Category: Architecture and Interiors

Now who would actually clean the place is another question entirely…

From Vintage Everyday:

Sears Catalog Homes (sold under the Sears Modern Homes name) were catalog and kit houses sold primarily through mail order by Sears, Roebuck and Company, an American retailer. Sears reported that more than 70,000 of these homes were sold in North America between 1908 and 1940. More than 370 different home designs in a wide range of architectural styles and sizes were offered over the program's 33-year history.

Sears homes can be found across the continental United States. While sold primarily to East Coast and Midwest states, Sears homes have been located as far south as Florida and as far west as California. Examples have also been found in Alaska. A handful of Sears homes have been identified in Canada.

Sears Modern Homes offered the latest technology available to house buyers in the early part of the twentieth century. Central heating, indoor plumbing, and electricity were all new developments in house design that "Modern Homes" incorporated, although not all of the houses were designed with these conveniences. Primarily shipped via railroad boxcars, these kits included most of the materials needed to build a house. Once delivered, many of these houses were assembled by the new homeowner, relatives, friends and neighbors, in a fashion similar to the traditional barn-raisings of farming families. Other homeowners relied on local carpenters or contractors to assemble the houses. In some cases, Sears provided construction services to assemble the homes. Some builders and companies purchased homes directly from Sears to build as model homes, speculative homes or homes for customers or employees.

Sears discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940. A few years later, all sales records were destroyed during a corporate house cleaning. As only a small percentage of these homes were documented when built, finding these houses today often requires detailed research to properly identify them. Because the various kit home companies often copied plan elements or designs from each other, there are a number of catalog and kit models from different manufacturers that look similar or identical to models offered by Sears. Determining which company manufactured a particular catalog and kit home may require additional research to determine the origin of that home. National and regional competitors in the catalog and kit home market included Aladdin, Bennett, Gordon-Van Tine, Harris Brothers, Lewis, Pacific Ready Cut Homes, Sterling and Montgomery Ward (Wardway) Homes.

My Dad knew Ms. Eichen. When he brought this book home in the early 70s I remember pouring over the pages in rapt attention. This was the future, damn it! My future! This was the aesthetic I entered my architectural career with.

It's funny how styles change. What at first seems beautiful and fresh and new looks so antiquated only a few decades later. The photos above are from the 70s, but even the big trends of the 90s (glass block, neon, Zolotone paint) now look hopelessly dated. That's why I have to laugh when I watch the current crop of home improvement shows where kitchens are all white (or grey, or, most recently blue) shaker cabinets with stainless steel appliances, granite or quartz countertops and tiled backsplashes. Hardwood floors are a requirement throughout a house, and don't even think about designing anything other than an open concept living area.

This too shall pass. By the time 2060 rolls around, all these "modern" accoutrements are going to look as dated as the photographs above. People will walk into these homes and say, "Granite!? That's so twenty-teens! It's gotta go!" In fact, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the photos above are the look in 2060 since everything old is new again.

From Dezeen:

This Quebec holiday home by Canadian architecture studio Naturehumaine comprises two blackened wood cabins.

The pair of buildings make up the 888-square-foot La Binocle residence, located at the top of a forested mountain in the Eastern Townships tourist region of Quebec.

I like this one too.

…but I could live there.

Cute little place on Meade Street in Denver.

But I'd definitely need a full-time housekeeper. And a 4WD MINI Countryman to deal with the winters…

I'd make a few changes…I'd choose some other ceramic tile for the floors, I'd transform the breezeway into an enclosed living space and alter the kitchen enough to accommodate full-size appliances, but other than that I do like the aesthetic of the place—especially for the climate it's built in.

And it's even local!

I remember when I would've killed for a room like this…

Okay, it's a bit large for just the two of us (we'd need a full-time, live-in housekeeper), but I do love the architecture. And it's even local!

