OLD EUROPEAN COTTAGES

Cozy houses are on my mind lately, so I thought I'd write about cottages. Here's a nice contemporary one (above), done in the old style, but it's a bit too...I don't know...too perfect. I'll bet a Beverly Hills lawyer lives here. Let's see if I can rustle up something more authentic...

....something a little more rural...like this (above) one.

  

Inside it's a bit cramped, and the ceiling's kind of low, but it's cozy and the low top no doubt makes it easier to heat.

What I like most about this room is the large kitchen table. I imagine that friends who came to visit sat at the table and chatted with the owners while they cooked and cleaned.

That's the way it is today in Steve Worth's kitchen (above). On entering the house, guests ignore the living room and instead take a seat at the kitchen table. This is a cottage-style kitchen with comfortable chairs and a big table you can walk around.

I concede that a cozy living room is a thing of beauty. Even so, the kitchen is a more natural gathering spot.

I don't know anything about the history of cottages. To judge from pictures I've seen, old European cottages frequently consisted of one large room containing a hearth, a table, and cabinet beds. Other rooms were for additional beds and storage. Lots of cottages contained a fire pit (above) in the middle of the floor.

Having a fire pit rather than a stove or a hearth strikes me as odd since the room must fill with smoke sometimes, even if there was ventilation. Maybe the smoke was welcome because it drove vermin out of the thatched roofs. Maybe smoke was rare because the only thing that was ever cooked was soup and that only required enough flame to simmer.

Maybe families with a big hearth and lots of iron kettles were thought of as upper crust.

Maybe an interior oven was a status item, even if the oven was only a mound of mud or clay like the one above. This wasn't a poor folks' cottage. It had a carved door, a cabinet for china, formal chairs rather than a bench, and a separate bedroom.

I can't tell what the floors in this photo were made of but I'll guess that they were dirt floors. I'll also guess that dirt floors were doctored somehow to make them more solid than you'd expect dirt to be.

Here's (above) a Russian cottage with thick, wooden walls and inexplicably high ceilings. Boy, that bedspread looks great! Every room, even in modern houses, should have one key item that's special, something fussed over, like the blanket.

Here's a cottage that's packed with cabinets that look like they once belonged in more affluent homes.  There's a story here...I wish I knew what it was.

My guess is that modest cottages, where generations of the same family lived for years, frequently had a high-end item or two on display. Over time families accumulate unusual things.

A TERRIFIC SMALL LIVING ROOM

I'm still looking for ideas I can use when I find a new house. I'm on a budget so I'll have to make a Devil's Choice: a small house with complex and interesting shapes, or a larger house with boring rooms but decent square-footage. I'd gladly take the small place if I could find something like this (above), but what are the chances of that? 

Is this living room practical? I'm not sure. The open staircase means that sound from the living room goes unimpeded up to the rooms above, and that could cause arguments. On the other hand, it's soooo cozy and artsy. I like the level changes on the floors between rooms, too.

  

I wouldn't have picked some of this furniture (above) myself but I like the color contrast. 

If I were to have a large, simplified color graphic on the wall I might choose something like this (above).

Here's (above) another room in the same house.  Once again the color and dark textures read great against white. 

Maybe I'll get lucky and find something big and cheap (above)...but I doubt it.

That's all I have to say for now. I'll end with this infinitely cool coffee table that dominates the room. I wonder where you'd find something like that? I'd probably have to make it myself.

DISNEYLAND ARCHITECTURE

Minnie's House in Disneyland is a destination I never get tired of.  The skewered, wonky look of it would be too caricatured for everyday living. Even so, you wonder if some modification of that could be made to work in the real world. 

Wonky or not, the house has a wonderful vibe and that's hard to achieve. Whenever someone succeeds with that they should get a medal. 

Disneyland doesn't contain a reproduction of the home in "Alice in Wonderland," but I'll discuss it here anyway. 

In this frame from the film (above) Alice is a little too big for the house but I can imagine a more practical scale that would still make the visitor feel tall. 

I also like the scale of the stairs. They're the kind of stairs you see in split level houses as opposed to two story houses. In split levels the higher level is off to the side rather than on top of of the bottom level. That makes for a shorter staircase.  It's an interesting idea. 

Also, notice the slant of the ceiling.... 

From this view the film gives the ceiling a different height than it is in the establishing shot. That's okay, it's all about artistic license. 

