Boxes and Barn Doors

I am always struck by how important frames are, visually and virtually, in helping us see. Take this very simple vignette by artist Spy Emerson that caught my eye recently at Flora Grubb, an exceptional garden design nursery in San Francisco.

The wood box — no bottom, just sides — focuses the eye on the blue bottles and the small plants, creating a vivid still life. The rough wood and the way the plants extend beyond the frame reinforce the naturalness of the arrangement. So sometimes thinking inside the box is more important. Flora Grubb is a talented designer/entrepreneur whose sense of composition is especially strong. She is most famous for her dramatic vertical succulent gardens — framed in sturdy boxes like this one

on the patio of her plant gallery. Each of those tiny plants comprising the mosaic grows out of a small soil niche that’s set on a slight diagonal. The frame literally holds everything together while the strong outline contrasting with the busy field of green is visually compelling in its own right. The surprising vertical placement is the clincher, making us look again — and again.

All of this rumination is by way of considering how we design or reinvent the boxes we inhabit and call home. The shape and character of the frame — walls and windows, their depth, height, materiality, proportion, and placement — are the keys to good design. One frame that has always appealed to me is the barn door. I like it because it’s a space saver (no extra feet required for the door swing — I like pocket doors too for the same reason), and it makes the opening simple and dramatic

as in this marvelous house by Turnbull Griffin Haesloop Architects (photo courtesy the architects) where one outside wall opens through a series of elegant contemporary glass barn doors. Here the door becomes a feature in its own right and also disappears as one slides across the other.

It’s a form of architectural magic.  Barn doors always seem to harbor an element of surprise when they’re used indoors, as in this more rustic example  by Johnston Architects of Seattle.

Here they open to reveal the bedroom, as if it’s on stage (photo courtesy Sunset Magazine). In many cases there are latent or obvious references

to real barns with elements like exposed diagonal bracing and expressive hardware. The example above is by Hutker Architects of Falmouth and Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts (photo by Brian Vanden Brink). The rustic aspect can become a signature fetaure and is used to dramatic effect by Faulker Architects of Truckee, California

and seems especially appropriate for a rugged ski country home (photo courtesy Sunset Magazine). There are almost as many examples of sliding barn doors as conventional swing types because almost any solid door can be hung on barn door hardware.

Hardware choices include spoked flat track

(shown above), heftier barn-evocative type

as in this U-shape example, and elaborate stainless steel systems

as shown here. All three tracks are from Barndoor Hardware.com.

Though a very simple architectural element, the barn door — like the box frame — can become a defining feature.

Contemporary Dinner Lighting

Because darkness is falling earlier these days, let’s talk about certain slants of lighting (with apologies to Emily Dickinson). I’m thinking of ways to brighten the dining area in time for the family gatherings that are just around the corner. The variety in contemporary pendant lamps, for example, is vast. Here’s a sampling. The 7- by 11-inch “Aura”

by Resolute from Surrounding Lighting, with its amber-hued whirl shape made from printed polycarbonate plastic, takes a compact fluorescent bulb and would suit a dining alcove. The “Moare”

mesh-covered drum-within-a-drum design from ylighting comes in small, medium, and large sizes (up to 24.8 inch-diameter by 24 inch-high).  It uses an incandescent bulb. The free form WillyDilly

pendant by Ingo Maurer from Stardust Lighting uses stiffened card and plastic, takes a halogen bulb, and is put together by the purchaser. These more dramatic pendants would suit larger spaces.

A more eclectic though still contemporary approach would be to mix a traditional fixture with modern furnishings, as illustrated here

by two “Jamison” chandeliers from Rejuvenation. Some classic reproductions of early chandeliers, like this one from

Conant Metal & Light, are contemporary in their simplicity. A friend has an antique candle chandelier on a rope and pulley so that it can be lowered and lit and then raised to the appropriate height — this might be the perfect solution for adding romance and a sense of history to your evening meal. Another friend scoured junk stores for old electric chandeliers, rewired several,  and strung them up on pulleys in the trees around the house for his daughter’s wedding reception. Now that was a magical evening!