Except for that funky exhaust hood over the range, however. That's DOA…

Having spent half my working life in the architectural profession, it should come to no surprise to anyone that I've designed my fair share of personal "dream houses." Dozens. What might be surprising to learn is that I've never actually been a home owner.

I guess it stems from the very real refusal to settle down when I was younger. I loved the ability to pack up and move every six months if the desire struck me, and as much as I would've loved to have actually designed and built a home of my own, it was just never in the cards.

I was living in San Francisco when I finally started to get that urge to settle, and while I wasn't making bad money, there was still no way I was ever going to be able to get a down payment together in the amount needed to buy a place. Moving out of The City wasn't an option; as my friend Kent was fond of saying, "Why would anyone want to live just outside the pearly gates?" I'd rather continue to rent in San Francisco itself than own in Pittsburg.

And that financial situation hasn't changed simply because we're now back in Arizona. But that doesn't mean a boy can't dream.

Some of my dreams rarely progressed beyond basic sketches:

This particular one was inspired by an advert for the American Plywood Council (or something similar) in one of my dad's architectural magazines when I was a wee young thing. The magazine is long gone but the image was forever imprinted into my memory.

This one—a small beach house—grew out of a triplex apartment development I had the pleasure of working on shortly after I moved to Tucson in 1980.

I can't tell you how many house plans I've actually designed for myself since the architectural bug first bit in middle school. As my skill level increased, if my ideas got beyond the basic sketch stage, they burned with such intensity that I had to at least start a set of construction documents—if only a handful of those projects actually ever came to fruition with a complete, ready-for-a-bidding set of drawings.

Some of my first truly personal (i.e. not copied from another designer, a local builder or a magazine) designs were a series of desert houses originally inspired by Obi Wan Kenobi's bungalow in Star Wars and the lower floor of the tri-level house my family lived in during my high school and college years.

Buried four feet into the ground with massive concrete walls to keep out the heat, this design motif resonated with me for years, eventually coming up with several variations…

At one point I even went so far with this theme as to design an entire apartment complex (small scale floor plans and exteriors only, I'm not that driven) on the then-vacant land on the southeast corner of Grant Road and Wilmot Avenue in Tucson—but I never really developed a good way of integrating multiple bedrooms into this particular ouvre—which obviously limited its appeal.

My move to San Francisco in 1986 inspired a new design aesthetic. I loved the Victorian row houses with their multicolored gingerbread trim, but I was equally impressed by the modern, contemporary variations on the theme that many local architects were utilizing.

This 3-story house was the vehicle by which I actually taught myself AutoCAD. I became so engrossed that I was literally moving objects in my dreams by calling out their cartesian coordinates!

In the mid 90s, I returned to my desert house design, armed with a new aesthetic gleaned from living in a 1920s-era Victorian for several years. The massively thick concrete walls remained, but the barrel vault roofs were gone and much more wood was incorporated along with an almost steampunk feel for the interior details.

I don't remember what prompted me to do it, but a couple years after I tired of that exercise and had started contemplating leaving San Francisco and returning to Tucson, I pulled out a plan for a small house I once dreamt of building in in the northeast part of the city, at some undetermined point along the Catalina Highway before it actually started up into the mountains. I'd completed a lot of work on this plan already before moving to San Francisco—back when I was still doing overlay drafting with ink on mylar, but since I was now comfortable working in the virtual realm of AutoCAD, I decided it was time to transpose it into bits and bytes.

As you can tell, I tend toward smaller houses. Even this multi-structure design isn't really that big. And this one's builder-ready. Not only did I do the usual floor plan and exterior elevations that I do with all my projects, this was one of those instances when I did it all: foundation, roof framing, electrical, mechanical, and interior elevations. It was designed for a lot that gently sloped away from the street with an unobstructed view of the Catalina and Rincon Mountains. Sadly, while the land in that area was mostly untouched when I first envisioned this house in 1985, it isn't any longer. My last visit to Tucson confirmed my fear that the area is now completely built-up and there are no more unobstructed views of anything except your next door neighbor.

