“Three-Story Craftsman House for the City, With Sleeping Balcony and Homelike interior: No. 99”

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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…

The Search for Rugs

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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…

Photo Catch-up

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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…

A Winter’s Rest from All the Hardscape

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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…

Craftsman Bedroom Beds

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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…

New Dining Room Furniture

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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…

The Kitchen

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View of full kitchen. Floors and windows yet to be finished. 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…

A Change of Course

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Exterior Almost Complete 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…

The Dining Room Fireplace

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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…

A Fire Escape

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Finished fire escape 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…