CF3 Coffee Chat - Niland Residence

I was privledged to attend the latest CF3 coffee chat this past week, a special soiree affair at the David Niland designed 'Mary's House'. A little preface before we begin. Niland was a University of Cincinnati Architecture professor at DAAP for many many years eventually acheiving emeritus stuatus. Have graduated from this program in 2002, I was a student of Niland's during my thesis for Architecture. Although it's called 'Mary's House', professor Niland and his very gacious wife reside here together.

Now on to the house, which is tucked away off a gravel road enclave of super private lots about 2 miles from the Ohio River. Approaching on foot one is greeted with the view in the first photo. A super white modernist architectural sculpture. A deceiving symmetrical compostion on approach gives way to a playful play of geometric depth that isn't perceived on intial approach.

Complete with white pumpkin, the entire skin of the house is completely white. I have to mention a funny story, in that I actually never went in the front door, instead I walked around the outside to the back area lost in amazement. Nonetheless you can see in the second photo the front door is framed by a typical Niland portal entry.

Coming around to the rear of the house in the third photo, a large subtractive terrace is recessed into the volume of the house. The rear composition is punctuated with another portal element connected to a curvlinear and open deck attached to the main rectilinear form. Still on the third photo the master bedroom with huge full height windows can be seen in the foreground. The same full height window proportions run vigourously around the periphery of the exterior

Inside a symmetrical ying yang floor plan is anchored to a large and open central living space. Stacks of magazines and books line the walls and front entry. Although we were there in the early evening, the sun peeked out occasionally and allowed us to see the quality of light the house offers. The fourth photo shows the central fireplace flanked by backlit cabinet banks. The collection of glass offers hints of color. The curvlinear hearth and reveal another running Niland detail.

The collection of furniture in the house is fantastic. Nelson, Eames, Saarinen, Aalto, there is something from many of the staple MCM furniture designers throughout. Turning around the living space in the fifth photo you can see the view back out to the rear terrace with our host beyond. Professor Niland coached the beverage station to assure meeting all the guests. I have to admit, he's a much nicer guy when not under his architectural critical thumb as a student.

During the course of the couple hours I browsed around the house among fellow CF3'ers, I heard a couple times "it's amazing to see Cincinnati has this caliber of modern house." There is no surface or element not completely though out and purposely placed. The white planes hover and screen a connected volume that serparates space but never disconnects it to the whole. The utilities in the house are all concealed, light switches and outlets are tough to find, often concealed. All the heat vents run flush with the floor. Cincinnati does have some nice moderns indeed.

The sixth photo is of a model of the home that sits on the living room floor, it's enormous. The lack of roof in the model offers a good view of the floor plan and spatial relationships of the design. It's funny I can't really say there are 'rooms' in the house. No space is completely enclosed. You can see the ying and yang arrangement of the spare bedroom and office. The chimney stack a steeple of modernism.

The seventh photo shows one of the enormous modern paintings in the large collection that gives the house a museum feel. Many pieces of brightly colored abstract geometric artwork fill the white house. This is my style of art and completely caused uncontrolled drooling. From glass to sculpture to paint on canvas, they have an impressive, if not the best I've seen in person, collection of artwork.

The final photo is a sample of a hallway that had pieces of colorful modernism lining the walls, not yet mounted. There are not that many built works of Niland, the completed ones carry an enriched sense of complexity and architectural wonder. We have a Niland project here in our neighborhood of Paddock Hills that I will have to try and feature in a future post. Speaking of our neighborhood, we've made more curb appeal progress, look for posts coming soon.

Modern House Numbers

Our new house numbers are in fresh from the metal fabricator! As a component of our 'Curb Appeal' project, we decided to abandon the surface applied 'italized font' brass numbers and do something more creative. My inspiration for our new numbers came from our local Porter Paints up the street. Their MCM showroom has some cool three dimensional numbers hanging off the edge of their flat roof facing Reading Road. We also love the DWR Neutra font house numbers. Unable to pair up our four numbers on the cheap at a DWR Warehouse sale, I looked to a couple of online resources.

Really 4" tall numbers don't do it for me, I wanted something a bit larger scale. Having our four numbers done 8" tall in neutra font from customhousenumbers.com was far to expensive for us. I decided to draw up what I wanted and see what it would cost to have it locally custom fabricated. Experimenting in AutoCAD with many scales and thicknesses along with full scale printouts really helped me visualize the proportions and size appropriate for our house. After a quick PDF sketch to my metal fabricator the quote came back very reasonable, when could they be done?

