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Stairs make single story design inaccessible

When Single Story Isn’t Accessible

I met some new clients to look at a home that we thought might offer good access for potential wheel chair use. We ended up looking at a “single-story” house that happened to feature:

stairs up to the house
elevated entry foyer
a step down all around from the foyer
a sunken living room
steps up from the garage
steps down [...]

Houses, Slopes, and Water

Today my clients looked at a house sited downslope from the road with clearly insufficient drainage. Clearly because you could simply look at the driveway and follow the path of least resistance for the water right under the garage door into the garage…which showed clear water damage including a big crack in the floor. There [...]

Green Luxury at the h2hotel in Healdsburg

The h2hotel in Healdsburg has to rank among the greenest and most upbeat hotels in the world. I toured the hotel today in advance of their fully b0oked July 4 weekend and was impressed with the deep attention to detail and brilliant design that squeezed this spacious feeling hotel into an underutilized downtown space. The [...]

Luxury Details – A Perfect Corner

I’ve been a builder and know the satisfaction that comes from doing a job as close to perfectly as I can. Not every carpenter or other tradesperson cares about the little touches that separate perfect from good enough, but craft still matters to many in the building trades. Those few perfectionists would prefer clients that [...]

Home Depot is not a four letter word

Badly done home remodels aren’t the fault of Home Depot. Too many homeowners watching “Flip this House” or “Trading Places” got themselves focused on the wrong aspects of home repair. The fundamentals of construction techniques that have evolved over centuries were ignored in favor of flashy fixtures and false ideas about quality and materials. Well [...]

Details, details, details

I had a chance to visit a terrific ten acre property on Eastside Road near Forestville today. You’re never quite sure what you’re going to find on a place you can’t see from the road, but I have been driving past this secluded driveway for years and have never had a chance to see the [...]

Monte Rio

It was beautiful driving weather today, so I thought I’d check out some fixers along Highway 116 and the Bodega Highway. Northwood Golf Club is a beautiful spot for a little recreation, but I didn’t have time for nine holes, let alone eighteen, so I just stopped to admire the redwood shaded grass for [...]

Entropy 101, or why leaks matter

I was creating some graphic headers for this site and realized that I had just made a whole bunch of pictures of entropy in action. I could do a complicated discussion of the second law of thermodynamics, but you can read that here if you’re interested. From our real world perspective, entropy is iron rusting, [...]

Occidental

I headed up to Occidental where I needed to get pictures of some of the Italian style family restaurants for an article Wild Jane is writing on the main sonoma.net site. I made sure to get photos of both the Union Hotel and the classic Howard’s Cafe two blocks up the street. The Union Hotel [...]

Bodega Architecture and Quoins

The Potter Schoolhouse in Bodega is one of the few remaining buildings from Alfred Hitchcock’s filming of “The Birds”. It’s been a schoolhouse, bed and breakfast, and private residence. I’m a fan of the simple symmetry of the building with the round-top windows, corner columns, and octagonal tower. It’s a timeless building without the gingerbread [...]

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