cloudhaus: a memorable memorial

 

We four-day-weekended Memorial Day to spend some time in Cloudcroft to check on the status of the cabin, receive a coffee table, and visit with The Bride's brother. 

Holy moly, the cabin is looking and feeling FANTASTIC! It is going to be (and is) an amazing place. The street-side approach is close to complete (still lacks a wee bit of guttering and the hardscaping), but it captures the amazingness of the design (see photo above). It monolithic nature is not for everyone and leaves many scratching their heads, but the street-side view of the cabin satisfies my fetish for introverted design (see my pinterest board on introverted architecture to assess my mental stability) and was one of the pluses for choosing this challenging lot. And we adore how the low roof profile doesn't block the forest from the street and hints at what's to come.

The facade is part of what amounts to a grand entry sequence. As a visitor noted during our trip, the front bluntly announces that there's something really different about this place. The entry porch came out stunningly good, a combination of angled walls, shou sugi ban, and a bright, cheery green door among the darkness all of which complements the forest itself. The builder did a fantastic job with the sugi, the Japanese method of burning wood to finish it. You would never know that he and his  team had never done it before.

 

The shou sugi ban carries into the interior on an accent wall in the hallway. I was afraid this might be too dark, but it works perfectly, amply helped by the window in the laundry room.

Once inside, the place opens up dramatically to the forest. On my previous visit, one of the neighbors asked, in all seriousness, what we had against windows. "Have you been inside?" I asked. The place comes alive with light and forest. I didn't get any good photos of the living room since it was full of appliances awaiting installation, but the photos below hopefully give you some sense of the openness. I also suspect the same folks that question the lack of windows in the front will question the number of windows in the back.

primary bedroom (with the slate floor going in)

view from kitchen into dining room (this side of fireplace) and living room (that side of the fireplace)

looking from entry through the dining room

dining room into the kitchen

dining room back into the kitchen. the dining room isn't THAT big: some distortion from the lens

kitchen and the kitchen cabs

view into the living room from the backside of the dining room

The living room and downstair's bedroom have NaNa-like sliders that open WIDE to the outdoors. 

The view from the back of the property up the slope presents a rather heroic stance of the cabin. From the street, the cabin almost looks like a modest accessory building while from the back it looks like a mansion. It's two buildings in one! The reality, as it turns out, is in the middle. 

 

 

Seeing the cabin now in all its glory, there's a part of us that wishes we had gone all black all around. These things are hard to envision, especially since we weren't so sure going in.

The covered outdoor living spaces out back are also somewhat unique in that there are three choices. That patio out the upper floor is absolutely glorious. We just read a column about the coastal grandmother aesthetic popular with the kids these days. The author (a coastal grandmother) states that "At this age, finding the perfect spot in which to drink your morning coffee becomes a matter of life and death—how many more mornings do you have, anyway?" Which is funny because, even before we knew of coastal grandmother, we started fantasizing about sipping coffee out on this patio with the crashing surf of winds through pines (call it mountain grandmother). 

The floor slate was just starting to go in when we arrived with the primary bedroom about have tiled when we arrived. The tile is redder and lighter than "promised" with the photo, but the installer pointed out that, when sealed, it will darken up. Regardless, the slate is looking sharp, and nice to have a natural material for the floor.

The baseboards were a bit of a gamble: black on the bottom but white above, but I'm diggin' the look:

And it looks like they chose the best countertop:

Finally, we bought a coffee table for the living room. We don't plan to go all woody and woodknot, but I thought a tree cookie coffee table might be a good homage to the forest amidst the modernism. I hadn't found a no-brainer until I saw a local (via El Paso) post some of his work for sale:

This hunk of wood is unique because of the two trunks. Furthermore, on the drive out, we listened to part of the book Braiding Sweetgrass where the author discussed how Native Americans, after marriages, planted two trees next to each other. We may ask the creator to make some furniture for the cabin. 

And there you have it! May try to go out during 4th of July weekend to see how the floor has come along. The tiler thought it might take a month just to finish the floor, in which case not a lot will have gotten done (except the floor). On the other hand, it's so pleasant up in Cloudcroft, especially during a ). 

cloudhaus: tanked at an angle

 

 I like The Gestalt, an organized whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Everything (everything!) is a design opportunity. LP tanks are a reality of mountain living, and they tend to wart the landscape with their thick, white hot-dog bodies. We requested that ours be put behind a wall so it couldn't be seen from the street. In the original plans, it got plopped down orthogonal to the lot lines, but it really should be lined up with the axis of the house. 

