June 2008

Whilst Kevin and I were in the US a few weeks ago, I became rather obsessed with the houses that we saw as we drove around. It was my second trip to Poplar Grove, Illinois, so I was curious to see how much the development that I saw last September had moved on. The results of the credit crunch were very evident: half-finished houses that looked like they were never going to be completed; finished homes standing empty; land marked out for foundations but remaining unbroken.

But whilst this was interesting, I was more curious about my own reactions to the houses we saw. Many of them left me cold - they were soulless, heartless, cookie-cutter developments with all the personality of, well, a brick. From the road, all we could see was the backs of the houses, which featured small windows, uniform cladding and a roof that looked like it had been made using the Photoshop ‘clone’ tool. Deeply unattractive.

When you drove into these housing estates, or ’subdivisions’ as they call them in the US, you could see that a little bit more effort had gone into making the front look attractive, usually through the use of false shutters, but the sides and back of the houses were extremely plain.

In this house, you can see that the central front windows have false shutters, but all the lesser windows are don’t. The backs of these houses were even worse - they looked just like giant shipping containers. This example also shows one of the other design tricks that American mass housing developers use to try and create an ‘interesting’ look: cutting up the roofline as much as possible. Personally, I think this is hideously messy and entirely unappealing.

Here’s another example of a house with a rather overdone roof featuring dormers and gables aplenty:

It’s got soulless windows too, and I think that the almost wrap-around porch is out of proportion and does nothing to enhance the look of the house.

Now, I’m not a design expert, so I spent a lot of time wondering why I hated these houses so much, trying to put my finger on what it was that made them so unappealing. Whilst I can generally articulate why I dislike houses in the UK, it was harder to figure out the problems in the US because the style of building over there is very different. I started taking photos, but a lot of the worst offenders were seen at a distance from a moving car. Here are a couple more examples for you:

Don’t be surprised by the size of these houses - they were a part of a subdivision attached to a small airport. The bit that looks like an oversized garage is, in fact, a light aircraft hanger. Nevertheless, this does highlight another ugly trend I noticed, which is the prominence given to the garage. Many of the normal houses I saw put their garages front and centre, giving them more prominence than even the front door. Ignore the size of this house, and just look at the placement of the garage compared to the front door:

I mean, I know that some people love their car, but is your garage really the most important part of your house?

Contrast this to some of the older houses the US has produced, which are truly lovely. This is the Baldpate Inn just outside of Estes Park, Colorado:

A house in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin:

And a farmhouse near Kev’s parents’ place, which possibly goes a bit far with the rearing stallion, but its simplicity proves that you don’t need to be big and flash to be nice:

So, what are the key things that I don’t like about the mass produced houses?

• Cladding. Ground to eaves cladding, of any sort but especially the cheap crap used in mass developments, is awful. It’s uniformity is entirely uninspiring.
• Windows without ornamentation. Some sort of ornamentation - and I don’t mean false shutters that don’t shut - makes a really big difference to how a house looks. Windowsills, surrounds, lintels - anything to add a bit of character. Small windows also put me off, because I really prefer lots of light in my house.
• Cut up rooflines. There’s nothing wrong with a simple roof that’s in proportion to the building it sits upon. There’s no need for multiple dormers, gable ends, faux porch roofs, or tiny ‘rooflets’ stuck all over the place. It doesn’t look nice, it just looks messy.
• Prominent garages. Garages are a utilitarian space, they are not the face you show to the world. Don’t make your garage door more noticeable than your front door.
• Boring colours. Modern American houses seem to only come in various shades of drab. I don’t know how people can come home every day to something so dreary.

It was definitely an educational trip in which I learnt a lot about what I do and don’t like. I also realised that I don’t need to go so far to learn about housing design. America has a lot of land, a lot of people, and a lot of opportunity to create awful housing development that suck the joy out of life by their very existence. The UK may have less land and fewer people, but by George we’ve produced some genuinely awful houses, particularly during post-War reconstruction. Modernism has a lot to answer for.

But I also learnt that I don’t need to focus my learning on books and magazines - there are plenty of examples I can look at just outside my front door. After all, I’m not trying to become an architect, I’m trying to figure out what I want and like in a house.

