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I enjoy the beach in the winter, and a simple boardwalk, like this one, in any season. It gracefully echoes the shoreline that it borders. Barely elevated, it charts a pleasing path. Its destination is just far enough out of sight to keep the curious in pursuit. It invites us to respectfully engage with our natural environment, to appreciate a fragile landscape, while treading lightly. I would follow a boardwalk like this wherever it may lead.
by Katie Hutchison for the House Enthusiast
Blue base trim, a simple chair rail, and an understated peg rail modulate the height of this cream-colored Shaker hall wall. Intermediate blue door jambs and posts punctuate its length. The shimmering, darker blue, wide floor boards cheerfully bounce light while drawing you forward. The rhythm of the vertical blue components and the implied hierarchy of the horizontal blue elements, together, differentiate space within this hall, creating a sense of both enticement and comfort. I won’t soon forget the luscious blues that beautifully offset the creamy white backdrop. It’s a dreamy palette.
by Katie Hutchison for the House Enthusiast
These wide, antique floor boards reveal a vibrant layered color palette, worn down over time to wonderful effect. The resulting surface of rich yellow and red ochres amidst cerulean blue, all with a luster finish, would delight on an abstract canvas. It’s is even more sublime under foot. A simple Shaker rocker and matte black, slate hearth provide quiet counterpoints to the animated painted hues. This kind of floor treatment works well with spare wall finishes, furniture, and furnishings -- as the Shakers well knew and the Modernists would likely agree.
by Katie Hutchison for the House Enthusiast
Residential architects generally love stairs. They invite us to sculpt. Stairs provide scale since step dimensions directly relate to the human body. They offer vertical relief from the otherwise horizontal realm of our day-to-day experience. Mostly they provide an opportunity, in a single architectural feature, to distill an overall design concept. Their form, craftsmanship, materiality, and finish can speak volumes.
This staircase does. It's representative of many finely wrought antique staircases in Salem, Massachusetts. The boxed raised-paneled risers are especially noteworthy. Look closely at the balusters too. There are three per tread -- each a different turned shape above the knuckle. The starting newel is a marvel; the corkscrew shape seems to foretell the winding path of the stair climber. The wall panels below the staircase and the wainscot that travels up alongside it elegantly accommodate the staircases’s dynamic geometry. This staircase is the accent feature in a Georgian home in which carefully proportioned wood details differentiate walls and space throughout. It is uniquely of its time and context.
by Katie Hutchison for the House Enthusiast
Much of architecture’s artistry comes down to how intersecting elements are handled. The meeting of the roof eave and the roof rake is one of many intersections that good design should take into account.
The roof eave, as you likely know, is the horizontal edge of the roof. The roof rake is the sloped edge that travels up a gable, shed, or gambrel end-wall. This photo depicts an extended, closed eave with a level soffit that transitions at the end-wall into an extended, closed rake that follows the roof slope. Did you get that? Basically, a level, boxed-in eave overhang intersects a sloped, boxed-in rake overhang.
The resolution of this intersection is far more elegant than if the level eave soffit had continued past the gable end-wall to the face of the overhanging rake board. That would have resulted in a chunky triangular box, almost ear-like on the gable elevation. This solution is less successful, though, where the gutter meets the crown trim on the rake. Maybe the gutter return should have continued a little farther, so that the crown trim on the rake would have run into and ended at the top of the gutter-line instead.
Why am I telling and showing you this? Because the resolution of this type of detail matters. Attention to such nuance is the crux of comprehensive, thoughtful design.
For more information on designing roof rakes, in particular, check out the December 2007/January 2008 issue of Fine Homebuilding that includes a “Drawing Board” column that I wrote and illustrated on the topic, or click here to see a PDF version of it. Visit the Journal of Light Construction website to see a design column that I wrote and illustrated for them about eaves and rakes in general.
by Katie Hutchison for the House Enthusiast
