There's a whole lot more to designing homes.
Mercer Island and lots of other nice places are being
overrun by “Spec Builders” producing these oversize
boxes with their wide white trim. Other touches are
the tapered posts, pasted-on river rock. While fronts
are abundantly adorned, both sides and the back are
usually left plain- except for some wide white trim. J-
These Models are a great way to present design concepts.
Here’s a Scale Model of a family home I did a long while ago in Woodinville, WA- a really nice place to live, raise your family. I used to make these for all of my custom design clients. As you can see, these were very helpful- and very much appreciated. J- I’m an long-time member of the AIA American Institute […]
This was a home I designed for two busy commercial artists and their growing family back in 1967.
After hearing that my “Meadowdale house” was listed for sale, I called the Realtor Craig Purfeerst of Windermere Real Estate, Edmonds, arranged to go visit my creation of long ago. I was pleased to see how the various owners over the years have cherished and cared for this special home, its
lovely garden and the woodland knoll upon which it sits.
A nice far-away job designing a modern ranch home-
A very interesting job designing a ranch home on 3000 acres
for a University of Washington foreign student we sponsered.
At the time it had 300 cows, now the herd has grown to 900.
We still stay in touch with Marileen.
another of the highly-crafted homes Ray Brandes built for my clients.
Here’s another of the many custom homes I’ve done for artists and other occupational communities such as airline pilots, Boeing- engineers and management. It was a Seattle Times /AIA “Home of the Month” with these beautiful photos by Vern Greene and accompanying description by Margery Phillips. (Click on any of these photographs to enlarge same.)
a large circulation twice-yearly "shelter" magazine in the mid '50s.
a very popular ’50s MCM shelter magazine to which I was a major contributor.
There’s really no publication like it today which is unfortunate inasmuch as it
served a real purpose- “guiding” people working with their architect to create
a well-designed home for themselves.
What was once a warm, sunny, inviting Master Bath had been changed by the previous owners into a sterile, unfriendly "institutional" bath. The new owners intend to restore it with my help (and encouragement).
It would have been really easy to add a sliding tempered glass door below the overhead beam to get an enclosed shower while retaining the warm ambience of this italianate friendly bath with its opening side view window. Mid-Century Modern homes such as this one are deceptively simple and are often tempting for people to make badly conceived, […]
Our own experience in redoing a Mid-Century Modern-
“Mid-Century Modern” (MCM) homes (such as ours- below) are
often a good buy in today’s market- although they usually need
some expert updating and/or redoing to bring them up to today’s
standards of comfort and efficiency.
Another one of my early New Homes Guide Home Designs adapted to today's Structural Insulated Panels which have now come into their own as a very viable way to build an efficient, economical structure. I helped to start this now accepted technology.
At just 520 square feet, this carefree home is laid out on a 4 ft. module based on plywood sheet sizes. It is well-suited to SIPs (Structural Insulated Panel) construction. (Several links to Structural Insulated Panel manufacturers are included below).
The roof is a painted-on hypalon elastomeric coating- done in the shop and then completed when the house kit is assembled.