If you’re an avid Grand Designs fan, you’ve probably seen the work of Carpenter Oak and Carpenter Oak & Woodland, who built the Argyll timber-framed house. I met Carpenter Oak at Grand Designs Live, and was delighted to later discover that their sister company, Carpenter Oak & Woodland (yes, I know it’s confusing!) have a blog. Although it is updated only sporadically, it’s worth taking a look through the archives as there’s some very interesting stuff hidden away there. Andy Parker points out that oak isn’t the only timber and gets cross at Martin Clarke of British Precast (whose job it is to promote concrete) for calling for a moratorium on timber use in multi-storey developments because of one fire. Tim Burrell talks about how no one seems to know what ‘environmentally responsible’ means, writes a really interesting post dissecting the poor build quality of an oak frame house featured in an issue of Homebuilding and Renovating magazine, and explains what green oak is.

The quality of the writing is great, but I’d like to see a lot more of it! The blog hasn’t been updated since March, and it’d be great if we could get at least one blog post each week. I’d also like Tim and Andy to remember that not everyone reading their blog is an expert in timber framing - they need to explain their jargon as they use it, so that us novices can learn something as we go along. Unfortunately, their RSS feed provides only headlines, and the archive navigation is so difficult that I gave up trying to dig into their old posts via the website and just read the ones still in the RSS feed. With my social media consultant hat on, I’d suggest getting Wordpress installed and using that for all things bloggish.

I have spent a fair amount of time over the last few days searching for expertise online about cat psychology and behaviour, and have been frustrated by the lack of decent blogs on the subject. Many of the sites I saw were ’splogs’, or spam blogs, that have taken content from other people and chucked it up on their own blog so that they can make money out of ads. I deplore that sort of behaviour. Other sites were very badly written by anonymous authors. And yet others stated the obvious, such as “cats like to be stroked” or “don’t feed your cat human food”. Well, no shit, Sherlock.

There are a few good cat rescue blogs, but that’s not quite what I’m after. And the two blogs I found that do show an inkling of promise are either irregularly updated or not quite quality enough. I really am rather disappointed. I have searched on more than one occasion, hoping to perhaps find blogs written by cat vets, or maybe even a cat behaviourist/psychologist, but it seems that there’s very little out there worth reading. Lots of mad cat people, mind you, who have owned 17 cats their entire life, believe that their psychic link to Tiddles gives them a unique insight to the feline psyche, and want to proclaim that fact on garish pink websites that display a distressingly cavalier attitude towards grammar and punctuation.

So I turned my attention to books. Turns out that there are a lot of books about cat behaviour and psychology on Amazon, so I spent a happy hour or two reading through descriptions and adding the ones I liked to my Kits and Mortar wishlist. These are the ones I’ve liked the look of so far, in no particular order:

• Psycho Kitty?: Understanding Your Cat’s Behaviour, by Pam Johnson
• Is Your Cat Crazy?: Behaviour Problems and Solutions from the Casebook of a Cat Therapist, by John C. Wright
• Twisted Whiskers: Solving Your Cat’s Behavior Problems, by Pam Johnson
• The Cat Whisperer, by Claire Bessant
• Why Does My Cat…?, by Sarah Heath
• Cat Confidential: The Book Your Cat Would Want You to Read, by Vicky Halls
• Treatment of Behaviour Problems in Dogs and Cats: A Guide for the Small Animal Veterinarian, by Henry R Askew

I don’t just have a problem deciding where to start (and given the number of unread books I already have stacked up, whether I should start at all!), I also have a problem deciding where to buy these titles.

Yesterday I discovered that Amazon has been abusing its market position in the UK to punish small publishers who don’t do as it says. The New York Times says:

In the latest in a series of disputes over the division of revenue from online sales, Amazon has disabled the “buy now with 1 click” icon on its British Web site for hundreds of books published by the British unit of Hachette Livre, from back-list Stephen King novels to, naturally, “The Hachette Guide to French Wine.”

