The other houses to be featured include:

The wide front door on this house still holds its original 92-year-old glass panes. A two-story addition was recently added that provides wonderful views of the Washington National Cathedral.

The antiques, Oushak carpets, and Murano glass chandelier are highlights in this warm and inviting house.

Don’t miss the lovely French art from the mid-19th century in this home.

The original owners of this house, built in 1912, witnessed historic events, including a huge Suffragette rally in 1913.

 

I recently read about Thom Filicia’s “Designer Visions,” show-house apartment, which was covered on the House Beautiful Web site.

Besides the fact that Trish and I – and everyone else – were wowed by him when he was in High Point last month (see Trish’s blog for more), I also fell for his cool stairway with the rope “banister.” I never would have thought of that.

And here’s a stairway in honor of the story on organization we’re preparing for our upcoming issue. Why not make the risers and stairwell into book cases? So brilliant, I want to cry.

From above, looking down

What’s even more brilliant is that these homeowners color-coordinate their books, so they make a design statement as you climb up and down the stairs.

I’m bummed the stairway is in London and not in DC, where we could put it in the magazine. Apartment Therapy gave the house some nice coverage in this article here.

And while we’re in Europe, check out this staircase by a Stockholm architect, made with prefab pine kitchen worktops. I’m sure it would never pass code in the United States, but boy is it cool to look at. Apartment Therapy also covered this one here.

Moving on to Australia, where this beauty comes from these architects:

And once again, Apartment Therapy has uncovered another WAY COOL staircase here, also in Australia, which fulfills every child’s deepest wish to climb on the kitchen counter.

Back in the US, I’m loving what one of my favorite design bloggers, Janell of Isabella & Max Rooms, did with her own sweeping staircase. The paint, along with the quiet yet solid design, is just beautiful to look at.

I get the same contented feeling with this staircase, which was profiled on the PointClickHome site.

And this stairway would wipe the worst of moods away as I climbed to my private quarters each night. (From this feature in Architectural Digest)

The staircase above is so spectacular, in fact, that it got its own tower:

We would love to do a future magazine spread on fabulous staircases in our own area. Designers (and design-savvy homeowners), please let us know what you’ve got!

“Visual Acoustics,” which is narrated by Dustin Hoffman, is 83 minutes long, and includes interviews with Architect Frank Gehry, Artist Ed Ruscha, and architectural historians, among others.

Right after the screening, Director Eric Bricker spoke to the audience about what it was like to make this film.

“This was the experience of a lifetime. Julius was a master at living life. There was always a silver lining in everything that happened. That was the No. 1 thing I learned from Julius,” Bricker said.

Tina Alster, Paul Frazer, and the film’s executive producer Lisa Hughes hosted an after-party in Alster and Frazer’s fantastic Georgetown home.

Corinne Davidov visits with “Visual Acoustics” Director Eric Bricker (center) and Paul Frazer, who hosted the after-party.

I spoke to Bricker over cocktails. He talked about how he met Shulman by chance in LA back in the late ’90s when he was looking for some 1930s photographs of San Francisco while working as an art consultant. Someone referred him to their next-door neighbor, who happened to be Shulman.

“I was blown away by his photographs, and I was equally blown away by him as a person,” Bricker said, impressed by Shulman’s talent and wisdom. “The first day I met him, I said, ‘I’m going to be friends with him.’ ”

Bricker said meeting the remarkably talented photographer has been a life-altering experience. “Julius Shulman never went after wealth. It was his connection with nature and his relationships that was his wealth.”

Shulman, who was born on 10/10/1910, passed away last July at age 98. Shulman gave his archives to the Getty Museum, and saw “Visual Acoustics” seven times before he died.

“I don’t know anyone who has lived a fuller life than he did,” Bricker said.

Shirley Thomson, former director of the National Gallery of Canada, with Tina Alster, founding director of the Washington Institute of Dermatologic Laser Surgery, and hostess of the soiree after the screening.

Several top architects attended the screening and the soirée that followed, including the renowned Hugh Newell Jacobsen.

Architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen talks to Washington Spaces Editor in Chief Trish Donnally.

