Recently in Ideas Category

We forgot to mention that the reason we are looking at color palettes is because we are thinking of painting each interior door a different solid color. The front door will be red (it's glass so the frame will be red) and the doors to the bathroom, basement, guest bedroom and our bedroom we have yet to decide on. Nate mentioned that a red door is something of a Rapson signature and we think it would look great.

Here are a few color stories using the Corbusier palette (we'd never be able to afford the real paint though!):

Thoughts on the bathroom...



We would of course need some storage in there too, but I think we want to go with furniture for that rather than built-in. Like a narrow credenza/shelf or bench along the one wall between the doors, something wooden. We could do subway tile floor to ceiling and we'd use it for the base of the tub as well. The tub is an extra deep, round, Japanese-style soaking tub. The shower wouldn't be enclosed with a curtain or anything, sort of an open space with a shallow floor to ceiling wall next to the door.

Toilet

Bathtub

Sink

As things get further along, we need to start thinking about details like finishing and hardware.

Door knob $ 6.99 ea



Rosette $2.39 ea

We read an article about this house in upstate New York in Elle Décor the other day and found all of it very inspiring.

Doing things backwards, we bought Jill Greenberg's bear photo for a wall that has yet to be built. And when we purchased it clampart also gave us a copy of the very excellent companion book of her Ursine photos. I guess we have to remember to never invite Stephen Colbert over.

In doing and extra little bit of research about prefabs online, we stumbled upon Wieler. Not sure how we missed this one in our first round of looking but we are intrigued. The houses are based on a case study house designed in 1945 by Ralph Rapson. Very cool. And the cost per square foot is pretty much the same as the weeHouse. And according to the website, they include more services in the $140 - $200/sqft:

• Allowance for building permits & local impact fees
• Site preparation
• Allowance for foundation (on crawl space, basement additional cost)
• All off-site construction and on-site finishing of home
• Exterior and interior doors, windows, flooring, plumbing fixtures, hardware, lighting fixtures
• HVAC installation
• Appliances
• Exterior siding
• Delivery and set costs
• General contractor, engineering, and architectural fees

The model that would make the most sense for us is the starter with an addition of 12'x24' module. The original floorplan looks like this:
Here is a revised version of that plan with the addition as two bedrooms. The house would then be 864 sq/ft. It would have a guest room/den and a master bedroom with a built in closet that has sliding doors out to the patio: Here are some other views of the starter plan:

It may be early to be decorating the walls of our imaginary Villa Straylight, but we found the perfect piece of art; this bear from Jill Greenberg's Ursine series. We've been huge fans of her work for a while now, the hilarious and surprising monkey portraits and the controversial crying children. But the idea of taking the bear out to the woods seems perfect.

The name "Villa Straylight" comes from a fictional house in William Gibson's book Neuromancer. It is the home of the Tessier-Ashpool family who appear in the Sprawl trilogy novels. The family owns Freeside, a space station shaped like a spindle constructed in high orbit. The family resides in the Villa Straylight, which occupies one end of the spindle.

[via Wikipedia]