Kits and Mortar

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.

Filed under : design

0 Comment »

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!

Filed under : design, rooms

0 Comment »

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.)

Filed under : design

0 Comment »

I had an email from Peter MacLellan the other day, telling me about a “360 degree immersive image” of the interior of Black Sheep House that he put together for the builders, Miles of Harris Construction. He says it “shows all the exposed timberwork before it was plastered. Amazing joinery - it’s a pity it was largely covered up.”

And so it does! Well worth a look, particularly at the roof, which is a little bit more complex than your average. Beautiful work.

Filed under : design, materials

0 Comment »

I was watching Property Ladder the other day, the show where Sarah Beeny offers expert advice to a couple of property developers which they promptly ignore. The show I was watching included a lady who was renovating a flat in a huge old manor house where the layout was complicated by the fact that in order to get from the kitchen to the dining room you had to go through a third room, effectively turning that room into a very big corridor. Sarah Beeny suggested that she put in a secret door, one disguised to look like a part of the wall or a bookshelf, so that there was access from kitchen to dining room without compromising the character of either.

I thought it sounded like a really good advice and she took the wannabe property developer to a similar place that had a secret door and it worked fabulously well. You could barely tell it was there, decorated as it was just like the rest of the wall. The idea was, predictably, dismissed out of hand.

I really rather like the idea of hidden doors. This one is rather fabulous:

Thank you Kelly Sue.

And there are companies out there that specialise in hidden doors. The aptly named Hidden Door Company has some nice ones, as does Space Dan Diego. If you want really cheesy automated hidden doorways, controlled by a James Bond-esque candlestick or maybe a fingerprint scanner, then Hidden Passageways has some very amusing ideas. These are all US companies, but I am sure there’s some in the UK too.

I definitely think that a hidden doorway has to go on my List of Things I Want In My House!

Filed under : design, doors, on TV

5 Comments »

Kevin and I love books. We have just one sad little bookshelf here in our flat, which holds those books of mine that I cannot live without, and others that we have bought between us since we moved in together. The rest of my books are in boxes in my parents’ loft and Kevin’s are all in boxes in a 5ft x 10ft lock-up in Maryland, USA.

I think one thing that we’re both really looking forward to, one day when we buy a place somewhere, is getting all of our books together in one spot and unpacking them in our own little library. Indeed, I’ve always wanted to have a library, and Kev has to, so I think that it’ll be one thing that’s definitely included in the plans for our house, when we get round to drawing them up.

Thank you, Stewart *

Turns out that we’re not alone in lusting after a library. An article in the Telegraph, Interiors: Rooms that lose none of their shelf life, (found via Shedworking) says that:

In the survey of 4,000 people, 15 per cent said they would like a library compared to 13 per cent wanting a gym, 9 per cent a music studio and just 8 per cent a home cinema.

That doesn’t really surprise me. Books are special things, they have a warmth and humanity lacking from many other physical objects. They have a smell that reminds me of childhood, and they are the instantiation of knowledge, discovery, and escape. Despite the invention of the ebook and ebook reader, I doubt that paper books will ever go away as a product, because collecting and displaying books is still, for some of us, a great joy.

Of course, you need some space to have a room designated specially as a library, but that doesn’t mean you can’t line the walls with books. My Aunty Stella, out in Sydney, Australia, discovered the last time that she moved house that she had 9 cubic metres of books. She discovered this because she packed them all into tea chests which are a metre tall, wide, and deep. She then discovered that a tea chest full of books is too heavy even for beefy Australian removals men to lift. When they weren’t in boxes, her books lined every spare wall in the house on shelves made of planks and bricks - a shelving technique I’ve used myself, but which requires one to have quite considerable faith in the strength of your floor.

If you don’t have enough space for a library, or to line your walls with shelves - we don’t, there are no spare walls in our flat at all - then you could always try the technique used by London couple, Leonie and Rhodri. In remodelling their top-floor flat, they converted their loft into a bedroom and put in a staircase that doubles as a library. (Lots more pictures in the Apartment Therapy gallery or on Gizmodo.)