Architect Rudi Djabbarzadeh of Rudi D. and his wife, Interior Designer Fabiola Martens

“Visual Acoustics” is scheduled to play at the Landmark Theatres in DC through Nov. 19th. Don’t miss it. The success of these kinds of small independent films is built on word of mouth. So go see the movie, tell your friends, and let me know what you think.

This townhouse in DC’s Shaw neighborhood won a design award in Washingtonian magazine.

Lautman shot the formidable townhouse of The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward for another story in Architectural Digest.

While going through Lautman’s photographs, I was struck by his ability to capture so many spaces and light sources in a single photograph, as he did here in a Cleveland Park house that was featured in The Washington Post.

Lautman’s picture of George Washington’s study at Mount Vernon is so crisp, you can see every single architectural detail, from the wavy plaster ceiling to the individual dentils in the molding, to the painted-on grain of the wood paneling, to the raw planks in the flooring.

Even if you’ve already seen Jefferson’s entry hall at Monticello in person, Lautman’s picture makes it more dramatic than it is to the naked eye.

This is almost more a picture of light itself than it is of Jefferson’s study.

As Jacobsen told me, “Death is an outrage. You can never accept it.” Anyone who knows (and loves) architectural photography will surely miss this giant in the field. We are lucky to have the National Building Museum in our backyard, where his fans and students of the genre can access Lautman’s work for generations to come.

Gwathmey has a local legacy in the form of the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, MD, which the secretive billionaire Mitchell P. Railes commissioned to showcase his private art collection (named by ARTnews in 2006 as one of the top 10 in the world). Sadly, this museum is not open to the public, but you can read about it in this fascinating piece that ran last year in the City Paper.

Now, let’s go back and review his work, decade by decade. There’s definitely an evolution, but the lines and curves commingle in every design. (All photographs are from the Gwathmey-Siegel Web site, linked at the top of this post.)

 

1960s

Here are more views of the house he designed for his parents in Amagansett, NY, plus a studio he built a few years later:

 

 

The Cooper house was finished in 1968 in Orleans, MA. Very similar to the one above:

 

1970s

The Haupt house, built in 1977 in Amagansett. The houses are starting to expand outward…

 

1980s 

The DeMenil house in East Hampton, NY, built in 1983, leaves me in disbelief that this is actually a house.

 

 

Also in East Hampton, also built in 1983, is a very different look for Steven Spielberg’s house.

 

1990s

The San Onofre residence, built in 1997 in Pacific Palisades, CA, carries the signature horizontal profile, with stones thrown in – a very cool combination.

 

 

Also built in 1997, the Hilltop residence in Austin, TX, has one dramatic perspective after another – all different.

 

2000s

Gwathmey was designing up until the end, and his firm, Gwathmey-Seigel, keeps working.

This Malibu house, designed in 2000. The curves and glass blocks give it art-deco undertones.

 

 

In 2001 came this design in Bel Air, CA, with the curve making the main entrance statement, yet it retains so many strong horizontal lines inside.

 

 

This house in Austin was built in 2007, and Gwathmey provides an interesting elevation that shows the marriage of curves and lines.

 

 

And finally, the Three Trees residence in Aspen, CO, on the boards to be completed in 2010. What a great loss his vision will be to residential architecture.

Nice entry hall in the turret, with sweeping stairs:

Trish gets arty with the camera here:

The entry hall leads out to this charming backyard, framed on three sides by a loggia and two wings of the house.

Does this adorable fountain convey?

The kitchen opens out to the loggia through a spacious breakfast area.

You can just see the bead-board ceiling here – a nice touch.

And of course, there is a pantry hall that leads into the dining room.

Here’s the dining room. It’s too bad all the rooms are empty. Some staging would make this “European Villa,” as Fleisher calls it, look like a million bucks – er, $3.85 million, to be exact.

The cast-limestone mantel in the family room. I’ll take one of those, please.

The beams in the family room are ready to be stained any color the new owner prefers, although I like them just the way they are.

From an upstairs bedroom, you can see the cedar roof – unusual for these parts.

Heather – ever the gracious hostess – points out the all-important wine cellar downstairs.

Heres’ the exercise room – the completely mirrored exercise room.

And the home theater. Fleisher notes that this room, in addition to all the other rooms, are completely wired and automated for audio and video.

