My buddy Chris and his family are heading to Italy soon and I don’t get to go. But since I’ve been already, I got over it and settled for watching A&E’s “The Miraculous Canals of Venice,” a forty minute documentary available on Youtube and also as “instant viewing” on Netflix. It’s a way to get a dose of Venezia without having to even get out of your chair. I love getting a brief overview of a place with interesting history, especially if the emphasis is on interesting big-picture stuff and not so much on political details and dates.
Some have said Venice is the most beautiful city in the world, but I think there might be better word choices. (Besides, everybody knows Paris wins the beauty title.) Maybe they meant the most “beguiling.” There are waterways large and small, with boats on the move and boats at rest. Palaces crowd together with grand doors at water level. Arched bridges abound along the narrow and shady maze-like walkways. Along the water’s edge are moss covered marble steps. Flowering vines hang exquisitely on thousand year old brick walls.
There’s nothing quite like it in the world. Beyond the striking visuals, there is an amazing back story about how such a world-class city so rich and dense with splendor could possibly prosper in the middle of a swampy lagoon. Therein lies our tale.
It started when Barbarian hordes began raiding northern Italy in the fifth century forcing the locals to flee to the only safe land available, the swampy islands in the middle of a watery lagoon that lay just off the coast. The raiders were unwilling to chase their victims into such an inhospitable bog, so the settlers set up temporary huts and then returned to the mainland after the murderous hordes moved on. These invaders were the same ones who famously managed to finish off the last of the Roman Empire further down the peninsula.
When raids continued again and again, more and more people set up to live permanently on some of the islands. They brought in wood to create lightweight structures that wouldn’t sink in the mud. A culture of fishing and getting around in boats became the way of life.
Almost every resource had to be imported to create a life in the marsh except for one product that they were ideally suited to produce: Salt. And in the days of no refrigeration, salt was extremely coveted as a food preservative, and the Venetians were in an ideal situation to create it and then ship it by boat to Europe. Prosperity ensued.
A settlement that had been born from fear was transforming itself into a self assured major player in the world. As the Venetians became wealthier they wanted nicer buildings for themselves. Someone finally figured out they could create stable building sites by driving pointed logs straight down into the mud until these log piles were stopped by stiffer soil. By crowding many of these piles right next to each other they could create a stable support for thick slabs of saltwater-resistant marble that would serve as a platform for large heavy brick structures. As long as the many wood posts stayed wet they never rotted and even slowly petrified with water minerals into stone. Millions and millions of these log piles were used to create the city.
When Venice started doing well it became a place worthy of being looted, but the invaders never could steer their boats very well through the surrounding mudflats. There was a definite “home field advantage” for Team Venezia. For added security the center of city government was moved to the larger isolated “Rialto” Island that is now considered the heart of Venice.
Because the city’s natural water defenses worked better than any moat, the city had no need for a defensive perimeter wall. While the rest of Europe had to build heavy stone castle fortresses for safety from pillagers, the Venetian merchants could focus on luxury in their elaborate palaces open to the light and air of the Grand Canal in Venice. A building type emerged of a four or five story palazzo built tight to its neighbors with a ground floor that was used as a warehouse for merchandise to come and go by boat, while the owners lived in grand rooms on the upper floors.
There you have it, armchair explorers, how such an unlikely city came to be in such an unlikely place– as I understood it from an interesting TV documentary, backed up by some online fact-checking. Of course I’ve neglected to follow up on the centuries of history as leaders of world trade; the torture of perceived enemies; the theft by Venetians of the remains of the Apostle Mark from Egypt so that Venice could have a big time patron saint; more torture of enemies; the implementation of checks and balances in governing themselves; yet more torture; and so on. I will save that for the real historians.
Hard core fans of Venice should make a point to visit Google Maps and use “earth view” to see the whole city in virtual 3D. It’s very cool zooming around and down through the canals and city squares.
A parlor, a stair hall, a corner of a dining room - my house gets colorized
It seemed like it should be pretty simple to select colors for inside my house. Compared to the other decisions we had made so far in our remodel – like agonizing over the nuances of our kitchen cabinets – it would be easy to select some hues from a Kelly Moore fan deck. Then reality happened.