Personally, I’d be scared of kicking the books, and of going arse over tit down such a steep staircase (it’s almost more ladder than stairs). Being left-handed and left-footed, I’d be likely to put the wrong foot on the wrong tread at the wrong time, and I hate to think what would happen next.

I’ve always had a bit of a thing for libraries that have an upper gallery, such as those you find in castles and stately homes. There’s something about having to go up a ladder, preferably a wrought iron one, to a little balcony in order to fetch down a book that appeals to the hopeless romantic in me. In such a library, the urge to cover remaining wall space in Jacquard tapestries and to have a carved limestone fireplace big enough to talk into would be almost too much to resist.

This gorgeous two-storey library just makes me drool uncontrollably. Kevin too.

Thank you, Champagne Chic

Can you imagine having such an amazingly beautiful library in your house? More to the point, can you imaging having the budget to have such an amazingly beautiful library in your house? Wow. I struggle a bit, but it gives me something to aspire to.

* This is so weird. Wherever possible I use Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr on my blogs, and I reckon that about 50% of the time, the images I use turn out to be from people I know. In this case, not only do I know (vaguely) Stewart Butterfield, he also happens to be one of the people who started Flickr. But the fact that his photo was the first one to shop up on a CC search on ‘home library’ is entirely co-incidental. Obviously I just know a lot of good photographers who use Flickr and CC licences!

Filed under : design, libraries, rooms

2 Comments »

If you’ve ever been tempted to run away from it all and escape to the Highlands - and I will admit, I’m tempted every day - you’ll fall in love with Black Sheep House. (Via Shedworking and The Times.)

It used to be a ‘black house’, a single-room dwelling common in the Highland and islands right up until the Second World War. This particular black house was being used as a sheep shed until it was bought by Christine and Pete Hope, who decided to renovate it. It has two double bedrooms, a big living space, underfloor heating, and a Japanese soak tub (a small but deep bath with a seat in it). The views look fabulous views, and the turf roof and stone walls make it blend in beautifully with its surroundings.

Because the build went over-budget, costing £130k instead of £50k, the Hopes have turned it into a guest house, whilst they live in a nearby rented cottage. The cottage sleeps four and goes for between £600 and £1080 per week, which is a bargain if you ask me! I’m obviously not the only person who thinks that, as they’re solidly booked (at time of writing) until late August.

Travel to Black Sheep House could be a bit challenging, though. It’s near Tarbert on the Isle of Harris, which you can get to via ferry from Uig, on the Isle of Skye. That’d be a good 14 hours by car, so you’d probably want to fly.

Filed under : case studies, design

1 Comment »

Ever fancied living in an egg? If so, then perhaps Eco Hab houses are for you. Small, but cheap with a starting price of £17,000, you could probably fit one in your back garden, or in the corner of a plot you intended to build on.

Currently I think they’re a bit too titchy to actually live in for any length of time, not if you actually want to retain your sanity. The Eco Hab 4 (it’s not clear what happened to Eco Habs 1 to 3) is just 4m in diameter, and 5.3m tall, giving a total of 12 m sq on each level. From the website:

The ground floor comprises of a kitchen diner / living room and a separate bathroom. The first floor is the sleeping and living quarters that is also styled to double as a study, and has a Perspex disc (1 metre dia x 25mm thick) covered in toughened glass set into the floor to let light permeate the building.

The transparent domed roof light allows for an abundance of natural lighting and can be shaded as required.

The upcoming Eco Hab 6 (clearly odd numbers are out of fashion these days) will be much bigger, with enough room to house a family of four long term.

The design is very compact, as the virtual tour shows, without an inch of wasted space. It reminds me very much of the caravans we used to go on holiday in when I was a kid, except circular. Space is at a premium in a caravan, so there was storage under every chair and most seats - and certainly the table - turned into beds. That’s fine for a couple of weeks in Cornwall, but less practical for living in.

