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 members finished their projects in less time with Stickley’s thorough plans which I wish I had on hand. It all started in 2017 when the inspiration hit me. At first were the dreams, scale drawings, graph paper, calculator, pencils, erasers and rulers that covered my dining room table and forced us to eat dinner for months on the kitchen counter.

In the winter of 2018, my husband, Gary, helped me build the basic “carcass” in his wood shop with very little heat and a lot of trips to the kitchen to hold cold hands under the hot water tap (see “Building the Shell” post). Later it took four guys to carry my house down the hill to my workshop, remove the shop door to get it in and position the structure on a temporary table with no top so that the house could be accessed from underneath. For a while now, I have wanted to show where it is all taking shape, my shop, my most happy place, where hours spent there can feel like meditation. Truly, there is a lot more to be done, but maybe I can proclaim that the structure and interior woodwork are on the home stretch. Electricity, more furniture, and accessories to follow…for two more years (?).

This is the illustration from “The Craftsman”, October 1910, that caught my eye. The house is designed to be built on a city lot, 25′ wide, in the middle of the block (a row house), with neighboring buildings on both sides, a HUGE departure from Stickley’s more common bungalows. That 25′ specific is the only dimension I had to determine the dimensions of the rest of the facade. The three floor plans included in the magazine had some dimensions and one bedroom elevation which helped with drafting the interior. With one “party wall” (a shared wall with the neighboring building), windows on the opposite side of the house can look out over a narrow breezeway/court between the house and its neighbor. Leaving the party wall open was the perfect design for a model house, and the narrow structure had few rooms one behind another, also perfect for a model house. With that in mind, I eliminated the butler’s pantry to open up the kitchen and a couple walls on the second and third floor landings around the stairs for more visibility.

Still a dilemma, the second-floor master bedroom is enclosed in a wall around the stairwell. That wall makes perfect sense in real life but in my house, it would block the view of the bedroom and its furniture and accessories, so it has to go. A “pony wall” would not be realistic for a main bedroom that opens to the lower floor. So how to “suggest” a wall but allow visibility into the room??? There is always something yet to be decided.

The following are photos of the City House progress and some shots of my shop, tools, and supplies.

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, and I’m tempted to use that same excuse, at least for my lack of new posts. However, rocky 2021 life (and it was!) didn’t slow me down with making progress on the structural interiors of my little house and more of its furnishings. I accomplished a lot and will load a group of photos here with brief descriptions to get caught up.

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 “craftsman”, of course, designed with low maintenance, durability, spacious interiors, liberal use of wood, warmth of colors, structural built-in features and emphasis on charm in mind. Per Stickley, each room must seem complete before a single piece of furniture is added.

In his compendium, he goes to great lengths to describe living rooms, dining rooms, halls and stairways, wall treatments, fabrics, and of course furniture without a single word about “sleeping rooms” as he called them. There are three bedrooms in my city house. Two are plain rooms with casement windows that open up to the rear alley behind the house near the fire escape and to the narrow breezeway between my house and the neighboring building. The master bedroom, though, opens out through French doors to the charming “sleeping porch” (balcony) on the second floor above the main street. Details of how to decorate these rooms has been left entirely up to me.

I started with the beds. Stickley furniture catalogs include few beds and all very basic, but I did use the dimensions that are specified there for three widths. The one design I did copy is the “Knock Down Daybed”. It was shipped in pieces and left assembly to the buyer. (A la Ikea!! Stickley was ahead of the curve…again! and only a few tools were required.)

The master bedroom bed is my design, Craftsman in feeling but a little departure from the “absolutely plain and unornamented” severity that Stickley professed. Harvey Ellis, who worked with the Craftsman Workshops briefly until he died in 1904, added his gorgeous inlay designs that lightened up some classic Stickley pieces. None of his designs were ever added to the general catalog for sale. He might like my bed; not sure Gustav would.