I was using our kitchen remodel as a reason for doing a long overdue color makeover of our major rooms. Some extra accent lighting would be added, but it was mostly about new colors everywhere. The bedrooms and baths would be spared the makeover for now, thus allowing us to “live” in the house (if you can call it that) by hunkering in the rooms that were not invaded by plastic sheets, airless paint sprayers and blue masking tape everywhere.
After many years of white walls, I was asking the family to venture into the world of color. My idea was that we could do honest-to-goodness colors, but then mute them a bit so they didn’t overwhelm. Melody looked at my choices and told me they seemed too grey. Her own leanings tended toward the yellow side of things. Fine, I said, as long as it isn’t too bright and was instead more on the “creamy subdued” side. Definitely no Navajo White, we agreed. In this way, language became a key component in how we dealt with color.
We both vowed not to focus on the arbitrary names the paint manufacturers gave their hundreds of shades because we didn’t want some absurd name (“Ambrosian Angel”) to taint our opinion of a good choice, or have a cool quirky name (“Secluded Cottage”) cause us to like an undeserving color. This took some restraint on my part, because some of these names just beg to be made fun of, or at least commented on.
I picked up a few of the little brochures of pre-done color schemes available at paint and hardware stores. Each brochure showed a theme room done in a color scheme and included color chips showing the three or four colors side by side. We looked at them more to loosen us up about the possibilities and not so much about copying the exact colors.
We bought quarts of paint mixed to our most promising colors and painted little two square foot areas on a wall. At twelve bucks a quart, there was a fair amount of waste, but it beat getting our whole house wrong. A friend saw me having paint mixed at Ace Hardware and told me how he and his wife did that step enough times on the same piece of wall that the texture there was made smooth. We all chuckled at that one.
At one point we learned that our kids are now old enough to have opinions about colors that they didn’t mind sharing. We discovered this when they walked by the samples we had up on the dining room wall and expressed revulsion towards some of them. Honestly, a few of the colors probably deserved such a blunt assessment.
“If we’re going to do a yellow,” Gwenna said, “could it be something more like cut straw.” Wow that sounds really good, I thought. Just like that she came up with a clever way to describe the shade I wanted. “Yellow” is one thing, but who wouldn’t like “cut straw”?
And then the day came that we finally settled on the different wall colors for the four major areas of our house – mostly soft yellows with some green influences. (Insert Hallelujah chorus here.) Professional painters were called in and we passed a week amidst clear plastic covering everything. We fed the cats outside, fed ourselves by either eating out or undraping a bit of the kitchen to get a bowl of cereal or some toast.
Now that it’s all cleaned up and we’ve lived with the results, I can tell you that the biggest success occurred in our small Living Room that we’ve always called the Parlor. I was finally getting to enact my vision to load up the Parlor walls with art and photos. Key to this concept was having a rich and dark olive color on the walls that would serve as a backdrop for the all the art that would crowd the walls and bring the small room to life. Our numerous prints and paintings could now be brought out of storage and into view. The darker wall color had “tested” much better for featuring the artwork than a paler “safer” lighter version of the green. The focus group involved with this decision consisted of my wife and me. The immediate and absolute agreement we had about the superiority of the darker color was very satisfying to experience. After so much second guessing, it was a joy to step easily and sure-footed into a decision. Before the room was painted, we added a series of small dimmable spotlights on two tracks to really bring it all to life.
One last point to make about selecting paint: be aware of sheen. Tiny little differences in the shininess of a wall will change the feel of a room in a noticeable way. I tend to like flat paint for walls and semi-gloss paint for doors and trim. Just about everybody recommends semi-gloss for trim because it’s easy to wipe clean and it makes the trim sort of shine. Flat paint for walls is not as universally called for, but I like it because it downplays wall texture and helps hide any imperfection in a wall plane by not reflecting light as much as the other sheens. The rooms just somehow seem more “restful” to me – and less like a low-income apartment painted by a slumlord who wants to be able to wipe the walls down with a sponge mop. My painter convinced me this time to use the eggshell sheen which is almost flat and is still okay with me – just barely. I’d recommend staying away from the next step up (usually called satin.) It’s too shiny in my opinion. In kitchens it has been standard practice for years to call for paint with some gloss in order to make it easier to wipe the walls clean. I’ve always gotten away with the lower sheen paints in my kitchen and have had no regrets.