As you browse pendant possibilities think about the kind of light you want and balance that with projected energy use: fixtures designed for compact fluorescent bulbs remain an important eco-friendly alternative to typical incandescent lights, though even more efficient LED (light emitting diode) fixtures are developing fast.

If  you want your light to be on the table itself — with old fashioned candle power — check out these intensely colorful glass votives

from GlassyBaby. They come in a great many nature-based hues. A recent GlassyBaby blog post

even matches a range of votives to a collection of fall leaves.

Candle holders are another way to go. The classic shoemaker’s candle stand

from Shaker Workshops, is ingeniously adjustable (up and down) thanks to the screw pole at the center. The  spare functional design gives it a contemporary look. Or consider a modern candelabra

such as this solid chrome example by Design Mango from Dutch by Design. I like the contrast between the minimalist base and the slightly wavery candles…it’s ultra-sleek and Shaker-simple at the same time.

So now that you have the lighting, what about the room? An open layout means the dining table is all the more important as a place to dine, work, play games, and relax. Thus flexible lighting — often complementing fixed downlights in the ceiling — is important. In this compact row house, Plan 469-2

the table is under the stair, which creates a feeling of intimacy so a small adjustable pendant would work well. For a more open area, either directly in front of the kitchen island, as in Plan436-1

or off to one side in a corner of the great room, as in  Plan 466-3, below

a more expansive and dramatic sculptural fixture would create a focal point to define the dining area within the larger space. For more dining area ideas browse our Thanksgiving Kitchens Collection.

As you explore Houseplans.com, think about how your ideal dining area will function at different times of day and try to imagine it in daylight and illumined at night. With the right lighting you should be able to create a variety of moods to match different occasions.

Hitting Home

The approaching World Series makes me think about connections between baseball and contemporary home design. Themed decor is an obvious overlap and a brief web search produces a wide array of examples. This novel wall clock by Pachi Paradice from Squidoo

uses baseballs for numbers, suggesting new ways of telling time, like “quarter-after first base” (4:15) or “half-past home” (6:30). I think the  hands should be centered on the pitcher’s mound, however, not second base, because time and the game really begin with every pitch. Baseball wall murals

like this 9- by 15-foot example from Classic Wallcoverings, Inc., might suit a media or family room. (Bring out the garlic fries!) Or what about a baseball bat lamp

made out of a recycled metal slugger from Rerun Productions. It’s an odd idea but the tapered shape seems to work rather well. And naturally every front doormat

is really home base. The one shown above is from Uncommon Goods.

Interestingly, the baseball diamond makes a useful house plan diagram. For example, if I rotate Plan 48-415 slightly,

home base becomes the front entry; first base: bedroom 2; second: the master suite; and third: the kitchen. The dining area makes a good shortstop — for a short stack? — and the great room is a natural infield. Of course the back yard becomes the outfield and maybe the garage is the dugout. (You can’t do this with football.) The point is that a simple way of organizing a home is to think of it as a malleable baseball diamond. The tricky part is adjusting the space between the major rooms, er bases. You can borrow space but there’s no stealing.

Teamwork

Baseball has other connections to home design. My wife and I were in Buenos Aires earlier this year, visiting our daughter on her semester abroad. She had a room in the elegant early 20th century house of a remarkable woman named Diana who had raised three children there after her husband suddenly died. A plant-filled front hall, high ceilings — some a little crumbly and patched but full of character and style — welcoming dining and living rooms, and a roof deck were key features. Diana spoke very movingly of the house as “my partner in raising the children.” The roof deck was especially important as a protected place for them to play in that particularly dense section of the city. In other words, like a dependable catcher, a good house is a team player, working with you as life throws new challenges, allowing you to live not just more comfortably, but more fully.

Outfields of Dreams

The roof deck-as-team-player is worth considering for houses on tight lots with little yard space. The deck can be at the top of the house

as in Gregory La Vardera’s Cube House, Plan 431-8, or to one side

shown here over the carport in Plan 472-7, or

above a detached garage as Plan 64-195 shows. In all of these cases you just have to be sure your decking is over a gently sloped, well drained, and permanently sealed (often with an elastomeric membrane) roof.

