I recently had the pleasure of attending a class on public interest deign offered by the Public Interest Design Institute and the SEED network. Now, I am normally a fairly skeptical guy. If Cameron Sinclair is the eternal optimist, I am the eternal pragmatist. I do not need to be inspired. I have already decided that I am going to devote a large chunk of my professional life to this kind of work.
We recently had the opportunity to be involved in an interesting project. A homeowner approached Bruce Parker, a good friend of ours and the owner ofMicrohouse, with an interesting proposal. The homeowner had a beautiful little house that she had spent the past years restoring to its original early Seattle ‘craftsman’ glory. Unfortunately, this house had the misfortune to be small and located on a lot that was zoned L1, making it a prime target for redevelopment.
When is the best time to move offices? Obviously it is a couple of weeks before you are expecting your new child to enter the world. Well, maybe not. Maybe that is actually the worst time to move offices, especially if it requires a non-insignificant amount of build out. Well, everything is better with a deadline, right?
We were recently asked to design a cabin on a large rural site for a client who envisions this as the first part of a complex of structures to house family and friends. Future plans call for orchards, a fish pond, trails, guest cottages and maybe even a distillery. What’s not to love? On top of that, the cabin is going to use passive solar design and use rainwater collection for potable and non potable uses. Right up our alley.
Below are a couple of early design images. More soon.....
You need more space. Your mother in law is moving in to torture you and/or help with child care and there isn’t any space in the house. Or maybe there is space but there isn’t enough ‘space’. Or maybe you are finally ready to go out on your own and start that software company. As it really is customary to do this in the garage you are all set as you a have an underused one sitting out back. The problem is that we don’t live in California and working in the garage in winter is less than ideal. Wouldn’t it be great if you could convert it to a nice heated office? It would! But……
We recently had the pleasure of remodeling a kitchen in a mid century modern house here in Seattle. Sometimes we work on a whole house remodel but partial remodels are more common (although occasionally these end up as whole house jobs anyway). Usually the task is to bring the kitchen or baths up to date with modern appliances, fixtures and layout.
We’ve recently being seeing quite a lot of mention of the idea of “open-source” architecture, and thought maybe it was worth a little exploration. It seems to be a topic that defies clear explanation but it also seemed to us to be a good opportunity to talk a little bit about what architects do.
Recently we were contacted by some friends of ours to design a house for them in Maun, Botswana. We certainly enjoy working on projects here in Seattle but a little variety is always nice, especially if that variety involves hyenas.
Seattle is not a city known for its large bathrooms. Many of our clients with older houses have bathrooms that range from small to tiny. Some of these are guest baths, but often they are the main or only bath in the house, meaning they have to serve the whole family including adults, kids and visitors. It can be a challenge to make a small space work for so many different functions.
We just wanted to share a quick recap on the recent Northwest EcoBuilding Guild's Green Home tour a couple of weekends ago. Our most recently completed project, a remodel on Phinney Ridge was featured on the tour and we had a great weekend sharing the house with tour goers. There were tons of people! It was a great crowd, full of folks with excellent questions and comments.