A week later they were done, made from solid hot rolled steel, they are hefty to say the least. Each numbers is connected to the top mounting plate with a 3/8" dowel rod. Each number is 8-1/4" tall, 1/2" thick, and 1" deep. The top plate is 1/4" thick and 3/4" wide and will be mounted to the bottom edge of the fascia of our flat roof. Most likely they will end up to the far left of the front door aligned with the brick wall. Close to the mail chute, they will cast a nice shadow on the brick at the end of the day. Next stop for the numbers is for a clear powder coating and then mounting, material ripe for another blog post, stay tuned.

Mid Century Modern Recessed Bullet Ceiling Lights

While we wait out this rainy weather pattern that rained on our painting parade this past weekend and has continued all week, I thought I'd share a small past 'guerilla' project. Before beginning please refer to my very first blog post 'Time to Begin' with a good photo of our living space. About a 1-1/2 years ago I attacked replacing some ugly surface mounted 3-way ceiling fixtures with some vintage recessed fixtures.

A little backstory, we salvaged these light fixtures out of the Woody Garber designed Moore Residence that was being demolished (long stoy). Finally a day came with the wife and then 'kid' away. With a borrowed saw-zaw, and a full intended mess on my hands, I took to a ladder and started cutting into the plaster ceiling. Before going through the hole procedure, pun intended, I cut out for one light first to see what I was getting myself into.

The first photo shows the intial light installation adjacent to the old lights. Note the clean look of the fireplace, previously covered mostly with a brass insert. The lighting layout has three lights along the end of the room, and two lights in the center of the space. I felt best we keep the existing electrical locations. The new salvaged lights are recessed swiveling aluminum bullet lights made by Litecraft. Litecraft made some pretty cool MCM stuff and it's worth an Ebay search to see what the current market for some of their lights is.

Second photo, project was a full go, and all the existings lights have been removed. Third photo is a closeup of my unique archeological quest. Legend has it, our house once sat for awhile in the early 80's, prior to the 'Gene it up' era, the plaster ceiling had somewhat collapsed onto the floor. The reason for this is our house had radiant ceiling heating originally installed throughout the house. Flexible copper pipe is embedded throughout our plaster ceilings in the house, remnant of the old heating system.

Since this was experimental technology in its day, I'm sure the a lot of heat was wasted heating the sky above our house before the system was abandoned. Eventually the coefficient of expansion proved the plaster not worthy to encapsulate the varying temperature in the water lines. Nonetheless, Gene installed another layer of drywall over the damaged plaster to give a total ceiling finish thickness of 1-1/2". This would call for several more saw-zaw blades.

I should admit, standing on a ladder, holding machinery over your head and being rained on with dust is no fun task. I made a nightmare of a dust mess, and had prepared by covering all the upholstered surfaces and quarantined most of space. Fourth photo shows the post hole cutting dust mess which still makes me cringe when I look at it. The lights were somewhat simple to install with the rough holes cut out. The body of the lights fits snuggly into the ceiling cavity, and I ended up mounting the light housing into the plaster.

Fifth photo, the lights are in and wired, most of the mess was cleaned up at this point. The new lights look most period appropriate, very minimal and unobstrusive to the sloped ceiling. Additionally, with the swivel feature we are able to point the the lights straight down. Eager to test, all the lights worked and it was time to wait for darkness. The final photo shows our living room furniture and artwork back in its place. Darkness settled in and our new grid of recessed lights illuminating our living room 50's style.

Thrift Store Scores - Lane Tables

A couple weekends ago, I came across these two 'fraternal' twin Lane end tables at a local thrift store. They are fraternal because one of them has been refinished with Formica on top (doh!), the other is original. Lane has made some pretty nice Danish style pieces in their day. The chair and bullet planter next to the tables are future craigslist 'for sale' items. Our 'under construction' studio, with freshly repaired flat roof, has become a temporary storage room as we continue to work outside.

These two are very delicate in appearance with a ladder style rack for magazines. The legs have an exposed round peg mortise and tenon detail along with the exposed dowel connection on the rack to the legs. The top has rounded corners and a reverse bevel edge, the legs are tapered, a very Danish inspired overall aesthetic. For a mere $6 a piece we are thinking to maybe use them in the baby's room along side our Ikea couch.

Flat Roof Watch

Meteorologists often forecast rain, snow, wind, and sometimes even sunshine. They should add to their repertoire 'acorn showers'. With our MCM under a huge 50 year Pin Oak tree, we must succumb to the seasonal fall showers. It starts with the paradrop of caterpillars in the spring and ends in the winter as it drops its canopy slowly through fall and winter. In the beginning of fall we roller skate across our driveway as the Oak tree bombard acorns everywhere. All this proves to be bad news for our flat roof.

Current conditions indicate heavy acorn dropping patterns followed by repetitive roof brooming with potential slippage and irritation. The great shade our house enjoys comes at a cost. A couple of months have gone by since the roof repair band aid was done, so I decided to see how it was fairing. I had already gotten up a couple weeks ago to sweep the water and then 'baby' acorns off the roof and install some drain strainers.

