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CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT underway at my building in Cobble Hill — our former family home, now rented out to another family. I’m replacing three top-floor windows at the rear of the house — two in the master bedroom and one in a smaller bedroom next door.
Should be straightforward, right? Of course it’s not, because when we raised the roof in those two rooms, back in 1987 — it was originally attic crawl space you couldn’t stand up in — we created arched windows. Replacing them now requires either new, custom-fabricated all-in-one units or modified millwork so that the original fixed fanlights, which are fine and which I still like, can stay in place.
These arched windows are not accurate for the 1850s date of the house, but they’re in the back, so Landmarks was never an issue. And they sure looked pretty — before they started falling apart, that is. They’re not insulated, all wood, and perhaps they were never primed properly. They’ve virtually rotted, with panes falling out.
The rotting windows are six-over-six; at the time, I thought that was the proper historic configuration. Now I understand it’s likely they were two-over-two, and that’s what’s going in instead. That will line up properly with the mullions in the existing fanlight, which the previous sash never did (a neophyte’s design mistake). And instead of replacing the whole arch with a single unit, I’m having the fanlights at the top modified to accommodate new Marvin windows, which will be insulated, with ‘true divided lights’ (real instead of fake mullions) — aluminum clad on the outside, wood on the inside.
I’m using one of two contractors I met with, both recommended by Dykes Lumber, a local building-supply company: the one who showed up on time, took careful measurements, followed up as promised with an emailed proposal, and generally inspired confidence. The other guy was rushed, answered calls on his pager, took a few digital pictures but no notes or measurements, and gave me an on-the-spot rough estimate. It happened to coincide almost exactly with the one I received from contractor #1 a couple of days later, but his general demeanor made me not want to hire him.
I didn’t call any of the other names I had collected from neighbors and online resources. I’m going with my gut on this one. And even though the whole deal is going to cost six grand [frowny face], it feels good to be doing right by the house this time.
Proposed community of ‘shotgun’ houses in Lake Flato, TX
ALLISON ARIEFF’S AGENDA is showing. In her recent New York Times column,“Shifting the Suburban Paradigm,” Arieff took on the dismal prospects for the single-family home, longtime standard-bearer of the American dream.
Pre-fab shotgun-style Porch House in Lake Flato, TX
New home sales are in the toilet and have been for years. (Existing home sales are generally a bit better.) Arieff pulls no punches in calling these new homes — the same sheetrock con- struction from coast to coast, whether in the Arizona desert or the pine barrens of New Jersey — flimsy, ugly, and wasteful, “the same dumb box with a stage set of a façade tacked onto the front.” What’s more, no one can afford them. And all the developers can do is come up with wrong-headed marketing gimmicks to try and move their product, rather than considering any approach involving a different kind of planning or design.
Perhaps they are giving consumers what they want, to judge by the 150+ comments I read, many defending the right to a house with front lawn and back patio. Arieff thinks what will be needed going forward is multi-family housing and smaller, greener, more energy-efficient homes in walkable suburban communities. That makes sense to me.
High-end new construction by Blu Homes is only a sliver of a sliver of the market
But I gritted my teeth as I read, because Arieff mentions only solutions involving new construc- tion (one a strange-looking brick number, below, and a vernacular-style shotgun house in the South that many Times commenters swore they’d never live in). The word renovation — the whole subject of fixing up older housing — never came up. Fix-ups are not Arieff’s bailiwick. She was the founding editor of Dwell magazine and a promoter of modern architecture, which can’t move forward artistically if people don’t build new.
But why did only one comment mention fixing up older houses as the greenest solution? Arieff throws out a shocking figure; she says 50% of ALL waste comes from the home-building industry. Can that be!? If so, we’d really better re-think this whole situation. Maybe the answer is not building more NEW-but-smaller, more energy-efficient homes. Maybe the answer is to STOP building new homes altogether for a while, and put all labor and resources into improving and inhabiting the ones that are already there. Of course, I don’t for a minute think that’s going to happen.
KB Houses model: energy-efficient but ugly
What to do with all the monster houses from the ’80s and ’90s sitting unsold on the market? Do they even have any intrinsic value, let alone market value? I don’t have any answers, only questions.
I do agree heartily with Arieff’s bottom line: “We’re beyond the point of a fresh coat of paint and a new sales pitch. If we’re going to continue to hold on to the single-family home, we need to transform it.”
TODAY, “THE INSIDER” — my weekly column for the Brooklyn real estate website Brownstoner.com — visits a sweet rental apartment decorated by Lauren Stern, a young interior designer who lives there with her husband of one year, Ori Schwartz. It’s furnished from sources ranging from discount warehouses to to-the-trade-only vendors.
Check it out, with a dozen photos, right here.
Richard Cottingham, House with Awnings, oil on canvas, 1968, est. $80-120,000
LOS ANGELES MODERN AUCTIONS (LAMA) is set to sell more than 400 works from the estate of Richard Dorso, a Hollywood talent agent and later fashion retailer, who died last spring at age 101. A voracious collector who bought what he liked, Dorso acquired his first piece in 1930 at the age of 21, and just kept going.
The emphasis in the October 9 sale is on Pop Art. Dorso and his wife Betty, a former Vogue model, were particularly active in the 1960s. They bought locally, from galleries on La Cienega in L.A. and young artists’ studios, encouraging their entertainment-business friends to do the same.
Warhol is represented, as are Lichtenstein and other famous names, but the bulk of the work is by lesser-known artists such as John Baldessari, Robert Cottingham, Paul Wonner, John McCracken, and Richard Tuttle.
Ilya Bolotowsky, Red and Blue Tondo, seriograph, c. 1970, est. $5-700
Dorso liked “happy pictures,” which may be why I respond to these period images by photographer Grant Mudford of the Dorsos’ apartments in New York and Los Angeles, punchy with reds.
This was a man with an irreverent, confident collecting philosophy. “I always bought new artists who were unknown, and then waited to see what would happen,” he told Peter Loughrey of LAMA, who interviewed Dorso at length for the sale catalogue. “The only reason I bought them was because I liked them.”
Bruce Houston, Untitled (Television Island), mixed media, c. 1980-1995, $5-700
The sale is part of a citywide celebration of art created in the Pacific Time zone in the decades following WWII, ongoing now at museums and galleries throughout the city. As part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, LAMA is also presenting Collecting in Los Angeles 1945–1980, in three weeks leading up to the October 9 sale. It explores the collecting practices of Richard Dorso and the role of the collector in the evolution of the L.A. art scene, and concludes with the auction of the entire collection on October 9, 2011. Details below.
Preview and Exhibit:
September 19 – October 8, 2011
open daily 10am – 6pm
Auction:
October 9, 2011
12pm Noon (Pacific)
Auction, preview, and exhibit located at the LAMA Showroom:
16145 Hart St. Van Nuys, CA 91406
Auction, preview, and exhibit are free to attend and open to the public.
Interiors Photos: Grant Mudford
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