Another way to to make sure your chosen plan is a team player is to customize it by building in a little flexibility; for example, by making sure there’s a ground floor bedroom and bath for when stairs become a problem. A good house plan can accommodate the seventh inning stretch.

Drawing from Disney

Walt Disney was fascinated with the shaping of space both visually and physically, from the way he transformed the animated film to his invention of the modern theme park. I think architecture was always an important theme for him, like the shiny-bright suburb in the Goofy cartoon Motor Mania of 1950 or the suave contemporary ranch house in the original Parent Trap of 1961. I vividly remember touring Monsanto’s  House of the Future at Disneyland

(image fromYesterland.com) with its curvilinear white plastic pods

cantilevered over a central support and utility podium (Yesterland.com). Though designed not by Disney but by two MIT professors — who must have been channeling Buckminster Fuller

and his similarly central-masted Minimum Dymaxion house of 1929 — Walt had the sense to give the plastic Monsanto house a ten-year lease in Tomorrowland. The swoopy modern  furniture from fifty years ago

still looks contemporary today (Yesterland.com photo)

I was reminded of these images and Disney’s huge influence on design and our appreciation of it when I toured the superb new Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco’s Presidio, which opened last week. Two hours flew by. I felt I had stumbled into an animated autobiography, or rather, a compelling four-dimensional biopic.

San Francisco’s Page & Turnbull Architects have deftly inserted the state-of-the-art museum

into an historic 19th century brick row (photo by Cesar Rubio) along the Presidio’s parade ground — which is itself like a distant extension of Disneyland’s own Main Street. From the front there’s no hint of the wonderland within. And at the rear only an elegant glass skin

drawn across an addition (photo by Bruce Damonte) suggests a house of marvels. You experience the museum as a journey through Walt’s life with text blocks, still images, film clips, memorabilia, and narrations by Walt and others every few feet along a carefully choreographed and roughly chronological path. It’s a soft cacophony of sounds and images,  a “dark ride” that you walk, and even then it’s impossible to absorb everything.

Highlights for me are the multi-story “multiplane camera” that allowed Disney  filmmakers to create a realistic sense of depth within animations, the clever elevator that’s designed as a train car (the vertical naturally becomes the horizontal in this Looking Glass world), and the sleek modern terrazzo-and-glass mini-Guggenheim ramp

(image courtesy Walt Disney Family Museum) spiraling around a huge and meticulously detailed scale model of Disneyland.

In one sense it’s all a bit deifying, as if Walt were a latter day King Tut, but — as they say in Egypt — what a cool tomb! And here the hieroglyphics even dance to Silly Symphonies.

Beyond the Casino

I was also in Las Vegas last week, for a talk about Cliff May’s ranch houses at the World Market Center, which is another sort of  “ride.”

Well off the Strip on the north end of town across from City Hall (you can see the Stratosphere Casino tower in the background), this enormous furnishings marketplace is a contemporary landmark in its own right. The complex consists of a series of interpenetrating cubes and polygons that wrap around a 15 story tall central court that’s open to the sky,

like a box canyon from Red Rocks Park  reassembled as a building. It feels like the entrance to Oz. One of the great things about this design center is that it’s open to the general public, not just to professional designers. The Center’s Design Salon

offers consumers the ability to purchase designer furnishings previously offered only to the trade. Complimentary one-hour consultations with interior designers accredited by the American Society of Interior Designers are also offered. It’s a good place to get ideas for shaping or reshaping your home.

A short ride away is the new 180 acre Springs Preserve, Las Vegas’ answer to Tucson’s Living Desert Museum, and built on the site of the original springs for which the city is named (vega means spring in Spanish).

Here’s one of  the rotundas, recalling a sculptural sundial or open cistern. Part of the vast indoor-outdoor complex comprises a  sustainability hall where one gallery has  been turned into a model home — which puts a novel recycling spin on that overworked trademark phrase “what’s done in Vegas stays in Vegas.” One of the most effective exhibits here

simply shows how much water is used in a typical five-minute shower with and without a low flow showerhead. (Nothing about sand baths, however…) Elsewhere in the museum you can experience a simulated desert flash flood (perhaps the other side of sustainability?) which in this case is fun: inside one of the buildings you stand on a metal bridge across a boulder-strewn arroyo and suddenly the water surges around and under you.

