Web tour: Azby Brown

Samurai House & Garden image from Just Enough by Azby Brown. (Those samurai really knew how to live.)With his 2005 book The Very Small Home: Japanese Ideas for Living Well in Limited Space Azby Brown made a welcome appearance on my radar. He’s an architect and design theorist originally from New Orleans who’s been living in Japan since the mid ‘80’s. An interest in traditional Japanese wooden architecture initially attracted him to Japan, and the adaptation and reinterpretation of that tradition in contemporary Japanese architecture and design continue to intrigue him today. He’s the director of the Future Design Institute in Tokyo at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology.

His latest book Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan explores how sustainable practices of the Edo period can inform how we shape a sustainable future. For an informative introduction to Brown and Just Enough, check out this interview on Seeds and Fruit. You can also see and hear Brown highlight the book and its mission on this TEDxTokyo video or catch his Pecha-Kucha presentation in Tokyo. Additional information is available on the Just Enough website.

In a recent post by Brown in the Atlantic he shares a more personal example of a Japanese approach to sustainability, which could also inspire sustainable approaches elsewhere. It’s the story of his neighbor’s urban farm in “the middle of Yokohama, a progressive city of 3.6 million”. As with the lessons in Just Enough, Brown appreciates that often successful, Japanese solutions recognize how everything is inter-related. 

It is in many ways common sense, that issues of energy, water, materials, food and population are intertwined, yet sometimes we need to be reminded how a healthy, interdependent, renewable system has worked and can work in order to imagine how it might work in a different time and place.

by Katie Hutchison for House Enthusiast

Essex Antiquing: Andrew Spindler Antiques

The first in my series of travelogue videos about antique shops in Essex, Mass. features Andrew Spindler Antiques. Founded in 1998, Andrew’s shop displays an eclectic, highly edited range of objects, dating from the 17th through the 20th centuries. It’s an impressive, high-end collection recently touted on 1stdibs.com and mentioned again in The New York Times June 3rd story about Andrew’s home. 

 

by Katie Hutchison for House Enthusiast and North Shore Art Throb

Katie’s beginner (idjit) garden week one

This week it was time to move my kitchen-window, wanna-be garden off the shelves and into raised beds at the community garden. The bean bush seedlings didn’t look like they could take another day in their undersized, peat pots, and the other seedlings seemed to be aching to get out of their confining starter tray too. 

Sadly, some hadn’t made it to transplant day; the scallions and sweet peas met an early demise. Had I read the scallions seed packet I would have learned that it is “not recommended” to start them inside. But the bean bush packet says the same thing, and they were my star performers. There was more unheeded advice to be found on the sweet pea packet; “Soak seed in water for 12-24 hours or nick with sandpaper before planting.” But who can be bothered with the fine print?

I have, only upon this writing, made the horrifying discovery that my sunflower seedlings are of the “Mammoth Russian” variety, which the packet says grow six- to ten-feet tall! I had assumed “Mammoth” referred to the size of the flower head. Score one for the idjit gardener! How ridiculous those will look in the middle of my four-foot by four-foot garden. I think I’ll transport them to my mother’s garden where they will likely be more at home growing adjacent to her sizeable hornbeams.

The lettuce leaf and baby carrot seedlings, though healthy looking, were difficult to thin and transplant.  I’m highly skeptical that any of them will survive the experience. The Italian Large Leaf basil was easier, but I may have packed too many into a square.

I have a feeling my eventual square-foot gardens will bear little resemblance to their initial appearance. O.K., I can hope. Think of the following video as the pitiful “before” shots we architects and designers are so fond of including adjacent to miraculous “after” shots. Here’s hoping for stunning “after” shots.

by Katie Hutchison for House Enthusiast

Design snapshot: Bustins Island Beaut

Waumbek, a cottage on Bustins Island, Maine, is one of roughly 100, mostly antique, small dwellings that ring the three-quarter-mile length of this summer community.

The deep porch, wrapping around the narrow, one and one-half story gable-end shades over-sized windows from harsh afternoon sun, while low window sills welcome softer daylight. Such generous windows can help a small space feel larger. I’ve written about the appealing pattern of “small house, big windows” in a previous design snapshot. The windows' black sashes add crisp borders, like eye-liner around twinkling eyes.

Waumbek is practically a porch with a house, rather than the other way round. The sizable porch adds invaluable outdoor-living space, furthering Waumbek’s surprising sense of spaciousness, considering its size.

Wide, cross-braced guard rails pick up on the broad strokes of the windows and ample porch, suggesting a more generous space than a busy, smaller-scale, baluster design would. Angled brackets on the porch posts quietly echo the cross rails and frame a more personable space between bays.

No surprise, I favor the gable-end treatment of green, accent shingles defining the tippy top, while a white, trim board, in-line with the second floor window-head trim, transitions to the yellow clapboards of the upper-middle section, above the lower porch roof.

To me, Waumbek is an ideal cottage, one to inspire future designs.

For additional reading about Bustins Island and its history, consider The Story of Bustins, a Maine Summer Island.

by Katie Hutchison for House Enthusiast