And that brings us to my latest bit of mental masturbation:

This is the house we're currently renting—with several changes. It's the first time I've created a dream house based on a remodel, and I'm liking how it's progressing. It started out as an innocent "what if" between Ben and I, but now it's developed a life of its own and has morphed into a full-scale architectural exercise. As I've written before, it's been an interesting excursion into the deep recesses of memory, pulling obscure AutoCAD commands from the dusty crevices of my head and continually surprising myself that I still know how to do this stuff. It's also become my go-to "happy place" when I'm laying in bed awake and trying to fall back asleep at 4 in the morning…

Hey, it keeps me off social media (for the most part) and my blood pressure down (for the most part).

Made some small changes here and there. Had to do a lot of "repair" work as I call it when I realized that I'd drawn all the new interior walls the same thickness as the existing—which was a big error since new lumber is actually a different size than old lumber. (Old 2×4 studs were actually 2" by 4". New lumber is 1.5" x 3.5".) I also made the new master bedroom a big larger, trying to make it work with standard block coursing. Not entirely possible in all areas, but at least I got rid of the weird fractional dimensions. Not a big deal since I'm intending to stucco the entire exterior when I get to that point…

In addition to all the miscellaneous corrections and enlarging the bedroom, I got the pergola patio cover drawn as well as expanding the master bath a bit to accommodate a bench in the shower (Ben's request).

Reacquainting myself with AutoCAD has been…interesting. Obscure commands are coming unbidden out of memory (half muscle memory, no doubt), surprising me with their reappearance. At the same time, how some other things work have either changed since the days when I was doing this stuff full time, are different in the Mac version than they are in the Windows version, or my memory has failed in their proper operation altogether. Some of Column A, some of Column B, and a bit of Column C I suspect.

And so the adventure continues…

…and to realize my AutoCAD skills haven't atrophied nearly as much as I feared.

One of my favorite blogs, Life of an Architect, recently penned a post called—for lack of a better phrase on my part, "The Joy of  Sketch." Bob's blog has always provoked a combination of misty-eyed nostalgia, envy, and abject admiration in me. It's a constant (although not unwelcome) reminder of the career I regrettably—albeit voluntarily—walked away from 20 years ago. In fact I've exchanged a few emails with the him regarding my own sense of loss at having left the field. He's urged me to get back on the horse if I miss it that much, but at this point in my life I know if nothing else my knowledge of construction (how the bits and pieces actually go together to create a structure)—if not my CAD/drawing skills themselves—are too far gone to ever entertain returning to the profession, but at doesn't mean a guy can't dream…or at least dabble on his own.

A few weeks ago, while waiting with Ben in the checkout line at Michael's, I spied a display of sketch books that were on sale. They were sitting there screaming in my ear to buy them, but I dismissed that siren call by rationalizing, "When do I have time to sit and draw?" After we'd left, I immediately regretted that decision. It was now like an itch I couldn't scratch. Make time, damn it! Seeing those sketchbooks reminded me of how much I used to enjoy drawing. I mean at one point, architectural drawing and sketching was my life.

The itch didn't go away, so the following weekend I returned to the store and picked up one of the books along with an assortment of pens.

My first attempt, a free-hand sketch of what we'd like to do to our house if we ever bought it, didn't turn out well. I mean, it was acceptable in a first-attempt, amateurish sort of way, but certainly not what I remember myself being capable of doing. I didn't beat myself up too much over it because I knew those skills had atrophied over the years from disuse, and it would take a concerted effort to get them back to where they once were.

So to that end, I cracked open the book again this past weekend and this time (armed with a pencil and architectural scale) I did much better. Still not what I used to be capable of—I could actually draw perfectly straight lines without assistance at one point and wondered why everyone else couldn't—but it definitely more in line with what I was hoping for. And quite frankly, I was surprised how easily using the scale returned to me…

All I can say is, "Practice, practice…"