Last week in Melbourne I was lucky enough to see the Walsh Street home of the late Robin Boyd (1917-1971), one of Australia’s most famous modern architects and critics. He ran Australia’s Small Homes Service (stock plans by architects) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, designed a wide variety of structures, and wrote several influential books including Australia’s Home: Its Origins, Builders, and Occupiers (1952), The Australian Ugliness (1960), and The Puzzle of Architecture (1965). He was what I would call a “flexible modernist,” especially adept at finding innovative solutions for particular site conditions. The home, built in 1957 and now owned by the Robin Boyd Foundation, is one of his most ingenious — maximizing indoor-outdoor living space on a narrow urban lot — with many lessons for today.

The model, from Museum Victoria (by Paul Couch, Carter Couch Architects, 1989) shows how the house is divided into two sections book-ending a central glass-walled courtyard: entry, living-dining area, kitchen, and master bedroom at one end; childrens’ bedrooms and Robin’s office above the garage at the other. The courtyard is the leafy, sun-filled heart of the house: a private, spacious, wind-protected outdoor living room.

This view is toward the living room. The wings are tied together by an upswept roof of planks supported on cables, like a suspension bridge, as shown in this section view, below,

(courtesy Robin Boyd: A Life by Geoffrey Serle, 1995). Famous examples like the Menai Straits Bridge (1825)  in North Wales (courtesy Wales Directory)

with its cables slung over stone towers, or Kane’s Bridge (1929) over the Yarra River in Melbourne’s own Studley Park

(courtesy Bushwalkingblog.blogspot.com) spring to mind — Boyd would have known many such prototypes. The following ceiling detail

shows the cables supporting the boards of the roof.

At the top of Boyd’s catenary curve is the master bedroom (shown below)  over the living-dining area and kitchen. One of the clever twists here is that the main entrance from the street is through this space (called a bed-sitting room on the plan), which is treated as a floating indoor-outdoor platform overlooking the courtyard.

That’s why it doesn’t look like a master bedroom. Boyd Foundation executive director Tony Lee, who gave my wife Mary and me the insightful and inspirational tour, said that the Boyds always entertained guests in this space and then took everyone downstairs for dinner. (I guess they were very fastidious and always made their bed — it certainly sounds like something only an architect would do). Also the railings are mostly metaphorical (except  for the couch) so as not to interrupt views and spatial flow…or gravity, for that matter. Architects just love to levitate!

The living-dining area on the lower level extends into the courtyard through a wall of glass.

The kitchen is behind the stair and partially open to the living area — also note how the lighting is deftly tucked between the overhead beams. The plan (also from Serle’s book) shows how courtyard and house are extensions of each other,

making structure and site one supremely efficient unit. The key lesson here is that house is not a separate block plopped onto the lot; it becomes the lot. Every inch of the site is part of the plan; this is still an excellent way to design for tight urban sites. Precedents for such a patio-centric layout go all the way back to the Roman atrium

as in the plan for the so-called House of the Surgeon at Pompeii (courtesy AD 79). As a worldly modernist — who knew Walter Gropius, and in 1956 held a visiting professorship at MIT during which he met Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Eero Saarinen, among others  — Boyd might also have known the Eames House and Studio at Pacific Palisades near Los Angeles, of 1949.

It also brackets a courtyard (house on left, studio on right, plan courtesy Key Houses of the Twentieth Century by Colin Davies, 2006) ) though the site is very different and the structure faces a meadow across the long boardwalk. Robin Boyd seemed to absorb ideas like a sponge while addressing each architectural problem from a fresh point of view. His was a highly cultured yet agile imagination, firmly grounded and flexible at the same time. It was a delight to meet that mind at home.

It may still be dark and wintry outside but here’s a way to brighten the indoors: browse the range of contemporary floor coverings now available. Start with the new rugs designed by Los Angeles architect Stephen Kanner, FAIA and his 14 year-old daughter Caroline. These floor coverings give new meaning to the phrase “cut a rug:” the grid of vivid colors seems to float and dance, creating a room-within-the-room.