We had some rain a maybe a little over a week ago, and there were only a couple of small puddles left on the band-aid area. A couple hundred acorns lay scattered across the roof. The strainers were surrounded by acorns aching to get in the drain lines. About this time every year we get a drain clog in our utility room during a rain storm. When unclogged a ton of acorns come shooting out the drain. Apparently our roof drain, exterior drain, and interior utility room drain all tie into the same line.

Operation 'keep acorns out of drains' has been in operation for almost two weeks. A quick sweep and drain cleaning had everything on the roof cleared off and dry. It has to be a humorous sight to see someone sweeping off their flat roof. Our patch job has proved to keep it dry with no sight of any water penetration inside. Dreaming of tapered insulation and no pools of water on my roof has not yet come to fruition. Future forecast calls for acorn showers to lighten up and flat roof homeowners a final sweep of relief.

Mid Century Modern Curb Appeal Part 1

Our latest and greatest project has been our ever ongoing work to enhance the exterior 'curb appeal'. As mentioned in an early post, the outside of our MCM had a fun 80's exercise in the school of 'Gened up'. The first photo is our first look at the house on a very rainy day in May of 2005. Note some of the Gene interventions: fake green shutters; new electric meter on the front of the house with hideous galvanized pipe; angular lumber enclosed planting beds; vertical slatted blinds; and a lovely glass front storm door, complete with beveled glass and brass detailing.

We have had our work cut out for us with a complete 'curb appeal' overhaul, having done most of the completed work in 'mini-project' approach. A couple years ago, I pulled out all the front landscaping, including the wood enclosures and white gravel. We then poured the front concrete porch, a maturation of the original exterior concepts. I left the existing concrete landing and wrapped it with a new slab and inset step to match. The new concrete color juxtaposes nicely with the old weathered landing. Most likely the landing will get painted dark grey to match the house.

The large air conditioner was removed last summer, with glass replacing it's huge chunkyness on the front of the house. Last summer I scored an awesome 1950's MCM front storm door from a local salvage company, Building Values. It took 6 months to come across the right door, but this one might be a duplicate of the original. The door is simply trimmed with a removable glass frame, even the color almost matched our original maroon color.

This past Spring, a bad storm caused the next door oak tree to drop a huge limb that ripped out our entire electric service, meter and all. Long story short, we lived for almost a week off a generator. In the end we had the new meter and service installed on the side of the house, the required piping, etc was installed very cleanly next to our downspout to conceal it from the street view, photo to come in follow up posts.

We also installed two lines of aggregate pavers that were sitting stacked out back when we bought the house. The smaller ones are set in gravel next to the porch and along the entire front of the house with aluminum landscape edging. The larger ones are offset parallel to the porch. Part of our larger idea is to have a long rectilinear planting bed between these two walkways. Currently we are debating on whether to pour concrete or to set some patterned pavers for the landscape enclosure. The jury is still out. The outline of this new enclosed area can be seen in the fifth photo. Currently I've dug the trench for the concrete or paver enclosure.

With the studio roof recenlty fixed we've shifted gears to working outside while the weather is still nice. Painting the front of the house and getting the landscape enclosure finished is the goal before fall sets in. We've decided to go with a dark grey for the front color of the house (see sample in the third photo). We think this will compliment the red of the brick and keep the color scheme simple. The existing tan is going to remain on the flat roofline until next spring, unless we get our act together and go painting bonanza.

Around the new front storm door, we have patched all the gouges and nailheads from the installation. Since I reused the original redwood, I knew I had this tedious chore coming, much of the jamb face had damage, insert wood putty. A lot of ivy once covered our house, a ton of its remnants have left their mark on the concrete fascia and soffit. We decided not to paint the concrete finish, but to clean it and patch as necessary.

We certainly have had a few good laughs at how our house has looked, oh, for the past year or so. With a red front door, a white primed window, the other windows sage green, and chicken pox on our front door, how can you not laugh? The antique house numbers on the mail chute door have been removed and its come time to work on the windows. I have re-glazed several windows on the house and have to say, reinstalling new glass in a metal casement window is no easy task. We are focusing on painting the front 'wooden rectangle' face with a lot of window prep work before painting. We are going to extend around to the redo the two studio windows in the next phases.

This past weekend we scraped all the old caulk around the wood and windows in preparation to re-seal all the material connections, currently the front wall is quite drafty. I started reglazing with the largest window, you can see some process in the last three photos. Basically, you warm the glazing up in your hand, roll out small ropes and finger apply the glazing compound into a 45 degree angled profile from the glass to metal frame. Followed with several passes with a 1" putty knife, you work the putty to a nice smooth finish. It took me 4 hours from start to finish on the large window and the smaller adjacent window. The fresher the window glazing the smoother the job.