So what does it signify, when Disney comes to San Francisco and resource conservation arrives in Las Vegas? That may sound like the resolution of some distant prophecy but I think it means that things are looking up.

In other news, check out Writer Tracey Taylor’s  fine article about about us and affordable home design in the Financial Times! Her website tktaylor.com includes a wide range of stories about design and is a must read.

Wood Flooring 101

Look down: what’s the floor for you? It’s a huge subject so I asked materials expert Rob Jones of Build Direct, an online warehouse, to give us an introduction to the most popular wood floor options he’s seeing at the moment (not including solid wood floors, which are defined as floors that are real wood throughout). I have edited his notes for space.

Strand-Woven Bamboo

Strand-woven bamboo is a subset of bamboo flooring made from the parings of conventional bamboo floors.The example below is by Yanchi.

The parings are the left-over strips of bamboo that result from the manufacturing process, when the rounded bamboo stalks are cut for flat flooring boards. The parings are then woven together, heated, put under pressure, and laminated into flooring boards. Because this flooring is made from a renewable resource and from post-industrial material, you could call it “super green.” The result is a very hard attractive flooring surface that takes stain easily and stands up to high traffic.

Laminate Flooring

The news in laminate flooring is that thicker options — 12 millimeters and up — are now available.

This example is Toklo laminate. Such a floor incorporates no real wood, but an image of a wood grain and colour on what is called a decor layer. The thicker the floor, the more like a real wood floor it becomes in terms of a walking experience. And laminates from 12mm to 14mm are still priced at less than a solid hardwood floor. Laminate floors with attached underpad are easier to install than typical laminate floors, adding to their popularity with do-it-yourselfers and contractors.

Engineered Wood

Engineered floors are considered “real” hardwood floors, with a top layer of real wood, which ranges in thickness from a fraction of a millimetre up to 4mm over a core of medium density fibreboard (MDF) and a backing layer, which allows greater resilience. A glue-less click-locking system eases installation. Here’s an example of Brazilian cherry

by Vanier. Another choice is handscraped engineered hardwood flooring,

shown here in a Peppercorn example from Burlington. Handscraped is popular because the contours in each board add texture and aesthetic versatility. These engineered versions are making the look more affordable.

Rob’s Notes on Retail Pricing

Bamboo. $2.50 – $8.00 per square foot. Factors that affect this pricing include grade, which accounts for more consistent and more vibrant natural colors, the cost of staining, and milling standards which affect how the boards fit together.

Laminate. $0.75 to $2.00/square foot. Some important factors affecting price are thickness, locking systems, and AC rating. The last factor is an international test that determines how much wear a laminate flooring product has been proven to take, with the results applied to where it is recommended it be installed. For instance, an AC3 rated floor is recommended in general residential usage. Under AC3 are to be installed only in low-traffic residential settings (bedrooms for instance, rather than front halls). Above AC3 laminates can be applied to commercial settings of varying degrees of traffic. It’s hugely important to take these things into account when shopping, which is why the tests are done. There are prices listed for $0.50, but these are usually ‘bait and switch’ deals on shopping engines. There are equivalent ‘bait and switch’ products in every category of flooring.

Engineered. About $2.50 – $7.00 per square foot. Species is a huge factor, plus the thickness of the real wood layer, overall thickness, and locking system.

Hardwood. $4.00 – $10. There are loads of factors which affect this pricing, all of which are named above in the prices for engineered flooring, but finished, unfinished, and handscraped and brushed effects are also big factors.

Final notes: Rob says two recent forces are affecting the wood flooring industry. One is the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, which places limits on formaldehyde emissions in flooring. The other is the Lacey Act , which is concerned with the harvesting and importation of wood products, among other natural resources, into the United States. Thanks for all the helpful info, Rob!