The button allows registered users to purchase titles instantly, with free shipping. Customers can still buy the affected books, but they have to navigate to an open marketplace that links them to third-party sellers of new or used books. And they have to pay for shipping.

And it’s not the first time Amazon has bullied small publishers:

“The buy button is their weapon of choice and that’s how they impose market discipline,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, an American trade group that also briefly lost the buy icon, for titles sold from BackinPrint.com, a print-on-demand service for infrequently purchased works. “This is such a clear indication that once they have the clout they are willing to use it to the full extent that they can. It’s ugly with Amazon and will probably get uglier.”

[...]

The dispute with Hachette is not the first in which Amazon has resorted to removing the “buy now” buttons for certain books. In the spring it started disabling the icons for some small publishers in the United States that resisted Amazon’s demand that they use an Amazon-owned company, BookSurge, for print-on-demand services. Amazon is the dominant seller of such titles.

As a result, some smaller publishers in the United States have signed service agreements with Amazon. But a few refused Amazon’s demand to shift the instant printing of their books to BookSurge, which they say has been demanding a discount of as much as 52 percent on the retail price.

I have taken the Amazon wishlist widget out of the Kits and Mortar sidebar, and am seriously considering organising a boycott. Amazon control 16% of the British book selling market, and they use that to beat down small publishers who don’t have very strong bargaining positions. I appreciate that Amazon has a business to run, but putting pressure on small publishers and competing print on demand services is anti-competitive. And frankly, it’s just not cricket.

So I had a look for other UK-based places to buy Why Does My Cat…? by Sarah Heath, and compared prices to Amazon’s £6.99 with variable despatch and delivery options.:

• BookRabbit: Sells Why Does My Cat…? for £9.99 and offers free UK shipping, despatched within 2 days. Is also a bit Web 2.0-y with space for written and video reviews, discussions etc.
• Borders: £8.99, shipping is £2.29, despatched within 24 hours.
• WHSmith: £8.99, shipping seems to be free, delivery unclear without signing in.

And I’m sure there are other online booksellers that I could use, too.

When I have a bit more time, I am going to dig into this a bit more, and will probably blog about it over on Chocolate and Vodka. In the meantime, if anyone knows of any good cat blogs, please let me know in the comments!

• How to nap - Boston.com
  Naps are important, so any future home office of mine will hopefully have a suitable couch for napping too, so that I can easily grab 40 winks.
  (tags: naps napping sleep powernap catnap health productivity homeoffice)

Kev and I went over to Illinois a few weeks ago for our American wedding reception - a party at his parents’ house. The weather was pretty atrocious. A stationary front sat across middle America, spewing out violent thunderstorms and tornados. We missed one tornado by 12 miles, and there were Tornado Watches (be aware) and Tornado Warnings (be prepared to take action) many of the days we were there.

I will confess, it made me a bit nervous. Thunderstorms I don’t mind, but the idea of tornados scares the bejeezus out of me, mainly because I simply don’t know what the signs are that you have to go and hide in the basement. If you’re in a town, then there will be a tornado siren, but you can’t hear them from Kev’s parents’ home. One thing I would like to do on Kits and Mortar is to research various weather-related and geological issues such as tornados, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes, but in the meantime, all this talk of basements set me to thinking.

Kev’s parents have an enormous basement. They live in a single storey ranch-style house, and the basement has really good head height and is roughly the size of the house footprint, although I don’t think it extends under the garage. For Americans, this isn’t unusual - lots of houses in the US have basements and they provide not just a massive amount of storage space, but also maybe additional living space, and at the least, a laundry.

Even if you don’t do much more than use the basement to store stuff, I love the idea of having one. It’s cooler than the rest of the house, so with an air recirculation system you can actually use that air to cool the rest of the house on hot days. And of course, if a tornado does come, you can run down to the basement and hide in the northwest corner (relevant bit is Myth #5).

Of course, in the UK we rarely have strong tornados, but we do get about 33 each year which cause minor damage. We also don’t seem to go in for basements quite so much either. In Bath, for example, where I thought there were loads of basements, it turns out that these ‘basement’ flats are in fact at ground level, and the road has been built one storey up, supported by arches and with vaults underneath. Sounds a bit like Ankh-Morpork to me.

