 

on the upper floor. Here’s a built version of it in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (photo courtesy Cusato Cottages).

The shutters, clapboard siding, and gable profile give it a handsome Colonial Revival look.

Marianne Cusato is the author of Get Your House Right, Architectural Elements to Use and Avoid, with Ben Pentreath, Richard Sammons and Leon Krier, foreword by HRH The Prince of Wales (2008, Sterling Publishing). In 2006, her Katrina Cottage won the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum’s “People’s Design Award.” W. A. Lawrence and Eric Moser have long been involved in neighborhood and residential design. These houses can be family homes, vacation cabins, even granny units, and it’s easy to imagine combining them into vibrant communities. To mix a few metaphors — an architectural phoenix has risen from the floods. Welcome, Katrina Cottage plans!

Let’s talk about how using an iconic shape can help you conceptualize the modern design of your new home — architects start here all the time. Take the simplest architectural outline, such as four walls topped with a gable roof, as shown in this archetypal Scottish stone barn.

(Image courtesy gairloch.org) What can you do with it? How can you pack it, expand it, open it, raise it, give it a sense of history or modernity? Here’s a sampling of houses that all began with a similar profile,

starting with architect Rick Joy‘s design for a barn-inspired house in Vermont.

(Images courtesy Architectural Record.) Inside you can see how the shape is simply hollowed out for the main living space, with minimal but strong posts and rafters providing support. The design feels modern and historical at the same time. One side opens to a terrace while other has high windows for balanced light. Architects William Turnbull and Mary Griffin began with the long barn idea and then

divided it into two spaces (kitchen/living area and a bedroom/bathroom) separated by a breezeway-dining room, creating a contemporary dogtrot cabin (itself an historical house type) for the wine country.The outdoor dining room can be closed off from the prevailing wind with a sliding barn door  (which is in the open position, in kitchen on drawing).

The house is the width of a vine row (drawing and photo courtesy TGH Architects). Architect Stephen Atkinson took a similar tack with corrugated aluminum siding

and pulled the fireplace away to mark the edge of the deck in his Zachary vacation house.

Images courtesy Stephen Atkinson Architecture.) His plan is also a dogtrot but includes a galley kitchen that parallels the long axis; the breezeway stretches beyond the house to include the fireplace and deck. Australian architect Glenn Murcutt has often explored the use of simple house forms and distilled them to an essence,

as in the elegant curve of the gable on his Marie Short house (images courtesy Architectural Record), which also seems to be channeling a fluid line from Alvar Aalto. In this case the walls are really a series of operable layers that filter light, air, and view. So the iconic form creates a structure that allows for change depending on needs and circumstances. The two story gable is equally iconic, especially in the Rudin

house, made of concrete by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron (image courtesy Apartment Therapy), which in turn has influenced designs by others,

like this memorable little shelter by Ultra Architects of Poland (image courtesy Mocoloco).

The most famous riff on such shapes is probably Robert Venturi’s design for his mother’s house from 1964 in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania.

Venturi used the gable as the centering device for the facade and then broke it to bring in high light and shape the entrance (image from The American House, courtesy curatedmag.com). This house became an icon in its own right as a herald of “Post Modernism.”

Archetypal house forms are also at the heart of designs by architects in our Exclusive Studio, such as Bud Dietrich’s wide gable that encompasses

greenhouse windows and a garage, Plan 481-1; Ross Anderson’s Plan 433-1

for a coastal getaway, with saddlebag-like attachments like the rustic staircases and the screen porch; Braxton Werner and Paul Field

and their version of a long barn house, Plan 491-10; Gregory La Vardera’s Plan 431-14

even recalls the Herzon & de Meuron example in its cubist quality, only in shingles this time, not concrete,  and Frank McGahon’s Plan 520-7,

which combines a series of long gables into a courtyard layout. And we’re back to the stone barn — not from Scotland now but from Ireland!

Recycled Wood News

Kirei is a sustainable wood manufacturer known for handsome bamboo, wheatboard, and Kirei board products (the latter is made of reclaimed sorgum straw) and has just launched the new Windfall line of paneling.

It uses reclaimed wood from deconstructed buildings in the Pacific Northwest to create engineered wood panels for wall coverings and casework (image from Kirei). Solid panels come in Clear, Ivory, Anthracite, and Mocha finishes; 3-ply panels come in Clear finish. Solid and 3 ply panels also come in an end-grain style.