And finally – let the record show our chosen paints were officially labeled “Mushroom Cap” and “Manchester Mood” and (wait for it . . . .) “Beach Bum.” All simply splendid names, wouldn’t you agree?
I recently got to design a major building for First Street. Then economic realities intervened, and the client decided to put it on indefinite hold for now. It was a bit of a bummer, though not all that surprising. For a glorious month and a half this project was real. This would probably be the project of my lifetime. A way to directly make that little corner of downtown live better for Benicians for decades to come, maybe centuries. It was critical to get it as good as could be. That included achieving major cost savings for my client and still have the design succeed in all the ways a design can succeed. For those forty days, this design was my mania.
My son joined in when he volunteered to create a 3D computer model of the building on Google Sketch Up – a very cool tool that let us study the building from any angle we wanted. Wesley did this so well that he is now in charge of that department here at the World Headquarters for McKee Associates.
In order to preserve my clients’ privacy I will refrain from divulging personal info about them or the building design that they commissioned for their use in planning the future of their property. Suffice it to say, the proposed building is pretty nice. I like to think so, anyway. I also like to think it will come to life again someday.
It’s two stories tall with restaurant and retail space below and apartments above. It isn’t unduly tarted up with tacked-on fancies, fake roof lines, or bizarre siding changes that add expense without adding livability. The heart of the scheme is a wide covered outdoor dining patio just off the sidewalk that’s been laid out for maximum usefulness, good people-watching, and all the other good stuff that comes when we experience that ergonomic blend of feeling nestled in our own space but also looking out to the bigger street scene.
The apartments are roomy. Each has a balcony large enough to allow for some outdoor life for the inhabitants, with beefy railings that keep them private from the street, but allow views down the street through the trees toward the water. One of my favorite features is the archway that creates a shortcut to the garden patio that sets off the main stairway up to the apartments. If I lived there, I would want things like that.
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After going through all this, I noticed some things about designing for downtown that bear mentioning.
The new “form based” zoning for downtown seems pretty good
In 2006 Benicia adopted a new code for the downtown area that uses physical building forms rather than the designation of land uses as the organizing principle. Many Benicians participated in workshops that helped shape this code. Form-based zoning can create a built environment like a good ol’ Main Street from the days before the automobile changed our cities. The parking is pushed to the back so that the sidewalk is given over to storefronts. User-friendly features like courtyards and balconies help soften this urban relationship between building and street. As the buildings transition to the residential neighborhoods down the block away from First Street, the zoning rules change to encourage a lessening density so that the buildings will transition to single family residences.
There are some goofy rules here and there in this code that really ought to be reconsidered. Such as: obscure glass is required in windows on the sides of your house wherever your house is extended back past your neighbor’s house. (Seriously?) But overall I thought about ninety-five percent of it to be mostly right-on and supportive of the feel for our city.
Opportunities for quality sidewalk dining must not be missed
For now, most sidewalk dining in Benicia consists of a dinky chain draped along the sidewalk with a few tables inside the chain. It’s better than nothing, but think instead how “can-do” cities create much better outdoor dining experiences with spaces for tables nestled into well laid out patios alongside the sidewalk. Never mind Paris or Prague – how about Walnut Creek! Last December while I was in the midst of my “design mania” I spent an evening in our neighbor-to-the-south exploring the many dining patios of Locust Street and Main Street and saw how simple it was to get this right – you just need to care enough to pay attention and get a few details and dimensions correct.
It’s a shame that some of the newer buildings on First Street didn’t make the effort to do this and instead opted for tacked-on representations of these patios rather than truly useful versions. We deserve better and our design review process needs to take the lead in asking for this.