I wanted the third bedroom to feature a brass bed. There were Craftsman metal beds like the beautiful ones I saw in the Gamble House in Pasadena, but none in the Stickley catalogs. I designed this one to show off the beautiful handmade ceramic tiles I bought from the Krugers in Germany (www.tiny-ceramics.com). I had planned the bed to be brass, but the tiles showed off better inlayed in white.

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 here on Vashon Island, its kitchen was a nice size but very plain with fir floors, simple double-hung windows and a narrow butler’s pantry leading to a swinging door into the dining room. There, and throughout the entire first floor, were large rooms with gorgeous inlaid oak floors, leaded windows, lincrusta decorated walls, fine millwork including coffered ceilings, built-in window seats, wainscoting, colonnade to the living room and grand staircase with stained glass windows on its landing. Is that modest kitchen we just left minutes ago in the same house??

So, how to handle my little kitchen? My city house plan was published in the October, 1910 issue of “The Craftsman”, so I’m imagining this house as it might have appeared in 1915. Things were changing fast in the early 1900’s. Stoves and hot water heaters went from wood to gas. Not many houses had electricity in 1915, but an upscale city house like this one might have had light fixtures that were both gas and electric as gas use diminished and electricity became more available and reliable, especially in cities.

I found many old photos of water tanks attached to both wood and gas stoves for heating water, or standing next to the stove with a gas unit under the tank. Few of them were dated, but I love the look of the tanks and made one for my house with hopes that it’s appropriate for the time. I also bought a wonderful little model refrigerator online with the compressor on top only to discover that it was General Electric in 1927 that introduced the GE Monitor Top, way too advanced for my 1915 house. Would anyone looking at my finished house know? To be historically accurate, should I remove the compressor from the frig and turn it into an icebox? Yet to be decided.

Details: fine materials like marble were sometimes used for counter tops, but usually only in the butler’s pantry. Kitchen counters were wood.  Cabinets and counters replaced the kitchen work tables by 1910 with “toe space” under the cabinets, “very ‘modern’”, by 1915. Cupboards and shelving were made to look like separate pieces of furniture and not connected to the counters. Printed linoleum “rugs” made floor cleaning easier. Walls were painted gloss white or tiled white to emphasize that all-important sanitary look. Subway tile was popular in Craftsman homes. I found amazing hand-made subway tile in Germany by Rita and Horst Kruger (www.tiny-ceramics.com). And I thought gluing tiny bricks was tedious!!! But the look is so worth it.

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 favorite books about America’s Arts & Crafts Interiors is “Inside the Bungalow” by Paul Duchscherer & Douglas Keister. In it they refer to the fireplace as the “symbol of hearth and home.” Years ago, I saw a photo in that book of a fireplace that never left my mind, and I knew a fireplace like that one would end up in my miniature house somewhere, someday. Now, this house of mine has four fireplaces, in the living room, master bedroom and studio, three rooms that are located one above the other in the floorplan sharing a common chimney. The fourth is in the dining room on a wall with the kitchen stove directly on the other side. They share a chimney that goes up a chase through the middle of the house to the roof above the third floor. I’ve researched this house plan as much as I can and find no indication about how it was heated.  It’s possible that there was a coal fired boiler in the basement, but there are no specifics on the plans for plumbing and heat registers associated with a hot water or steam heating system. It’s also possible that heating was left to the family’s fire maker and the home’s four fireplaces.

This fireplace will be in the dining room. Based on the photograph, I made a cardboard model of the copper fireplace hood, with lots of trial and error! I hand hammered the copper sheet stock before cutting the pieces and silver soldering them together. The fireplace will eventually be covered with a pinkish brick and slate on the hearth. Stacey’s Masonry is closed now due to the Covid 19 pandemic, and my brick order is on hold. “Sheltering in place” has given me a lot of time to devote to my house and its furnishings, but I will have to put the bricking of this fireplace off for a while. (To see this finished fireplace, check out the “Photo Catch-up post.)