You do sometimes find houses with cellars, but again, they are not very common amongst the houses I’ve ever seen. A friend of mine had an old flint and brick house in Arundel which had a cellar accessible from a stairwell that led down off the lounge. It was dark, dank and cold down there, and if you stored anything there for any real amount of time, it would go mouldy. The floor was rubble, and you had to bend over to get in there because the ceiling was so low. Hardly ideal.

I do wonder why we don’t have more basements here, given how useful they are. Is it just a fashion thing? Are basements just out of vogue in the UK? Are they that much more expensive to build? Are there issues keeping them dry? It’s notable in the episodes of Grand Designs that have required a house to be ‘tanked’, i.e. made waterproof, there have always been problems. Kev’s parents use a pump to keep the basement dry, which is problematic if the electricity goes out, as it did one day we were there. But it’s not an insurmountable problem.

I really am curious to know why basements aren’t more common here, so please do leave a comment if you have any insight!

If you have always want to live in a beautiful, ornate wooden house, and have a real knack with sandpaper, then I’ve got the perfect renovation opportunity for you. It might take a bit of effort to get to, as it’s in Solovetskiy, Arkhangel’skaya Oblast’, northern Russia, but it’s a truly beautiful piece of work.

photo by Andrew Qzmn

The photo is part of a series taken by Andrew Qzmn which I highly recommend you go and look at. There are some on his Livejournal, and some more on English Russia.

The house above, and others, have been abandoned to the snow, despite the absolutely wonderful craftsmanship that has gone into them. Furniture was just left in place, making it look like the owners just popped out for a bit and fully intended to come back once they’d finished their shopping. I wonder what happened. Did they leave thinking they’d one day return, or did they pack up as much as they could take, knowing that they’d never see the house again?

Unfortunately, snow and time has done a fair amount of damage - roofs and ceilings have collapsed, walls and floors have given way, and from some photos it looks like the woodworm has been feasting. It makes me sad to see such beautiful work being left to rot.

(Link via Neil Gaiman.)

The idea of designing for cats is to get inside the feline psyche and figure out what changes you can make to your house to keep kitty happy. Now, I’m not a professional cat psychologist, (although if you are, email me!), but I think most cat owners would agree that cats really like being up. Up trees, up on your shoulders, up on top of wardrobes, or up on shelves.

Thanks jiva.

A simple way to provide your cats with added entertainment and height is to put up cat shelves.

Maxwell, over at Apartment Therapy, put up a series of cat shelves in his apartment for his two cats, Dodger and Oliver. He says:

When I adopted brothers Dodger and Oliver as kittens last year, I researched climbing products and was appalled at the utter absence of design sensibility in an entire product category.

Even the DIY projects I came across were consistently awful. [...] These are a combination of 12 and 36 units [...] carpeted with Flor tiles using industrial glue. The smaller shelves needed stronger attachment hardware to handle the weight.

Well worth going over to check out the photos (they’re copyright so I shan’t reproduce them here). Maxwell glued floor tiles to his shelves for added grip, but I don’t now if that’s necessary so long as the shelves aren’t too slippery and your cat has a relatively easy way route upwards.

Another favourite resting place for cats is somewhere warm and cosy - like the top of a monitor:

Thanks pquinn.

I have tried those radiator hammocks - metal frames that hook over a radiator and sport a furry cover for your cat to snuggle in - but I’ve never had any luck with them. My cats just haven’t shown any interest in them, maybe because they’re not very stable and so make them feel insecure. A well constructed monitor shelf, on the other hand, is stable, warm, and near kitty’s human.

Unfortunately, flat screen monitors rather rule out monitor shelves for the modern geek moggy, so I guess my futurecats will have to have theirs nailed to the wall instead.

• Trees are the Answer
  “on purely environmental grounds the policy of “use less wood” is anti-environmental. ” I’m not the only one who thinks that trees are an ecologically valuable crop. This long essay is well worth a read, but if you want to cut to the chase, go to P15.
  (tags: forestry biodiversity sustainability ecology forests wood trees)