Author: dabacon

The first thing most people notice when they enter into Tesseract home is the view.



The home, in classic mid-century style, makes extensive use of glass and seeks to connect those inside the house with the outside.  While not connected with “nature” per se, this home does strongly connect with the view outside, which includes the city skyline, the port of Seattle, Mt. Rainier and Elliot Bay.  In contrast to nature scenes, these are scenes of pretty much constant activity: cars on the Magnolia bridge, cargo ships, grain ships, ferries, and sailboats on the bay, trains traversing through Interbay, and airplanes descending into both Boeing field and Seatac.  Often visitors just sit with a view outside, and sit in a trance following the constant action going on outside.

That the outside is so much inside already leads one to naturally consider bringing the outside into the decor of the inside.  In particular the shapes of the city and of the port and the strong use of industrial materials can serve as an inspiration from outside in to the inside.  An example that we have already tried is with this steel “coffee table”:

Here the shape of the city is reflected, in miniature, back inside. the house
While I don’t think we want to go “full industrial” on Tesseract Home, I would like to use the outside industrial view and areas as inspirations for shapes and some materials.  See this Pinterest board, for some of these outside/in inspirations.

When the large awkward sheets start showing up…

It is popular among the scientists and engineering crowd who I hang around with to consider the mind as nothing more than an information processing machine made of meat.  This is part of the larger story of the push-back against supernatural explanations that has defined the enlightenment. A particular popular variant of this view of the mind gets particularly hung up on approaches to the problem of the mind that follow the pattern “we do not understand the mind”, “we do not understand X”, therefore “X must be important for the mind”.  Typically X is quantum theory. And typically this is followed by rants about decohence (never mind that perhaps the greatest discovery of the last decade of the twentieth century was that decoherence can be overcome by the methods of quantum error correction).

While I am sympathetic to these criticisms, I also find that these arguments lead to a certain narrowing which inhibits discovering ways to address the fundamental problem.  By this I mean that I worry that by making these arguments one does not set oneself up for further discovery, but instead finds oneself trapped within the confines of current argument (see note about quantum error correction above. You dear reader who read this, are you sure you are not you due to naturally occurring quantum error correcting processes?  If I remind you that the ratio of the size of the earth to the size of the galaxy is about the ratio of the distance between atoms to the size of a cell, does that change your mind?)

I think a lot about framing these days. It makes sense that the spaces that we spend our time in leak their information into our brain, commingling among our bits, and shape us.  But what then of my diagnosis above, that sometimes this can be counter to moving outside of the frame?  Certainly architecture and buildings change drastically over long time scales (if you haven’t done so, I recommend How Building Learn by Stewart Brand).  Over shorter time scales, we rearrange our furniture, paint our walls, buy a new rug.  Thinking about this got me thinking about spaces that have higher churn and are spaces I want to spend my time in.  Which led me to think about art galleries.

This is a shot of the living room of the Tesseract house and a painting that the original owner had hung there, and which we subsequently purchased.  When you drive up the Magnolia Bridge at night, if the lights are on, you can see this painting through the many windows of Tesseract home.  And when you sit in the living room and look at it, you find yourself discovering an infinite world of different colors and shapes.Imagine this room, then, but now instead of thinking about it as a living room, image it as an art gallery.

The thing about art galleries is that they focus nearly all of your attention on the art.  A great art gallery stops you in your tracks, pulls you in, and spits you out a new person.  And yet, an art gallery also changes, constantly morphing as new exhibits start and end.  New styles emerge, entire methodologies are learned, re-learned, and lost again.

So off I went to Google “art gallery house”. A top search hit was the Chestnuts House by Marchi Architects. This house features large prominent art works on white walls, but also I have to say I absolutely love the overall styling of this home. In modern minimalist homes I think one has to be aware of going too far in the direction of Columbian-drug-lord-all-white. And too, art galleries can push in that direction. But here I think the art pulls it back to a less flashy and human style

Another thing I appreciate about this house is how it shows a way to work with the stark white walls and a set of materials that really work well in this setting.  Here we see two elements, wood and stark black metal and art,

 

Digging further another amazing house arising in modern art gallery home searches is this one by Domenic Alvaro in Sydney, Australia:

One thing that really struck me was the use of very low furniture in the spaces that housed the art

I’m not sure the Tesseract home’s living space has enough breadth to support this but I think it would help reveal the entirety of the art that currently exists in this space, and maybe give the area a feeling of separateness from the adjoining dining room.

The idea of an art gallery for a house is, of course, not just that it provides a connection to the art, but also that, like an art gallery one can change ones perspective by changing the art.  For example the Seattle Art Museum has a program that allows you to rent and try out a piece of art before fully buying it. 