It, and the elegant runner below, are part of the “Squares” line.

The rugs are part of the Ariana + Kanner Modern Rug Collection, constructed by Ariana Rugs’ Ahmad and Alex Ahmadi, who are third generation Afghan rug weavers from Kabul.

These hand-knotted, hand-tufted cotton and wool rugs incorporate sustainable materials including bamboo silk and banana. The one above is from the “Square Compressions” line. Inspiration for the designs comes from the geometries and color field explorations of 20th century painting, including Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and American Abstract Expressionism.

Stephen is known for sleek machine age architecture — from futuristic homes and a zig-zagging In-’n-Out Burger outlet to the sweeping car-commanding canopy/marquis of his United Oil Gasoline Station,

completed in 2009 (photo by John Linden, courtesy archdaily) and  shown here.  But in the rugs I detect a new found freedom with hue and pattern that must have come from his collaboration with Caroline.

Another product — more a floor covering than a rug — is by a company called FLOR. It’s all about flexibility: you can mix and match the 19.7 inch squares or “carpet tiles” (made of renewable and recycled content) as you see fit. Launched in 2003, FLOR’s offerings keep expanding. We used FLOR in several Sunset Idea Houses and they were very successful.

These blue striped squares are part of the “Stripe It Rich/C Note” line and run about $16 per tile. Or here’s the “Shiny Doodle 2 Rug Kit:”

which includes ten tiles. A special “FLORdot” system holds each square securely in place.

Chilewich is a New York company that has made a name in very contemporary matting made from woven vinyl in a variety of textures, patterns, and colors.

They can add lightness as well as warmth to a room, as the image of a modern dining area, above, shows. Here’s their “Bright” series:

And the more subdued “Dark Neutrals:”

These mats are elegant and practical at the same time: easy to clean by vacuuming, or mopping with a detergent solution.

So now as you take a break from watching the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, you can think about ways to bring a little gold medal design excitement into your home!

On the surface, Avatar, the new blockbuster bailout of a movie by James Cameron, has nothing to do with home design but everything to do with a fevered and fertile visual imagination.

You probably know the sci-fi plot (see the excellent Wikipedia summation) about colonists mining “unobtanium,” an elusive rock to be sure, on the planet Pandora (diagram of the miners’ control room above), who have created avatars that let them mingle with the indigenous Na ‘ve population in order to get them out of the way.  It’s not so much a movie as a fabulous computerized “dark ride” through a lush jungle world

where nature is nurtured into a frenzied confrontation (image courtesy avatarplanet)

between Pocahontas and the Air Force (image courtesy Wired).

When I saw it with my younger daughter Martha, who contributed the Pocohontas analogy, we could only get seats in the second  row and thanks to our 3-D glasses I kept swatting at or dodging the ferns, branches, flying beasts, and other hyper-realistic computer-captured characters that whipped or whizzed past. Exhausting but fun. My older daughter Eliza, an art photographer, views the film in a very different light at Photophilanthropy.com — the family definitely helped with my research for this post!

So my point is? Home is the ultimate avatar, whether machine or forest. It represents us to the world and is our refuge and second skin. Architectural sociologist Clare Cooper-Marcus’ groundbreaking book House As A Mirror of Self (Nicolas-Hays, 2006) details this phenomenon through her case study research with more than 60 individuals. As she states: “At the base of this study is a very simple yet frequently overlooked premise. As we change and grow throughout our lives, our psychological development is punctuated not only by meaningful emotional relationships with people, but also by close, affective ties with a number of physical environments, beginning in childhood.”

This is true in my own experience: when I was teaching architectural history at Carnegie-Mellon University, I asked my students to write a short essay about their college living environments. Some described their dorm rooms as a kind of refuge; others as a public meeting place. In effect, each room became a reflection of psychological need, an avatar if you will. The trick is to understand your “inner home” (the Na ‘ve people’s Hometree and Tree of Souls? Unobtainium?) without launching rockets at it — or getting a divorce.