What a beautiful bedroom (above)!

A visit to a Disney park would be inconceivable without a visit to Tarzan's Treehouse and The Swiss Family Robinson walkthrough, but wouldn't it be even more fun to actually live in something like that? No, we don't have to wait for the far future when we can grow trees fast. We can do it now, with realistic synthetic tree trunks and fast growing real-biology leaves and buds stuffed into fake branches.

I have to admit that most people would rightly rebel against the idea of synthetic trees in real neighborhoods.  I'm only introducing the idea as a thought experiment.

Let me digress for a moment to ask, "Why haven't architects made use of real-size Banzai-type trees?" Can Bamboo, which is fast-growing, be trained to bend in useful ways?

Disneyland attractions are impeccably lit. It seems to me that all new houses should incorporate that kind of professional Hollywood-type lighting. By "professional" I don't mean the expensive quartz lights that are actually used for stage and film, but artistic arrangements of more safe and affordable lights that can mimic stage lighting.

Little old ladies shouldn't have to figure out these lighting schemes themselves. Professional designers should do it and install it before the first owners move in.

 Gee, there's lots more to say about this, but I'm running out of space. I'll pick this up again in another post.

BEDROOM DESIGN

Here's (above) a bedroom from Frank Lloyd Wright's Heart Island House. What do you think of it? For me it's too formal, too much like a terrific living room that just happens to have a bed in it. It lacks..."bedroomness." Wright was a peerless designer of living rooms but his imagination failed him when it came to bedrooms and kitchens.

 Ditto for Cliff May, another of my favorite architects. Bedrooms seem to have bored him. This one (above) looks like he devoted no thought to it at all.

For good bedroom ideas I find myself turning to less well-known designers. What do you think of this dark, low ceiling bedroom (above)? It's cozy and fun...evocative, too. It's like a Goldrush cabin in the Klondike or the Captain's quarters of an old 19th Century sailing ship.

I like to imagine that this room is one or two steps down from the level of the rest of the house, and that prompts an interesting question: is it a good idea to graft a cool historical bedroom onto a stylistically modern house? I'd say yes, but lots of people would disagree.

I like this (above) well-lit Ikea bedroom. I don't like what looks like a plain particle board cupboard on the extreme left, but the general layout seems fine. You can't see it from this angle but the headboard of the bed is a bookshelf on the side that faces the window. There's room to walk back there.

Here's a modest but still cozy bedroom idea, also from Ikea. It's cheery and even pleasingly austere, as if a nun sleeps there. Once again the lighting makes a big difference.

HOME DESIGN

I'll probably be moving in February or March. We haven't started to look for a new house yet, but I'm hoping for something like the one above: a nice old gabled house on a cliff overlooking a valley...servants quarters...a stable in back.

Haw! That's what I want, but what I'll get will likely be something like this, above. That's okay...even modest new houses have improvements that would have been unheard of when I was a kid: big kitchens, unusual room shapes, the home office, lots of daylight, etc., etc. 

I've been reading about the history of home design and I'm amazed to see how many ideas that we take for granted are fairly recent. Believe it or not, comfortable chairs are a fairly recent idea, and even corridors...corridors!... are recent. Until the last 100 years or so you accessed your room by passing through other rooms to get there. Even Versailles (above) was built like that...well, mostly.

What I really want, and I'm afraid I may not get, is a nice, old fashioned front porch. I spent half my childhood on porches like that and I got some of my best kid ideas there. Who invented porches, anyway? I mean raised, front porches...the deep, spacious kind with a permanent roof. I think of them as an American invention, but maybe I'm wrong.

Pity the British poor. They had not only had no porch; they had no roof of any kind over their front doors.

Wait a minute, what am I saying? Pity the British rich, too! They had the same problem. With all their money the rich still had to stand out in the rain while they fished for their keys just like everybody else. Britains just don't believe in a sheltering roof over the front door.

Even the prime minister is expected to stand out in the rain while he waits to be admitted. How odd. Why not a porch? Why not recess the door inside the building?

But maybe I'm too quick to criticize. In the part of the U.S. I'm moving to there's very few porches, and very few foyers either.  The front door (above) just lets into the living room. No transition area, no greeting spot. A person coming in the door in the cold of winter lets in a gust of wind that probably sends every paper in the room flying. Yikes!

