Do I qualify as an official member of “The Craftsman” magazine’s Home Builders Club if the house #99 I am constructing (published in the “The Craftsman”, October 1910, issue) is in 1:12 scale (one inch to one foot)? Does total time invested count? I am beginning year number six, and I am betting most club […]
With so much of the flooring in the house incomplete (or not even started!), it’s hard to begin imagining the rugs those floors will eventually need. But for the past couple years, I’ve been creating some needlepoint prospects with great hopes (they’re fun but take enormous time) and collecting upholstery samples with the thought that […]
A recent article in The New Yorker about a man who has long been planning to write a book but has yet to write a word is titled “I’ll start this new project just as soon as all conditions in my life are perfect.” It has been months since I last posted on this site, […]
Maybe it’s my fatigue from our Covid-19 Thanksgiving (no family), Covid-19 Christmas (no parties, no family). Ditto for New Year’s, Superbowl, Valentines Day… I put aside the wood, bricks, tiles, glass, stones, metals and retreated to my sewing studio with fabrics, embroidery thread and my sewing machine. All the now constructed beds needed to be […]
In 1909, Stickley published a compendium of what he considered the best of the houses designed in his workshops and published in the last five years of “The Craftsman” magazine. They range from simple little cottages to large, expensive homes with farm houses, vacation homes and “mountain camps” thrown in as well. However, they are […]
The transition between the living and dining room in my city house is under construction, both in fact and in my head! I have imagined a colonnade of some kind, a half-partition, to agree with Stickley’s idea that a home should not “be a series of cells, room upon room, shut away from the others”. […]
Researching kitchens for my city house proved challenging. The only thing I could find that Gustav Stickley ever said about kitchens is that they should be “white’” to exude “cleanliness”. It’s true that at the turn of the last century, kitchens were primarily the realm of the help. Thinking of our 1909 Craftsman we bought […]
None of us will ever forget this spring of 2020. I read recently that it’s like Mother Nature has sent us all to our rooms to think long and hard about our bad behavior. Covid 19. The optimist in me thinks that after that long and hard thinking, we are all going to come out […]
Gustav Stickley, I read somewhere, designed houses so that the fireplace was the first thing that someone entering the house would see. Not too close to the entry to cause drafts into the main room, but close enough to invite the person inside to enjoy the warmth and shelter the fireplace promised. One of my […]
After more than a month of dealing with tiny tweezers, rulers, PVA glue, sharpened pencils, sand paper, little brass jigs made to help cut bricks in perfect halves, Q-tips etc. etc. on the façade of my city house, I debated long and hard about whether the rear wall which faces a back alley would also […]