Built to Last! This Cottage Style PREFAB HOME was Designed for Harsh Environments

With spring behind us firmly and the best of summer here, now is the time to bring back a bit of that freshness to our home with green goodness and fresh flowers. Not all of us are blessed to have an extensive garden. And this is exactly where a gorgeous little planter can come in […]

You’re reading 27 DIY Flower Box Planters for Fancy Windows and Beyond, originally posted on Decoist. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Decoist on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

Have you ever wished you could travel back in time? Well, there’s a place that will…

An entrepreneur and family with a passion for healthy living requested a large home on their dramatically sloping 2-acre site. They specifically wanted an informal layout that could be woven into the topography of the property. Wanting to enjoy as much of the site as possible, the client requested the inclusion of steps and landscape pathways to allow for access to more distant parts of the steep site. Situated on a promontory jutting into the canyon below, the hillside retreat boasts multiple vistas of the surrounding canyon and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Since covenants, conditions, and restrictions associated with the property allowed for only a single story above street level, many of the home’s rooms are located on a lower level which daylights onto the downslope side of the house. This modest massing arrangement allows for neighboring properties to see over the roof of the home. In three distinct locations, landscaped topography “fingers” heighten one’s awareness of the natural hillside. Bridges span over these fingers, enhancing and extending the natural graded areas deep into the heart of the home. The design solution offers new perspectives for experiencing the owner’s prized views while providing a glimpse of the topography as it stood before the house was set upon it. Meticulous craftsmanship and authentic building materials are recurring themes best exemplified by the widespread use of board-formed concrete walls, white oak shiplap wall cladding, and painted galvanized steel doors and windows. A datum of wall elevations was carefully laid out to align the joints of the seemingly random board-formed concrete with the adjacent wood boards that come in 3″, 4″, 5″, and 6″ widths. Floors, ceilings, steps, lighting, speakers, keypad controls, and outlets were all carefully placed so that no element ever interrupts a joint in the boards.