Couple of house designs
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Here are two houses I worked on prior to constructing my current house. While these are significant departures externally, a number of ideas born during this process were carried over to the final plan.
This first one is a two and a half story with large overhangs on ground floor and top galleria for an art studio or a reading room.
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This second design was one I was really after for a long time until circumstances made me go in another direction. This is a comfortable layout with a large family room between the wings, left wing is a kitchen/dining room and right wing accommodates two large bedrooms with a shared bath. Upstairs is a very large master suite that if needed could be further subdivided.
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Web design intro
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Web design, as I refer to it on here, is in the visual sense. It is how a page presents itself in your browser. That is completely separate from the underlining code that keeps all the data together and makes it available for CSS routines to be displayed in the right places. With the advent of CSS, or Cascading Style Sheet, a few years back, the information data and its presentation have been running in separate planes. In effect a visual appeal of a page can be changed with a click of a button, while still displaying the exact same information. 
One of the best presentations of this effect is at the Zen Garden, a project meant as a showcase of what CSS is capable off. Any web designer, established or aspiring, can take the available original code, and modify its appearance at will. Navigate through the 210 designs currently available and see for yourself. Simply astonishing. CSS standard continues to evolve, just like the original HTML code, and more and more features are added with each release. The changes are not only to improve cross-browser uniformity, but more visual effects are becoming natively possible, so fewer coding tricks need to be used.
Web pages can be coded directly, which is for those who are, or want to become, proficient in the coding languages, or the process can be semi- to fully automatic by use of numerous programs.
What to expect?
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The header tells it all = lifelong contemplations
My interests are broad and there is hardly an area that would not be of value to me. While a topic at hand may change considerably, you should not be surprised by seeing a car design right next to a fence or a brick oven or a house of any size or a guitar. As an example, I currently am working on a small energy efficient house (perhaps a large cabin, depending on the reference point) and a couple of guitars. There is also a line of cars strongly based on what streets saw in the 1930′s, yet modernized enough to meet current standards. While a lot of these little projects are more of a feel-good preliminary designs, they still hold a powerful message in my book. Don’t forget web design, I do it on a small scale and am not a programmer, but I do like the results. I will also be posting links to computer screen wallpapers, optimized for common resolutions. Shibboleth for these is simple: “be different, display what others don’t”
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As I am driving around I see houses, especially built after 1960, that are an eye sore. I’m sure it may not bother the tenants or owners, yet so little would be needed to upgrade their curb appeal. For some reason most houses built before 1960, or even 1950, were well thought out designs and trim work was just superb. Such trim work is nowadays considered super custom and calls for an astronomical investment. There are two factors that made it happen:
- general public has long been simply unaware of the difference and demand for such work has dwindled over the decades
- builders en masse have no skill and/or desire to do any more that is absolutely necessary to deliver a project
Get Your House Right is a book you might want to read on house design, trim, proportions etc. Worth a ton. Available here and is already at $19.77, a steal of the century. It’s a guide, a coffee table book, a fantastic publication.
(BTW, I don’t make money on this).
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