I was particularly drawn to the linen shades on the theater’s sconces.

This house was designed for empty nesters, Fleisher says, although he notes that a family with four young children was scheduled to look at it today. Most of all, he says, the design is not common for new construction you see around DC.

“This was a design that came from Jim [Gibson] and Ankie [Barnes] with the intent of trying to do something not as a townhouse, not as a suburban home, but rather an urban empty nester space. It’s a bold design for a speculative house,” he said.

It’s definitely not your typical center-hall colonial. Another unusual element is the master suite on the first floor – a boon for older empty nesters, or parents who want to keep a distance from their rambunctious offspring.

If you want to check out more, go to the virtual tour right here.  Happy house hunting.

These detached structures have become so popular that Design Within Reach offers its own prefab version called the Kithaus. Not only can you purchase the structure, but you can also buy furnishing “packages” designed to fit within its walls. How cool is that?

I was also enchanted with the many examples of grain-sack upholstery in our What’s New department.

But no sooner did the magazine arrive at the warehouse than I got the latest catalogue from Wisteria, which features table runners…

… and upholstery.

I also noticed that Pottery Barn has gotten into the mix with its “French stripe” upholstery on the Marcel chair.

And Dan Marty Design, whose grain-sack textiles we featured in the magazine, sent us images of additional antique textiles, but these were recycled Japanese kimonos and futons, called Boro. Here, they show the lovely fabric on a chair with a grain-sack stripe.

Dan Marty’s Boro cloth pillows elicit the same shabby-chicness of the grain sacks:

I’m only one set of eyes – has anyone else out there discovered more great examples of outbuildings or grain sacks? An unlikely pair, I know…

“They kept coming back to that [image] time and again for inspiration,” Leggin told me. And beyond the façade, he did a significant amount of work to update what used to be a tired, ’60s-era home. “We really did pretty much of a whole-house gut,” he said. Here’s the result:

The front doors were made to look old, down to their new “antique” wavy glass panes.

The stairs were reoriented from near the front door to create a formal stair hall beyond a small entry foyer.

Most of the rooms in the old house had low ceilings. Leggin created varying heights in different rooms in the remodel, such as this nine-foot ceiling in the family room.

The homeowners used their country home in Virginia as inspiration for the kitchen cabinets, which Leggin designed and The Master’s Woodshop in Hagerstown, MD, built.

The old study had “kind of a ’60s ski-chalet style,” Leggin said, with red walls, dark mahogany cabinets, and a “pickled” cathedral ceiling. The updated version, with a mantel and millwork designed by Leggin and built by The Master’s Woodshop, is much more pleasing to the eye.

The new garage leads to the house through a breezeway. Leggin also designed all the landscaping.

The pool and pergola – I wouldn’t mind being there just about… now.

And besides the spectacular view from outside, the rooms continue the Bauhaus theme.

In addition to the buildings, Bayer designed a series of “earthwork” sculptures across the campus, connected by a small stream.

Look closely here to see the huge depression in the ground, with an additional small depression and a mound and boulder inside.

Beyond the housing buildings, there are more mounds and sculpture, which are brilliant in the morning sunshine.

After passing these “earthworks,” you follow a trail across a meadow to the seminar building, which seems to rise up from the sagebrush.

The riches of Aspen are also close by, as the hills surrounding this gorgeous campus reveal its grand homes.

Here’s a parting shot from Aspen’s namesake, taken on a hike through a forest of aspen trees.

Landscape Associates Inc. of Aldie, VA, received a “Best of Landscape Design” award for its serene outdoor living environment.  

Through the Garden of Harpers Ferry, WV, displayed a lovely stone wall.

Holly Heider Chapple Flowers (my beautiful sister’s business) has been a vendor at this show since the first festival 19 years ago. It’s become a Loudoun County tradition to stop by Holly’s booth and pick up beautiful fresh-cut wildflowers and take them home for your table.

Shade Tree Farm of Sudley Springs, VA, filled Leesburg’s streets with boxwoods, dogwoods, and stone walls to complete the landscape display.

Clearwater Landscape and Nursery set the mood with a centerpiece fire pit.

