A furniture company rented our house about a month ago to shoot photos for their latest line of furniture. We decided to go along with it just because it was a change of pace. The first picture is the house before they arrived, and then the pix they took. We were out of town at the time, but when I got back there was ZERO evidence they’d been there, and if it wasn’t for these pictures and the testimony of the house sitter, I’d swear they never showed up.
The term they used for the house is “skyloft”, which is kind of cool. Always interesting to learn how other people see something. View Image View Image View Image View Image View Image View Image View Image View Image View Image View Image
Edited 7/22/2006 1:58 pm ET by CloudHidden
Replies
Wow! They got all that up your driveway? And didn't break anything? WOW.
Spheramid Enterprises Architectural Woodworks
" I am not an Activist, I am, a Catalyst. I lay around and do nothing, until another ingredient is added"
Amazing house, interesting pool table. Keep hearing about a HGTV show about this place, but have never seen it.. up here in canada we get different programming.
cloud... this is a cool pic.... 'course , they all were
View ImageMike Smith Rhode Island : Design / Build / Repair / Restore
Awesome! Could you send it all here, pretty please???
Did they give you any free samples? :)
Your house is great.....
Cloud
Very cool, a little to contemorary for me but well done.
Doug
Nice place Cloud, would like to see it in the flesh sometime.
That's an amazing place. You must never get tired of looking around and saying to yourself, "This is so coooool!"
"Would someone please give Bush a BJ so we can impeach him?" bumper sticker
Thanks.
Issue no 54, August 2000
Knock knock. What's round and has an entrance to the east marked by interesting deposits? If you've read JD Hill's article elsewhere in this magazine you'll probably guess the answer. It's that old joke the prehistoric roundhouse - one of those ridiculously passé designs abandoned by anybody with any sense since the Romans came, though you can still see them being set on fire in Westerns.
Apart from the Dome, a few modern cathedrals, and those street loos that seem impossible to enter without a letter from the mayor, there aren't many round buildings today. We left the roundhouse behind millennia ago, and according to ideas of progress this just shows what a hopeless design it was.
Not true. The advantages of round houses are as follows. Firstly, they are easy to assemble. If you or I were to start putting up a house today we would prop a lot of tree branches together so that they met at the top where a youngster could shin up and tie them together, and we would then add on whatever took our fancy in the way of covering material - not forgetting to leave an entrance. The alternative, measuring out the ground, arguing over how to achieve a right-angle, sticking in your corner posts, making door frames, getting in a state trying to prop up roof timbers before you secure them, is an obvious non-starter.
Secondly, inside a round house you get a nice, even spread of warmth. No freezing corners, icy lofts, or windswept landings and one simple direct heat source. Thirdly, the whole interior is very democratic, thus fostering social skills - no one is going to be shoved off into that upstairs back room or only congregate to eat microwaved meals whilst watching Neighbours.
Fourthly, the thing is a thrill to live in with lots of firelit architectural space giving one a noble feeling as opposed to the gloom of tracing the cracked plaster across a rectangular room's walls. Then, lastly, round houses don't require straight streets. If we had kept them we could have had towns laid out like our fields in all sorts of different shapes.
Look instead at the miserable rectangular house. Horrible poky rooms. No interior drama. Everything graded in importance from master bedroom down to utility and pantry. Inside loos (yuck) needing lots of pipes and gurgling drains. Horrid spider's web-filled corners, angles everywhere, cramped landings, miserable views south-east onto more houses with similar miserable views north-west.
Rectangular houses all have to be lined up as though on parade. This was presumably because in the Roman coloniae the retired military enjoyed bossing everyone about to make sure all buildings faced the same way and had best-kept town competitions where everything had to be neat and tidy to win. For it was the Romans who forced us to get rid of the roundhouse and replace it with imposing features like courtyards and porticos, and having to have those awkward rooms leading off each other or needing to be accessed by nipping outside. The modern era did away with civilised features like public baths and lavatories at the bottom of the garden. Our houses today are a source of worry rather than a home. The underlying meanings of the home are demonstrated in the exciting new ways of looking at buildings now being produced by archaeologists. Rectangular houses are analysed in terms of public and private spaces, differential access, class separation, defence, emblems of power - that sort of thing. But round houses are approached in terms of the profounder dynamics of light and dark, female and male, life and death etc.
The less pedestrian meaning of a prehistoric house is borne out by the weird deposits you find in the ring ditch ends. These show how the building involved all sorts of gestures and messages far more interesting than the rectangular house's typical datestone or I've got uPVC windows and you haven't.
Waking up each morning in our rectangular beds, going to different rooms for different functions, eating our rectangular toast and reading our rectangular news, we are being forced into compartmentalised ways of thinking. We need to return to round houses - and there watch the smoke ascending into the cone above us where darkness reigns and our thoughts can take wings.
That is an amazing space! How is it for sound? Is it loud?
jt8
"A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds. A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love." -- Saint Basil
The public spaces are lively. The other rooms aren't. The roundness of the room has little effect. The big difference is the openness and hardness of materials. More rugs and drapes would affect that, but it's not our style. 99% of the time it's not noticed...stereo sounds grrrrrrreat there and the clacking balls on the pool table sound good, too. Only aggravation is when DW and her mom are talking in the kitchen while I'm watching TV...we each up the volume to outdo the other...our own little mutual assured destruction. Solve it by not letting MIL visit often. :)One of the things I love about the house is how quiet it is if you're there alone. It's so much quieter than a conventional house that it's....disquieting. You definitely notice the lack of noise, to the extent that things like a frig motor or computer fan are magnified. It can be so peaceful...