What’s more interesting about the Eco Hab is that they can be constructed off grid, i.e. unconnected to mains power, water or sewerage, depending instead on wind and solar power, with a dry toilet and rainwater collection and filtering.

Could be perfect if you need a spare room in a hurry!

Filed under : design

2 Comments »

One of the fabulous things about Kits and Mortar has been how fast the idea has chimed with so many people. I’ve never started a blog which has prompted so many messages by email and Twitter from people interested in the same subject who wanted to suggest ideas. It has amazed me - after all, Kits and Mortar has only been around for a little over a week! So today’s post comes to you thanks to Jemima, who emailed me this morning about Earthships.

Now, I know what a mothership is, but earthships are new to me. Turns out that they are houses made of local unwanted materials. I’m not going to use the word ‘rubbish’, because that has unfair connotations such as “it stinks, rots away, and is generally bad”; but nor am I going say that they use recycled materials, because that implies that they reuse bricks, blocks, girders, etc. Instead, these houses are made of tires packed with dirt, empty bottles and drinks cans.

The Brighton earthship. Thanks London Permaculture!

The idea was developed by Mike Reynolds, who’s built a couple of hundred of earthship houses in New Mexico, as The Telegraph reports:

The specific advantages of the earthship model are spelt out by Mike Reynolds, who has built about 200 such buildings in the region around Taos, in New Mexico. “An earthship has no utility bills because it solves the issue of internal temperature by means of a highly efficient insulation system,” he says. “Its power comes from solar and wind energy. A catchment system on the roof collects rain and provides all the necessary water, which is recycled four times. It processes its own sewage, which is diverted into a reed bed and provides manure for the garden. And in its construction, it recycles the rubbish we create.”

An earthship is really just a self-sufficient greenhouse with a huge, inbuilt storage heater. On three sides, it is tucked into a bank of earth - ideally, a natural hill - and lined with walls of tyres. The fourth side, the front, which must face south, is all glass. Heat builds up during the day (natural ventilators cool it down if necessary) and the surrounding thermal mass of the earth radiates the heat back at night. In many respects, it provides the solution that the award-winning Hockerton housing project in Nottinghamshire does, but the three-sided insulation of that scheme is made of concrete.

These photos show walls being constructed on a build in New Mexico:

Thanks Mrs Hilksom!

Thanks stereogab!

Of course, once the walls are rendered, they can look quite lovely:

Thanks Josh Russell!

But I’m left feeling very uneasy by some of the ideas promulgated by Earthship.net. Their ideas about using solar and wind energy, catching rain for water supplies, and processing sewerage using read beds are fine, but I’m not yet convinced that using tyres, aluminium cans and glass bottles is actually the best way to reuse these materials.

Firstly, aluminium can be recycled and, in my opinion, should be. Aluminium is a finite resource, and whilst it’s unlikely to run out in our lifetimes, it is going to run out one day. Additionally, refining metals is a more energy-hungry, resource-intensive and polluting process than recycling them. Aluminium is made from bauxite which contains alumina and, according to WasteOnline:

Recycling 1kg of aluminium saves up to 6kg of bauxite, 4kg of chemical products and 14 kWh of electricity.

Recycling aluminium requires only 5% of the energy and produces only 5% of the CO2 emissions as compared with primary production and reduces the waste going to landfill. Aluminium can be recycled indefinitely, as reprocessing does not damage its structure. Aluminium is also the most cost-effective material to recycle.

A recycled aluminium can saves enough energy to run a television for three hours.

If all the aluminium cans in the UK were recycled there would be 14 million fewer full dustbins each year.

If we want to protect the environment, we should be recycling our aluminium cans, not turning them into walls. The earthship fails the environment on aluminium.

What about glass? Well, again, glass is easy to recycle and doing so saves the use of raw materials, reduces the energy required to create glass, and saves C02. Stats again from WasteOnline:

For every tonne of recycled glass used, 1.2 tonnes of raw materials are preserved.

If recycled glass is used to make new bottles and jars, the energy needed in the furnace is greatly reduced. After accounting for the transport and processing needed, 315kg of CO2 is saved per tonne of glass melted.