Meadows Farms Nursery is a local favorite, and one of the first nurseries in Loudoun County started by “Farmer Bill” Meadows. There are now 23 locations in the DC area.

And now, for my personal favorite – birdhouses made out of cowboy boots, wrapped in barbed wire – I had to buy one. I also loved the replicated outhouse with the sign, “This Way to the Stables.”

Yuri Sagatov of Sagatov Associates Inc. was the brains behind the home above and its neighbor, the one below. “We designed the brick house on Washington [Boulevard] as a modern play on a colonial look. We used brick to blend in with the local features and steel railings and stainless-steel gutter guards for a more contemporary setup,” he says.

A most modern home. The front facade looks like a carefully balanced art installation.

Chrome accents are more up-to-date than traditional brass.

This is a “much more modern house,” Sagatov says. They used cypress siding and aluminum for the bay windows, which are the most noticeable feature on the front. For landscaping, Sagatov Associates planted bright green grass and a full-size birch tree to create depth. And speaking of green, something you can’t see from the curb is the home’s living green roof, the reason for the boxy, flat roofline. “It’s one of the greenest-built homes in Arlington,” Sagatov says.

Even though these homes appeal to a specific taste, they have broad curb appeal, because everything is clean, from the landscaping to the architectural details.

There are pockets of modern homes in neighborhoods around DC, and this one is a gorgeous example – definitely the kind of thing I’d find in California.

This dramatic home below could be a ski lover’s châlet or a lakeshore lodge, and consequently looks like something you’d find in North Lake Tahoe. Even though the outside is darker than most homes on the block, it still feels cozy, thanks to its curb appeal. The home is clean, visually balanced, and the big picture window in front invites you right in.

A lake-cabin look.

Through the large picture window, homeowners can watch their tulips bloom.

A home in Arlington with no brick or siding? I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The creamy butter edifice below has to be one of my favorite homes in Arlington. Admiring this house from the sidewalk, I am transported to sun-soaked hills, ribbed with bountiful vineyards. I can picture myself lounging with friends on one of the home’s two terraces in the heat of an East Coast summer evening.

Cherry blossoms lighten up the landscaping.

A large doorway anchors the front of the house.

The back porch and rooftop terrace are visible from street.

This is the real definition of curb appeal – having a house so beautiful on the outside that people fall in love with the home and imagine what it would be like to live inside such a handsome abode.

Versaci, who’s designed high-end custom homes for 25 years, has come to this point after realizing “over the years that those homes have become increasingly expensive and further and further out of reach,” he says. The cottage designs are “the product of a fairly long time spent trying to figure out how to bring home building in line with people’s pocketbooks.”

After touring modular-home factories around the country, Versaci reached the conclusion that factory-built homes are not only more cost effective, they are inherently green. He ticks off the green benefits in a slideshow he prepared on the Pennywise concept: “Better engineered than stick-built [where it’s built on site]; faster assembly in ideal conditions; shorter completion schedule; uses less energy, water, and natural resources; lowers operating costs; improves air and water quality; creates less waste.”

Versaci’s only problem, he says, was finding a modular home builder that had design visions beyond the double-wide. “Until recently, modular building was associated with low-end houses and trailer homes – it has had a big PR problem,” Versaci wrote this winter in New Old House magazine.

Enter Haven Homes, which builds nothing but modular homes, and partners with top architects to create custom designs. “We can bring some of the best names in residential architecture at prices that are attractive to our customers,” says Jerry Smalley, Haven’s CEO and president. He explains that the majority of homes they build are customized for each buyer. “Ninety percent of [the plans] we build, we don’t build again.”

Where most custom homes start above $1 million, Versaci’s cottage designs cost around $250,000. All the buyer needs to supply is land and a foundation. “It’s time for architects to reconnect with homebuyers to bring good traditional design within reach,” he says in the slideshow.

Versaci’s vision through these modular plans is nothing less than restoring American homebuilding to its original glory.

“The recent and now certain death of the suburban subdivision and its cookie-cutter production methods opens up home building to a new dawn,” he writes in New Old House.

Architects “are ready to reclaim the turf of the small house from builders whose industrial-strength solutions drove the charms of the American home into suburban tract-mansion purgatory.