PINNOCHIO'S DARING JOURNEY

I had more to say about Disneyland than I could fit into Monday's post, so I'll write about that today.  What struck me on the last visit was the architecture of the Pinocchio ride, "Pinocchio's Daring Journey." I was amazed to see how many iconic details were packed into it. Everywhere there were turrets and towers, carved and painted pillars, flower boxes on balconies, colorful pennants of all types...well, it would be a long list. Suffice it to say that Central European motiffs were well represented there.



Inside (above) the architectural compression was even more extreme. Parts of faux buildings overlap and interfere with each other as if an earthquake had pushed them together. I found myself wondering if real-world business buildings could be made like that, I mean with tumbling block shapes. Would they be disorienting for the real-world people inside? Could they be made cheaply? I don't know.

I love this picture! The whole foreground and middle ground is a sort of art-directed tunnel in which cars on rails ratchet up to the front under a canopy of colorful shapes. It's all carefully lit like a Hollywood set with natural sunlight providing a counterpoint. The focal point, what everything points to, is a mysterious dark cave where we glimpse a warm-colored...something.



The car we're sitting in takes us into the cave and up to the something, which turns out to be dancing puppets (above). I love that double proscenium arch with the carving in the middle. I don't think that design was used in the movie, though.

 
The proscenium in the film (above) was simpler.



The ride fills the viewer with enthusiasm for puppets. You'd think the ride would let out into a store where you could buy puppets, but it doesn't...a missed opportunity in my opinion. Fantasyland desperately needs a good toy store where puppets of all kinds can be had. Most of the Pinocchio toys sold at Disneyland are plush dolls, which are inappropriate.



They should sell posters, too, like the one above.



The Pinocchio ride ends with a ride through Gheppetto's workshop where unique wooden toys are on display. Toys like that should be on sale.



One more picture (above) and I'm out of here....whaddaya think of these pennants? I'm considering making something like this for my workroom at home.

MODERN FURNITURE

I'll be moving in a few months and I won't be able to take half my heavy furniture. That means I'll have to buy a few new things when I get where I'm going and that's exciting. 

I plan to go for an eclectic blend of Charles Eames knock-offs (that's his work, above), Wright, Indiana Jones, Cliff May, Craftsman, Wally Wood, Mad Scientist, Calder and Carl Larsson. At one time or another I've blogged about all these influences on Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner, and now I get to try out some of these ideas in my own house.   

Lately I've taken a close look at modern furniture. Some ideas stand up to scrutiny and some don't. Like Mies van der Rohe's famous "Barcelona Chair" (above): I have to admit, it looks great, but...wait a minute... there are no arms! I like to rest my forearm on something when I sit, don't you?

I might give in and get just one Barcelona chair as an accent, but then I'll be sorely tempted to get an armless sofa to go with it. I'll need to steel myself to avoid that lest my living room look like a reception area.

Besides, I like to lie down and read on the sofa or even take a short nap there once in a while, and you need an arm for that. Why would anyone design a sofa without arms?

Then there's the Noguchi CoffeeTable. It's a beautiful work of art, no doubt, but is it functional?

 In the picture above, the table top is triangular and only the tip containing the green ashtray faces the sofa. That can't be right. What if someone on the far end of the sofa (off screen) wants to use the table? They can't.

If you turn the table around then the people sitting opposite get the awkward tip. Yikes! And look at the awkward dead space that surrounds the table!

Compare the triangular Noguchi Table just discussed to the rectangular, red marble coffee table above. I like this thing. The broad surface is available to everyone on the sofa, and there's plenty of room to stack the books I always have going. Marble adds psychological weight to counter the fear that the modern supports are too thin and flimsy.

 By the way, what do you think of the Windsor chairs surrounding the dining table in this picture? My current table uses chairs like that, and they've given me years of pleasure. It's a centuries-old design that still works. My only criticism is that the ones shown here all have arms which would be hard to slide under the table without pinching fingers.

Maybe I'll get lucky and find a new home with built-in bookshelves. If I can't then I'll rely mostly on a combination of George Nelson-type shelves (above), Ikea's "Billy" shelves, and some custom shelves that I'll tinker together myself. Eames made some good shelves which Nelson tweaked and improved.

George Nelson was a prolific artist. You might already own something he designed without knowing it...like his sunburst clock or this asterisk clock (above).

Nelson's designs have a light and airy modern feel and they blend well with other styles, like the fabric pattern above.

Well, there's more I could say but I'll have to save it for another post.