Posted in Design Projects, tagged Berkeley, garden, houses, landscape, small buildings, value on August 18, 2014| 1 Comment »
I was very happy to see this recent project full of people enjoying the newly connected living spaces and yard. The owners also built several nice cabinets and shelving themselves. These are just phone snapshots of the space…..and yes it does look like they might need a new couch at some point. Turned out great! (Thanks Berkeley Craftsman)
Posted in Design Projects, tagged houses, patterns, process, wood on August 4, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Design Projects, tagged Berkeley, houses, small buildings, value on June 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »
These are just snapshots – client is not fully moved in – but they are very happy with the remodel, as am I. (Thanks Berkeley Craftsmen) The basic idea was to add a bedroom and improve the street presence. In addition to adding a bedroom we gained a small parlor or office and relocated the main living space to the back with a nice connection to the garden.
The new front parlor window, cedar sill, and integral color stucco
High windows facing south
New front parlor
Looking from kitchen out the back doors
New Bedroom
Posted in Design Projects, tagged Berkeley, houses, windows on May 1, 2014| 2 Comments »
This is my South Berkeley remodel & addition project before:
Sometimes before shots are like low hanging fruit. Shutters that are way too small to cover the window are one of my pet peeves.
Not finished yet, but this little house now has some dignity!
Posted in Design Projects, tagged color, houses, patterns, whimsy on April 11, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Design Projects, tagged bright color, color, details, houses, patterns, stained glass on March 5, 2014| 1 Comment »
Thanks to Sabina Frank we will have cheerful colored light streaming in from the south side where we once saw only the neighbor’s looming stucco wall with aluminum windows.
Posted in Design Projects, tagged floorplans, house surgeon, house surgery, houses, interiors, kitchen, remodelling, small spaces, value on February 19, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Many houses have floor plans that don’t work very well. In the case of this project, the first problem is a nice living room disconnected from the rest of the house. (You have to go through the vestibule to get to the living room and the vestibule is not very big, especially if you include a coat tree and shoe storage. When I arrived and saw the space it also became clear that the kitchen/ diningroom connection could also be improved, as well as kitchen storage and counter space.
The budget isn’t grand, but a lot can be gained with a few small changes.
We will close the opening between vestibule and dining room and open a bigger one directly from dining room to living room. Then we will eliminate a big chunk of hallway between kitchen and dining and use this space to expand the kitchen counter and add some dearly needed kitchen storage.
Someday things might shift back the other way, but for now, most people seem to prefer informal dining that is very connected to the kitchen.
Posted in Found Objects, tagged additions, curiosities, houses, humor, Oakland, small addition, small buildings, tower, whimsy on December 4, 2013| 1 Comment »
My Oakland correspondent saw this curious tower addition on an Oakland bungalow. I’d love to see it from the inside.
Tower addition on Oakland bungalow
Posted in Design Projects, tagged accessory dwelling unit, ADU, Berkeley, boxes, cottage, Four-square, historical styles, houses, small buildings, utilitarian on November 8, 2013| Leave a Comment »
We are working on the repair and remodel of an actual 4-square cottage from the early 1900s!
Posted in Design Projects, tagged bathroom, Berkeley, Ficus, garden, houses, process, small addition on November 2, 2013| 1 Comment »
This small addition is a spa-like bathroom designed to be more accommodating to a person growing older. My client also wanted space for plants in the room, including her large ficus plant that was outgrowing her house. They are getting close to finishing the project, but I took some photos of the almost finished interior. Most of the interior design elements were chosen by the client…but deedsdesign guided the project in subtle ways.
Some of the collaborators:
Richard Pollack Tile, Peter Renoir Plumbing, Semolina Design (Provided and fabricated the Richlite remnant), Angress Construction
addition almost finished
Peter Renoir Plumbing (Blake and Modesto) Finishing the Plumbing Installation – Blue Richlite Countertop is a remnant fabricated by Semolina Design.
Henry and Ruben ponder the floor framing
Marcia and the house before
Marcia’s Ficus
Posted in Information, tagged appraisal, appraisals make me grumpy, earth sheltered, green, houses, landscape, underground buildings on October 25, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Appraisals make me grumpy. It seems brutal to reduce the value of a house to square footage, numbers of bedrooms, and whether the bathroom floor has tile. There are so many intangibles that contribute to the value of a house. For example the two large trees in front of my house that shade my bedroom in the summer with their dense greenery then turn bright orange yellow and red in the fall. Of course there has to be some way to quantify a house’s worth for banks.
One guideline that seems pretty silly is the rule that square footage that is even slightly below grade is not counted as square footage. This realestate agent’s article has some funny comments. One guy actually seems to have hired a bulldozer to unearth his house so that he could qualify for a loan. Another homeowner determined that he has no square footage because his entire house is dug into the earth.
I thought of one of the inspirations of my youth, Malcolm Wells. He was an architect in Massachusetts who built most of his buildings underground. Here are some of his words about this way of building (from his website):
“…By letting our structure hog all the sunlight wherever we go, we stamp out much of the natural riches of our land. Weather is not kind to building materials. They need to be protected by a blanket of earth. Otherwise, ice cracks the freeways, water rusts bridge structures, floods rage because water cannot soak into impervious ground….”
“…We live in an era of glitzy buildings and trophy houses: big, ugly, show-off monsters that stand—or I should say stomp—on land stripped bare by the construction work and replanted with toxic green lawns. If the buildings could talk they would be speechless with embarrassment, but most of us see nothing wrong with them, and would, given the opportunity, build others like them, for few of us realize that there’s a gentler way to build. It’s called underground.”
Posted in Design Projects, tagged houses, process, wood on October 13, 2013| Leave a Comment »
This is another whole house remodel project in Oakland. Stay tuned for more photos soon.
deedsdesign 