shoes at the door please

One of our absolute favorite things to do is go on modern/green/cool home tours.  Every year about this time are the AIA home tours in San Antonio and Austin.  This year was a little different than previous years since we are actually building a home so we needed to really scour the details of each house and not just casually take in the overall designs.  These tours give you the rare opportunity to see from the inside out how each architect and homebuilder went about achieving their desired result.  We've been doing these tours for years and,without a doubt, have been heavily influenced by some of our favorite spaces.  There's just something about being in an actual space and experiencing it for yourself.  It's something you just can't get from a photograph or blueprints.  It's like standing in the middle of an amazing chapel or staring up the face of a skyscraper.  But residential architecture is much more subtle (the kind I like at least).  My favorite rooms are ones that take the sunlight, environment, climate, and the outside world and blend them with a perfectly orchestrated interior space that add up to the sort of living that is simple, comfortable, and intriguing.  I'm reading a book called The Perfect $100,000 House by Karrie Jacobs who was the editor at Dwell during the "good" years.  She has a passage in her book that describes this experience very nicely. "It's about how a building treats your body, how it feels physically to be in a space.  I stand in rooms and try them on like I'd try on a dress."  As luck would have it, our architect El was wanting to go on the tour as well.  So we all decided to go together and it definitely made our day to have him with us.  It was an interesting tour this year.  It had a nice blend of modern and not so modern, although I would have liked to have seen a little bit more new construction.  The thing about these tours is that most of the homes showcased are very expensive which does not necessarily translate to better design.  The approach we have always taken when we find a space that we like is to find what it is that makes the space appealing.  Is it the ceiling height?  The floors?  The Viking Range?  The windows?  It's always different.  The thing is sometimes the qualities that draw you to a space are not the most expensive features.  Sometimes they are.  Over the years we have made a mental list of the things that we could do on our budget that would create an amazing space.  Some of the things on this list are room shape/size, openness, window placement, ceiling height/angle, concrete floors, and overall style.  Most of our list are decisions that would need to be made on any house and not things that come with significant added costs.

So onto the tour.  The tour was really a great experience and I highly recommend bringing your architect to one of these if you are building.  We spent the entire day going back and forth about the smallest of details in each house.  It was really a great way to communicate for both of us.  He got a better idea of the things that we liked and we got a better idea of some of the things he had in mind for our design.  The highlight of the tour was the very last house we visited.  A very modern home in Alamo Heights.  Obviously, money was not an issue with this one, it had an elevator for godsakes.  It was very well designed and had the most comfortable spaces on the tour in my opinion.  It also reaffirmed our decision to put wood on our ceiling.  It had nice 2x8 sheets of douglas fir throughout the living area which really warmed up the space.  This house also sticks out for another reason for me.  While we were in the kitchen we noticed that there was a mini split ac unit that just seemed out of place.  El couldn't think of a reason it might be there and it didn't make any sense to me but I assumed with the amount of money that had gone into this house the reason might just be out of my comprehension.  On the way out the architect was standing by the door so El decided to ask him about it.  As soon as the question came out his demeanor changed and I could tell a nerve had been hit.  He said they underengineered the ventilation in the kitchen and had to add in the mini split to get it cool enough.  It was a very short conversation and it ended with him thanking El for bringing up "the one flaw in the house."  Score one for ETD Studio.
 
http://www.aiasa.org/downloads/Website/AIA_2014HomestTour.pdf

The next week we went on the Austin AIA Hometour but it was not quite as good as years past.  There were some interesting houses and we got to spend the day in Austin so I can't complain.  Next time you're there I highly recommend the Blue Dahlia, a hip French restaurant in East Austin.