THE LATEST FASHION

The tiny house movement appears to be here to stay. Even people with money to spend want houses that are thin and cramped.

Thin exteriors could bring about a civil war in the home design industry. Minimalism still dominates interior design and that requires big, empty spaces. The only way to reconcile these two opposing philosophies is to have a house with only one big room that combines all functions. In a room like the one above you would eat off the sofa and take a shower in the planter. 

It looks like the interior faction is going to be on the losing side. That's too bad because there's been some minimalist innovations that even a maximalist like me can get behind. I kinda like interiors like the one above, though they might be better suited for offices than homes.  

The hot furniture designer now is Tom Dixon. That's his work above. He likes the digital look. I dunno. It's not my taste.

The table above might work if it could be made sturdy.

But really...flat surface table design is so...yesterday. Maybe the tables to come won't be tables at all. They'll be contrivances that make it appear that the plates and cups are floating.

Minimal dining utensils, naturally.

I notice that blob-shaped day-glow sneakers are all the rage now.

Since car design follows shoe design that means near future cars will be day-glow blobs also.

I used to think mens t-shirt fashions were here to stay, but a new formalism seems to be right around the corner.

Tight suit jackets with long sleeves will make what's in your closet obsolete.

Way above the ankle pants have been here for a while.

And women's fashions...that's a subject for another post.

ITALIAN HILLTOP TOWNS

I'm told that all over the mountainous parts of Italy you can find hilltop towns like the one above. Boy, they're beautiful...but you have to wonder: how do people make a living up there? The only good farmland is in the flatland below. Do workers really climb up and down the steep hill every day?

So far as I can tell, the answer is yes...or at least it used to be yes.

I guess you just developed good cardio if you lived there.

One good thing about living on a slope is that drainage is never a problem. Gravity pulls everything down to the mountain bottom. Garbage, human and animal waste...you name it, everything rolls down to some gully or other at the base.

As you can imagine, all that climbing and waste avoidance is no fun. So why did people choose to live up there? Well, they didn't choose it. They were forced to do it. In the Middle Ages barons wanted castles and fortress towns built up there and peasants were coerced into living there so they could build everything.

People had no choice. Besides, the lowlands were full of bandits and marauders. At least the mountains were safe.

Since they were stuck there, people did their best to beautify the towns. Some dirt poor places still had ornate staircases (above) or piazzas.

And , whatever the inconveniences, they still had the comfort of living in beautiful spaces (above).

After a point, though, the nobility moved out and the people who were left didn't see the point in keeping the place up. 

Things fell into disrepair. People never liked living up there and when they had a chance they bailed to the flatlands and to America. A few hilltowns on the tourist routes made out alright but most of them became near ghost towns.

Here's (above) a village in Southern Italy that's been completely abandoned. Living there would be kind of spooky but...hey, maybe it's free.

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BTW: I'm going to take a vacation for a week. I'll be back soon!!!!!!!!! 

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.