Associations Are Important

Another new film actually uses a house to tell part of the story. In Nancy Myers’ It’s Complicated the home of amicably divorced baker and restaurant owner Jane Adler, played by Meryl Steep, is a beautiful tile roofed adobe, supposedly in Santa Barbara

though actually in Thousand Oaks (photo courtesy Cote de Texas blog), and resembles a spiffed up version of classic adobe style houses

from the 1920s and early 1930s, like the Donald Dickey guest house in Ojai by architect Palmer Sabin, or

the E. L. Doheny Ranch at Santa Paula Canyon by architect Wallace Neff. And because the owner is a chef

it has a great kitchen with dazzling light and a seductive Carrara marble-topped island (photo courtesy Design 59 blog). The house as presented by set decorator Beth Rubino is warm, comfortably contemporary, and richly historical all at the same time. In other words, it’s a house with a past and an air of contentment about the present. And it represents an ideal of modern-day, food-and-garden-centric Southern California. It’s like living inside a large tile-roofed croissant. Adobe bricks and terra cotta tiles, are, after all — baked.

The Adler character’s momentary fling with her ex-husband drives the movie but in the end doesn’t affect the character of the home. In fact, it seems fitting that she ultimately falls in love with the architect who is designing her new kitchen addition. The home and the character are “moving on” to the next stage of their lives. For more on the rationale behind the set design see the film’s Production Notes and a brief interview with the director at Santa Barbara Visitors Bureau. Our homes — whether sci-fi trees or adobe ranch houses — are yeasty metaphors indeed.

Contradictions make us concentrate. Look at this image from Heyri, Korea, a new planned city outside Seoul.

Is it a leafy wall or a concrete tree, and how did they build it, anyway? The photo is one of many shot by folks at IDEO, global design consutants based in Palo Alto, California. (Find the image on their website under “Postcards.”) I think it begins to illustrate what IDEO calls “design thinking,” which is a way to derive new ideas from opposing extremes.

The firm’s Chris Waugh and others explained this approach at a fascinating all-day retreat for builders, developers, architects, designers and others that I attended recently. The gathering was sponsored by The Vine: A Conversation on the Nature of Community, which is an offshoot of the Pacific Coast Builders Conference. (Full disclosure: I’m on the advisory board of The Vine.) As Chris pointed out, design thinking is about being comfortable with ambiguity and, in fact, finding new potential in it. The discussion made me realize that design thinking isn’t new; it’s what the best architecture has always been about.

One of IDEO’s current projects is helping the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rethink airport security checkpoints. (What a great idea — up to now these areas appear to have been made up on the fly — so to speak). IDEO looked beyond the detection of objects to the environment of the checkpoint, and they studied human behavior.

Their prototype design, called TSA Checkpoint Evolution, uses informational screens, “Prep Stops,” and soothing lighting as crowd-calming devices in order to make potential  “hostile threats” more visible. In other words IDEO looked beyond the narrow security function and concentrated on how to relieve the stress as a way to make the most serious potential stress stand out. They may also be creating an instant community out of a collection of strangers. So out of ambiguous and even contradictory circumstances and needs  — stress vs. relaxation — comes a possible solution for increased security.

The home is a similar interactive environment, only more intimate, and one hopes less in need of security checkpoints  — The White House notwithstanding. Each room or space has the potential for different kinds of behavior: from gathering to seclusion. A well designed home encompasses these potential contradictions. New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger’s  insightful new book Why Architecture Matters – I highly recommend it — deftly illustrates this zoning principle in his description of architect Sir John Soane’s breakfast room in London: “with a round table set under a low dome that is not a real dome but a canopy, supported by narrow columns at four corners. Where the canopy meets the corners, Soane placed small round mirrors, so the occupants of the breakfast table can see one another without looking directly at each other.”

