It’s the second most used area in the house — right after the kitchen — but is oddly reminiscent of your college dorm room. It’s a hub of household activity — home management tasks, kids’ school stuff, take-home work from your day job — all stored and filed in those ugly cardboard boxes. It’s wired — high speed Internet, a snappy new computer, a color printer — along with a nest of wiring all in a mess at your feet. The rest of your house looks great but your home office looks, well, neglected. Isn’t it time to do something about it? (more…)
STEVE KIERAN STOPS BRIEFLY to survey the Chesapeake Bay from the living room of his half-built house. It’s a great view, but today he’s most interested in what’s inside the walls of his utility room.
“Look at that,” Kieran says, leading me into a small, tidy space filled with neat bundles of flexible orange tubing. Bolted to the wall is a row of black manifold boxes, each the size of a coffee cup. “It’s beautiful. It’s like the engine of a car.” He’s right; it looks less like a typical utility space – meters and junction boxes crammed with wires that splay off in all directions – and more like a piece of industrial design, crafted with planning and precision. And for good reason: This room and two more like it hold the house’s high tech systems. It arrived at the site as a single unit stuffed with a tankless water heater, pumps, and other equipment ready to hook into the air, water, data, and power systems. (more…)
Joy Kacik has had a lifelong love affair with older houses.
They’re lovely to look at, she says, but inevitably come with one of two problems: They cost too much to repair and maintain or, even worse, have had their architectural details and charm torn out by previous owners.
When the North Hills native decided to relocate in the early 1990s to the Avery’s Fields development in Cranberry, she found a way around that predicament: She built a new “old” house.
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THE phrase “bachelor pad” may evoke shag rugs, an oversize bed and an overwrought and conspicuous sound system — or perhaps for the contemporary bachelor, coolly minimalist modular seating, an oversize bed and an overwrought and inconspicuous sound system.
But two young New York bachelors, one in real estate, one a designer, have found new ways to mark their territories.
One has suspended furniture from the ceiling and steadied it with cables; even the fishbowl hangs from above. The other has placed furniture, electronics and plumbing fixtures on wheels, sometimes encased in vitrines. The devices under the sofa include a large-capacity MP3 player, a turntable, a DVD player and a karaoke machine. (more…)
Looking for ways to combat suburban sprawl, developers are bringing to market creative, high-density communities in mature suburban locations across the United States. From townhomes to mixed-use apartments to “Big House” designs, new developments are offering residents a rich variety of stylish housing options outside of city limits. Here are case studies of three recent projects that stand out for their designs and innovative use of land— resulting in apartment communities whose appeal rivals that of any single-family home.
City Embraces “Double Density” Due to Striking Design
When it comes to the density a suburban city will allow, a daring design can make all the difference in the world. Case in point: Waterford Place, the $125 million mixed-use development that Shea Properties opened in late 2003 in the City of Dublin, an East Bay suburb of San Francisco. (more…)