In thinking about this for the Tesseract house, I’ve started thinking about the space that could handle the type of art that the above styles depict. Certainly we have a start in the living room.  There is another opportunity in the entry way, perhaps replacing a built in wood vase stand.  The master bedroom will have a prominent wall.  Downstairs is interesting.  Because one of the problems with the basement is that it is a long unbroken space.  

Part of this space is the media area with TV, comfy sofa, etc.  The plans for the second part were mostly to update the kitchen to a more minimal wet bar and work this space into a social gaming or making area.  But here I wonder if a wall that does not reach full ceiling height (or does) but is designed to showing art might split this space nicely.

Another benefit of this is that the strong lighting for highlighting the art can help this room, which while it has natural light, needs the warm feeling of a strong inside light, especially during grey Seattle winters.

In thinking about remodeling this 1962 home, there is much that I want to keep. The flow of the home, and its relationship to the outside is wonderful. But, it must change, and thinking about art galleries makes me think that even with this change, we can continue the update and process of keeping the home new.  And don’t get me started on the type of art that I might use.  Immersive electronic art gallery home anyone? 

More ideas for art gallery inspiration homes can be found on this pinterest board.

This is a blog about a home.  In 1962 Seattle hosted the World’s Fair, the Space Needle was built, and the home (with a view of the Space Needle) was constructed by architect/builder James Paul Jones.  James Paul Jones had a long career in Seattle housing, building over 300 homes in Seattle, 150 in the neighborhood of this home alone.  After building the home, he lived in it for the rest of his life, passing away in spring of 2017.

In 2017, a family of three Seattle-ites made the mistake of beginning to attend local real estate open houses on the weekends.  The husband, Dave, considered this part of the slow process of finding a new place to live, having previously successfully stretched out the search for a place to build a cabin to over six years.  The wife, Lisa, considered this her next project, a new opportunity to build, create, and remodel a home in Seattle to match the modern cabin the family had constructed for in the Methow Valley.  The son, Max, wondered why his weekends were spent being dragged to yet another Seattle neighborhood, but enjoyed the endless discovery of open houses (what exactly was that toilet doing in the clothes closet?)  The dog, Imma, was impacted only in that her family seemed to return from these trips, which was another great excuse to run around excitedly and wag her tail like a helicopter.

The houses they saw on these adventures were spread all over the Seattle map.  The house that looked haunted.  The house with the falling off porch.  The house with the falling off basement.  The house, yes, with the toilet in the closet.

In October of 2017, they found a house on the water that was so close to the sound that it felt like it was floating.  That home was too expensive so they solicited a real estate agent to put in a lowball offer.  And then, on a Tuesday, a different listing, in the same neighborhood appeared.  “There is an 85 percent chance this is the home”, said the dad, with a degree of precision unwarranted even by a believer in the Bayesian  interpretation of probabilities, but informed by six months of staring at real estate listings and learning all of the tricks and tactics of real estate photographers (why yes that is a giant telephone pole in front of that big window.)

The next day they visited this home, perched on a south-east exposure in the neighborhood of Magnolia.  Their son, Max, came along, and immediately settled into the staircase to play his portable video game.  The mom and dad wandered the home, marveled at the layout, the pool, the very 1962 cabinetry, the massive bar,  and the 1980s master bathroom, the latter three requiring extensive updating.  The next day they put in an offer.

“Dear Family of the James Paul Jones home,” began their offer letter, “Thank you for giving us the opportunity to visit your beautiful home. Last night my husband Dave, our 7-year-old son Max, and I met, after school and work, and imagined the laughter and memories that we might someday create in the stairwells and rooms of your childhood home.”

This letter must have been persuasive, their offer was accepted, and thus began the selling of the old house, the packing, the countless trips to Goodwill, and then, finally, the moving.

In January of 2018 a dark cloud returned.  Cancer had returned to the mom, seizures sent her to the hospital in an ambulance that had to be carefully backed down the dead-end street of the new home.  Hope springs eternal, however, so the mom camped out in front of the amazing view of Seattle, and worked on recovery. With an optimism that can be the only answer to mortality, the family began planning for the major remodel the home would need.  Architects, Ray and Mary, who the family had previously worked to build a home in the Methow Valley were brought in.  Pinterest boards were created.

In May of 2018, the mom passed away, losing her battle with cancer.

This is a blog about a home. It is Dave, Max, and Imma Dog’s home.  It is where they splash in the pool, play board games at the dinner table, eat Hatch green Chile enchiladas, bark at the crows, and stare at the sail boats and cruise ships on Elliot Bay.  It is also the last gift from a mom, a project, a hope, and a reminder that there are no beginning and endings, only the relentless march of the wholeness known as time.

We hope you will join us as we embark on remodeling this home.  We hope you enjoy this blog about a home.

Dave, Max, and Imma