(Photo courtesy Livejournal.com) Paul continues: “Soane liked to create rooms within rooms and spaces that connect in unusual ways with other spaces, and in the breakfast room you can see that he is doing it not just as the early nineteenth-century’s version of razzle-dazzle but to provide a kind of psychic comfort. The dome is protecting but it is not quite enclosing, a reminder that while we may feel uncommunicative and vulnerable early in the morning, we need to move out of that stage into the world. The breakfast room functions as a kind of halfway house…it introduces us to the day…a room of great beauty and serenity, perfectly balanced between openness and enclosure, between public and private.”

So how does design thinking inform our house plans? Gregory La Vardera’s latest scheme, Plan 431-12, demonstrates. I asked Greg to explain what he did.

Compact at 1,800 square feet –  for three bedrooms and two-and-a-half baths — “there is no room for hallways or circulation space in the tight footprint,” says Greg.  “So for that reason we arrived at the unusual configuration of placing service spaces – bathrooms+laundry & coat closet –  on the stair landing levels of the house.”

Greg continues: “After wrestling with the floor plan it became apparent that any other location of the bathroom would require more hallway, or require the stair to be located elsewhere in the house. By using the stair itself as the “hallway” to reach the bathroom we gained back considerable space, enough to make the master bedroom suite quite generous for such a small house, as well as the open living area.”

“So the laundry area and bathroom serving bedrooms 2 & 3, and the powder and coat room on the main level are off-set from the floor they serve by 1/4-1/3 level. That uneven division itself may also seem a bit peculiar but it serves two purposes. It gives these functions bias towards the levels they serve – for instance the laundry + bathroom is much closer to the bedrooms than it is to the downstairs – it’s clearly part of the upstairs realm, there is no ambiguity about which floor it belongs to. This is because it’s just a couple of steps down from the bedrooms. On the living level the powder room has a similar but different relationship. Its definitely part of the first floor – you would never have the sense that the powder room is in the basement. Yet because it is a few steps down from the living areas it gives it a distance, both physical and experiential, that serves the design of the house well. You don’t want a powder room right on top of your living spaces. Yet with a small footprint house it is hard to avoid. The house in fact lives much larger than it is because the use of vertical as well as horizontal separation of these service spaces.”

Here an architect, like the designers at IDEO, willingly embraces — but is not bound by — the constraints of his problem.  IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown reminds us in his new book  Change By Design, that this is an approach most famously articulated by the great mid-century modern designer Charles Eames.

As you explore Houseplans.com you can practice design thinking as well by seeing how a particular plan is or is not able  to turn limitations into advantages.

I met up with a developer friend at the Urban Land Institute’s Fall Meeting and Expo in San Francisco this week (more about this event in a later post), and he said he was looking for what he called “Micro Cottages.” It made me think about plans that might start small and grow over time when circumstances and budgets allow — which seems a practical approach to home building in the current economy. So of course I looked through our inventory and created a collection of plans that are 1,000 square feet and under. For example, Plan 466-1

shown here, is 400 square feet

and is basically just one and a half rooms: a studio with a kitchen alcove and an enclosed bathroom. The front covered patio is an outdoor room for use in good weather. I can see adding onto this plan in various ways, such as turning the patio into an entry hall with added bedrooms and bathrooms opening off it.

Or take one of Bill Turnbull’s Sea Ranch Cottages (mentioned in an earlier posting), like Plan 447-1,

somewhat grander at 650 square feet. Again, the porch is an important expander in good weather.

A simple way to enlarge this plan would be to add more bedrooms and bathrooms off the living room and turn part of the front porch into a glazed hallway leading to them. Then the main living space could take over the original sleeping area.

Plan 471-1, below, is a 500 square-foot  module.

Designers Sarah Ascolese and Misty Weaver designed it to be a kind of multiplier.

Add up (literally!) — to 1,000 square feet — and you have two stacked modules, like Plan 471-3:

with sleeping area now on the second floor. Or expand to the side as in Plan 471-2

and you have 1,000 square feet in a horizontal configuration. The space between could be glazed to become an entrance hall. For more “Start Small” home ideas see our Micro Cottage Collection. Each could grow up to be a larger home someday.