Some nice reference houses

C2C Home

This is a great entry way. I love the concrete grass thing:











More here:

http://www.landliving.com/articles/0000000847.aspx

Chat Lunatique

Hey look the French do have a sense of humor:

Schindler

CP bought me this nice book of arch by RM Schindler. Great modern stuff and amazing most was done in the 20s and 30s

Good Home Blogs

Here are a few nice architecture, home design, or related blogs that I regularly read:

Land + Living: nice homes here but mostly in SoCal unfortunately
Apartment Therapy: well, more for NYC dwelling than country homes but still good stuff
design*sponge: she's a bit sappy and _loves_ everything but good links esp. for furniture/homewares
MocoLoco
LiveModern: people building modern houses...how familiar

An Architect (perhaps) and a Site Visit

We have found an architect (well, we think so but we haven't signed the contract yet so this may be the jinx post)! He's Matthew Bialecki based in New Paltz, NY (town about 20 mins away from our land). See his other projects here:

http://www.mbialeckiarch.com/

We chose him amongst the four we interviewed because:

1) He had completed other projects with a similar background to ours
2) Was quite keen on our interests and that we are open to some different ideas for the home
3) Has green building certification and experience
4) Is local, knows local codes and builders, and
5) (this is more me than CP) he was quite frank with us about options and approach given the constraints of the project

On that last point I appreciated that he told us going with a geothermal heating system was total overkill for a house our size and budget. He recommended a low-energy tankless boiler as a backup as he believed we could achieve most of our heating needs through proper passive solar design (and don't forget the center mass fireplace). And that would net about the same energy efficiency.

Oh, and he tried to impress CP with his art book collection. Then he vogued for us.

He had some really nice cardboard mock-ups of projects in-the-works and promised that we'd get a cardboard mock-up as well! That pretty much cinched it for me.

In any case, he's coming for a site visit on Monday 8/29 and this will be important to starting the siting process. Even w/o seeing the property he already had some interesting ideas about our streams/bridge/siting challenges (more on that later). We also mutually agreed not to sign the contract until after the visit. This allows for some adjustment based on his assessment of the siting since that could materially impact the scope of project. Also, in negotiating the contract we carved out any engineering work on the bridge since, depending on the scale we end up going with, that's a special project.

More on the visit after.

Clos vougeot

I got seeds!

Tree huggers

Official measure: 2 1/2 humans

Summer in London

thank god its not winter

Sisters reading

Much conversation was had

Choosing an Architect

We've take the summer to find, interview, and now come to a decision on an architect for our home. We read a bunch of articles on how to do this since it's both of our first home building projects. We decided we wanted an architect so that we could do something interesting but also work within some challenging constraints:

- $300k budget
- 1500-1750 sq. ft.
- an interesting but challenging wooded, hilly, and wet 7.25 acres with limited access
- and building as green and sustainably as possible

Now that we've done the interviews (2 NYC architects and 2 local to the site) we've come to our selection. Our decision centered around a few criteria:

- Were they interested in the project given the above constraints and the style we indicated
- Had they a similar aesthetic style and could they show us similar projects
- Local experience with builders and towns
- Green building experience
- Could they start this fall on the project planning with a target of build begin this spring
- Did we have a good rapport with them

In the end, only one architect satisfied all these criteria and that made us feel like they were the right choice. We now have their contract in hand and they've been flexible in changing that a bit (including fee structure!) based on the project.

We'll list the name once we're officially signed. We decided to move ahead with them with a site visit coming later this month (August) before signing. This is because the siting is complex and may change the scope of project a bit so we can adjust the contract accordingly.

We're off to France and will probably contemplate all of this over again but we're excited that we're moving from dream into concept. Now the hard part starts.

House Project

So we convert this little test blog (with several fun cat photos) over to cover our house building project. We'll document as best we can the process of building our modern home in the Hudson Valley in upstate NY. It'll be quite a process and hopefully not too painful.