Sorry, but earthships fail on glass too.

Finally, tyres. It is illegal to dump tyres in landfill sites in the EU, and burning them produces pollution, but they can also be recycled by processes such as retreading. Otherwise, the tyre can be dismantled, the metal rims recycled separately and the rubber used for other purposes, or ground:

Grinding is the most widespread materials recovery process in the UK. In 1999 it is estimated that 83,000 tonnes of tyre were granulated. This process produces a range of crumb sizes through the progressive size reduction process with the energy used to break up tyres increasing as the particle size decreases. Crumb is used in sports and play surfaces, brake linings, landscaping mulch, carpet underlay, absorbents for wastes and shoe soles. Crumb can also be recycled in road asphalt. Rubberised asphalt can increase road elasticity, temperature range and resistance to oxidation, which can result in fewer ruts, potholes and cracks in the surface. In 2000 a crumb road was laid near Battle in East Sussex.

Some crumb can be used in formulations with virgin rubber, but this is less than 5% of the total. Salford University in conjunction with Pirelli and Corus has produced a crumb 0.4mm in diameter, small enough to be recycled in tyres. Pirelli plans to increase the 5% rubber crumb content currently used in manufacture to 20% in 2006. Corus hopes to use the steel innards for smelting. For contact details of UK based companies involved in rubber crumbing and other recovery methods visit the Used Tyre Working Group website: www.tyredisposal.co.uk

There are other ways to recycle tyres, but most - 40% - are not recycled but instead used in a landfill, stockpiled or illegally disposed of.

So perhaps using tyres in building may not be a bad alternative, although there’s also the question of whether they release pollutants into the environment. I don’t have time to research that one right now, so it’s going to have to remain an open question.

Equally unanswered is the question of whether tyres rammed with earth actually make a good building material. I don’t have the expertise to say, but I wouldn’t like my house made of them.

I’m also disturbed and saddened by the anti-wood propaganda on the Earthship.net site:

We have built out of wood for centuries. Wood is organic and biodegradable. It goes away. So we have developed various poisonous chemical products to paint on it and make it last. This, plus the fact that wood is light and porous, makes it a very unsatisfactory building materials. This is not to mention the fact that trees are our source of oxygen. For building housing that lasts without chemicals we should look around for materials that have durability as an inherent quality rather than trying to paint on durability. Wood is definitely a good materials for cabinet doors and ceilings where mass is nto a factor and where it protected so it will not rot, but the basic massive structure of buildings should be a natural resource that is inherently massive and durable by its own nature.

Sadly, this is rubbish. Wood can be very durable and strong indeed. Oak, for example, strengthens as it ages, and is not prone to decay. That’s why our ancestors built so much with it. Indeed, as long as wood is sourced from local sustainable forests, it is very environmentally friendly.

A couple of hundred years ago, ship builders across the UK were planting trees as part of their plan to ensure the Royal Navy never went short of timber for its ships. Of course, metal ships came along and the wood wasn’t needed, but it is perfectly possible to manage timber sources ethically and ensure that we have a steady supply of good wood. Indeed, using wood from managed forests could even result in more trees being planted, something that should please even the greenest of people.

To say that cutting down trees is bad, that wood makes a poor building material, and “goes away” is a naive and blinkered attitude. Equally, to insist that wood preservatives have to be noxious is also ignoring the preservatives available which are environmentally friendly.

Overall, I’m disappointed by the earthship project. It seems to me to have its roots in fantasy instead of reality, and I think it lets the environment down on some key points. Building a green home isn’t just about renewable energy, saving water, and processing sewerage. And green materials are far more complex than just using whatever’s lying about. For every can stuck in a wall, how much extra bauxite has to be dug up to make a new one? For every glass bottle, how much extra sand?

I doubt that our home will be 100% green, because I think that’s an impossible target to attain, but whatever compromises we make, we’ll make them with our eyes open, and we’ll keep our heads out of the clouds.

Filed under : case studies, design, materials

8 Comments »