Not sure how high the CMU wall will be around the tank, but it will need to consider the view from the top of the property and be high enough to block the view from up there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

cloudhaus: a hard scrape for the hardscape

One of the concerns I have with the cabin is someone (heck, it could be me!) sliding down the hill and crashing into the house. To prevent that, we'll need to have something for folks to crash into to prevent them from crashing into the cabin. Bollard is the technical name for these sacrificial features that hopefully never get used, and they don't tend to be architecturally interesting (see image above from Wikipedia). There are exceptions. Target does a good job of using giant, concrete red balls (from the center of Target's target):

 

image from Mental Floss

For hardscaping, the architects have proposed four concrete "steps" (it's pretty flat out yonder, so let's call them "landing pads") that are pretty dang cool. Initially, I thought the landing pads looked like this (I've greyed in the pads to help with visualization):

but upon further study, I realized that they are truncated at the ends:

which is even cooler! The plan visually establishes the edge of parking and introduces an angle, a theme for the cabin.

While thinking of the bollard issue, I came across this project at the Tucson Mountain Retreat by DUST:

Although soopercool (if not downright deadly after four margaritas...), it's a bit too much for our project, but concrete cubes of varying heights that organically fit into the project and provide bollard services seems the way to go. We want something that quietly complements the cabin, not dominate it.

I took a stab at what this might look at for the architects to consider:

What I did here is (1) create a grid inspired by the existing design, (2) flipped a coin to determine whether or not a square had a bollard, and (3) used the RANDBETWEEN function to randomly determine height (1 = 0.5 feet, 2 = 1 feet, 3 = 2 feet). I then added a half-square at the other end of the cabin.

Another option here is to fill in all the squares for a more formal approach with a "bollard" of 0 feet tall:

This approach may be too formalized--I don't know. 

I suspect the hardscape design needs to be revisited to respond to what has actually happened on-site. For example, the final placement of the cabin and the (correct) decision to not build a retaining wall along the parking area (which constricts the area). The design above extends ~19 feet into the front area.

cloudhaus: mo tile, shou sugi ban, stained concrete

 

That photo above is of the entry with shou sugi ban cladding. Shou sugi ban, also termed yakisugi, is a Japanese method of preserving wood through burning the exposed-to-the-elements part of it. This looks absolutely perfect and complements the rest of the house really well. We'll have an inside accent wall-in-the-hall clad with sugi as well. Plan to leave the ceiling in here sealed but natural.  The whole entry sequence is turning out badass. Can't wait to see this in person!

This is a peek at the concrete floor in the basement, stained and mottled black. It also looks quite sweet. 

No flooring for the first floor as of yet. It will be slate. Been having anxiety attacks (jk! [kinda]) over how closely the delivered material looks like the photos. Hoping it's dark and not too brown... Now that we've gone over to the dark side, we want it to go all the way!

Here's the linear fireplace. If you look closely, you can see that the volume holding it is clad in large-format, vertically-oriented white tile. We went back-n-forth n back-n-forth on how to best treat this volume. Was initially thinking black but, after gawking at numerous photos of linear fireplaces, went with white to show off the linearity of the fireplace. This will be one of those decisions that I will wonder about until I'm on my deathbed... 

I have this artwork to hang over this side of the fireplace:

And the tile got finished in the primary bathroom! Unfortunately, we were wanting the tile on the floor in the same direction as on the wall such that visually your eyes carried you in the same direction. However, it probably had to be in this direction due to the linear drain.  :-(   c'est la vie! 

We'll be heading up to Cloudcroft at the end of the month to get a short reprieve from the heat (100 degrees lately here in Austin!), see Wendy's brother, and check on the progress. Hoping to spent a couple weeks in it in July-August to "break it in" and enjoy the space. 

cloudhaus: paint, tile, and electrics

Been slow going lately, it seems, but there has been some progress. Paint has gone up, tile is going in, and some of the electrics (light switched, LED cans) are going in. That variegated chevron tile looks wicked cool!

Ordering the appliances we want has been a serious pain in the ass. Either not available or appears to be available but you can't order it for some unexplained reason (order button pops up, click, nothing happens). Our credit card puts a hold on Build.com orders ('cause they are big and getting delivered elsewhere, so they quack like credit card fraud), Build flags them as awaiting funds, but then there's no way to resend the payment. I think I just figured that one out, though. One to two months for shipments. Yikes.

Once I get this book I'm working on done by the end of the month, we'll look for a four-day weekend to drive out and check out the scene again.