First, the numbers:

A new report in U.S. News quotes this research: 

• $50 of seeds and fertilizer yields $1,250 of produce, according to the Burpee seed company.
• A National Gardening Association poll shows that the number of households planning to grow their own food in 2009 has increased by 19 percent from 2008.

Photograph by Ralph Anderson from Southern Living magazine

Next, some inspiring words:

Kitchen gardens “grow really well here. You can grow at least three seasons of the year, and with a few tricks, you can grow four seasons,” says Cindy Brown, assistant director of Green Spring Gardens in Alexandria, VA, who has lectured and taught about vegetable and kitchen gardens for 15 years.

This raised-bed garden makes use of a narrow space formerly used as a dog enclosure. Photograph from Flickr.

Brown says “there’s no excuse” not to create a garden, even if you live in an apartment. Containers, window boxes, roof tops – even kiddie pools – all make great gardens. You can get lots of local resources and online camaraderie through DC Urban Gardeners.

 A rooftop fruit and vegetable garden. Photograph from Flickr.

If you’re like me, and would love to have your own kitchen garden but have no desire whatsoever to get your hands dirty, Joshua Wenz of My Organic Garden will do it all for you. Wenz, who is a budget analyst for his “real job,” is slowly transitioning into My Organic Garden full time because there is so much demand for vegetable gardens. “There’s just been a huge uptick in the number of people who want to do it,” he says, for reasons Michelle Obama noted today.

Still nervous? Start with a tiny, four-foot-by-four-foot plot with some tomatoes and basil, “and every year expand a little,” Wenz counsels. Well, that seems doable.

If you’re still looking for inspiration, check out these projects by one of our favorite landscape companies, Graham Landscape Architecture. Graham’s Arthur Balter describes each project:

This kitchen garden was built around a historic outbuilding. The client wanted herbs for the kitchen, flowers for the tables, and fresh berries. The fence was designed to enclose the garden to create its own space. Rails were added within the garden for the clients’ raspberries. Photographs by Victoria Cooper

This garden features an historic smokehouse that was relocated from elsewhere on the property to create an anchor in the kitchen garden. This client wanted a kitchen garden that would offer a variety of flowers that could be cut and used in the house, as well as herbs for cooking. A profuse variety of perennials and bulbs provide an abundance of flowers to be cut through extended seasons.

As part of a renovation process, the client restored the historic root cellar to become a wine cellar. Because of the clients’ culinary interests, they wanted an herb garden. With an objective to keep the profile low to the ground so the roof of the cellar would not be concealed, and so the shape of the mound would offer an additional sculptural quality, a variety of low-to-the-ground herbs and plantings were used. Photograph by Erik Kvalsvik

Duncan Frazier, the photographer behind Redshift-Blueshift, finds a point in the center of a building (the “nodal point,” he says) and takes six high-quality panoramic photographs with a fisheye lens.

He then assembles them as faces of a cube:

Through some kind of math magic, he programs them to mold to the shape of a sphere. In the sphere, you can (on a computer) zoom toward and away from any point in the room. The result is a 360-degree effect that is uncannily realistic, and also loads rather quickly online.

Suddenly, ceilings and floors can be inspected up close. “In a way it’s like a full disclosure,” Frazier says. A white ceiling or ho-hum carpet wouldn’t do well in this format, but the extravagance of, say, the New York Library (shown above and on the Web site’s home page) reaches new visual heights.

Site selection and lighting are crucial with this type of photography, says Frazier. (Lighting equipment can’t be used, for example – otherwise it would be impossible to match the shots with all the odd angles and shadows.) For his online portfolio, he chose venues with a great deal of intricacy and grandeur – Grand Central Station, the library, a large bar with several interesting items hanging from the ceiling. Having seen the level of detail in the moldings and millwork in some Washington area homes, I can imagine this technique being put to use here.

In addition to the 360-degree photography, Frazier, who has a background in film production, does time-lapse photography and simulations of digital models in real settings:

The cube, pot, and balls are not real items.

“It combines the near-cutting edges of a couple different technologies,” he says. “There is a lot of undiscovered potential.” And of people who work with similar techniques and technologies, he says, “We’re a pretty small group.”

Photographer Duncan Frazier hard at work.

See more online at Redshift-Blueshift.