A little effort with exterior lighting can work wonders
You know how fancy buildings will sometimes have lights shining right up along the face of prominent features like columns so that the play of light and shadow exaggerates and highlights key architectural features? Just a few well-considered up-lights can bring these buildings into extra exuberance at night. Well, even very minimal versions of this can be dramatic, such as a light on both sides of an entrance door that highlights the ornate trim work flanking the door. This is a simple way to add some zing to a building at very little cost, and all it takes is someone thinking about this during the design. A little elegance like this will stand out in an environment with mostly haphazard and uninspired lighting.
Massive city fees are killing good projects before they get started
In the last few years I’ve seen two very cool projects that would have surely drawn people to First Street instead end up on the scrap heap because of city “impact fees” that were over a hundred thousand dollars for each project.
Some of these fees cover actual city costs in providing services and utility hook-ups to the project, but some seem to be there just to raise money for the city in ways that have nothing to do with the impact of the project on the city. Meanwhile First Street languishes without the help of these “anchor tenant” projects.
Contextualism (fancy word for “blending in”) can work
It’s possible to honor and embellish Benicia’s modest urbanity by matching the context of the downtown buildings without having to pretend to be interesting by offering kitschy or caricature-like responses.
While designing my project I spent a couple hours cruising through the photo archive of the Benicia History Museum and came out of that experience marinated up to my eyeballs in what First Street was like over the decades. I was very excited to match the rhythm of the town I saw in those photos. We’re lucky that we live in an eclectic era that lets us fully embrace style and exuberance in buildings without feeling guilt. There is no reason a new building cannot add welcome harmony to the song that is downtown Benicia.
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Such a project may not be feasible right now while the vacancy rate on First Street suffers. Alas, for now there will remain a vacant lot. Know with certainty that the potential is quite exciting.
My friend Meg asked me if I have a favorite architect. It made me realize that I don’t, and that made me happy somehow, like that indicated that I was open-minded and an independent thinker or something like that. But then I remembered that a few years ago I fell hard for the work of Addison Mizner, who was instrumental in developing the ultra-refined Mediterranean Revival style associated with Palm Beach in the 1920’s. So elegant yet adaptable to so many situations!
I suppose there was also my first crush, Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger who gave a guest lecture at UCLA in 1979 and created a sea-change in my then-young mind in the way I saw the design world. A few comments by him, and worlds opened up to me.
Hertzberger spoke excellent English in the way that most “with it” northern Europeans do, and his slide show included a concert hall he designed that placed the musicians in the middle and the audience surrounding them on all sides. The sloped banks of seats angling toward the center stage were visually striking, but it was the little benches he made sure to point out behind the last row of seats that resonated with me. Not for their look, but for what they did for the livability of the place.
While designing this concert hall he went around to various venues and did his best to just notice everything he could about everything. He became aware that there were some people who preferred to linger on the edge of events without committing to the act of shuffling all the way down through the crowd to an assigned seat. These benches became places for these observers to comfortably loiter and take in the show in a way that was more comfortable for them.
With that small but highly sensitive gesture my eyes were opened to the idea that there were veiled forces at work in how people used their surroundings – realities that were in plain sight but eluded the attention of most – and that a sensitive person could become aware of these and design for them. There was much more to the act of designing than producing pretty shapes or interesting finishes. I loved it.
A few years later I became aware of a book that examined and methodically catalogued these sorts of insights, and it was like I found the Holy Grail. “A Pattern Language” was written in 1977 by Berkeley architect Christopher Alexander. It remains in print, as well it should. Local though the author may be, this is a resource for the world and for the ages. Numerous little chapters address all manner of the built environment, from the layout of cities to what to consider when adding trim to a window. Simple diagrams abound, as well as small photos that perfectly illustrate the ideas. It’s a joy to use.
Let’s take an example of something as archetypal as a courtyard. You may think you know what makes a good courtyard, but pattern number 115 suggests four key ideas that may have escaped your notice. Don’t fully enclose the courtyard and be sure there’s at least a slot of a view out to a larger open space. Include two or more doors to create natural paths through the courtyard to bring life to it. Next to one of these doors there should be a roofed veranda or porch which is continuous with the indoors. This brings the inside out into the yard and helps connect the inside and the outside. People really like having an in-between realm that breaks down the barrier between the inside and the outside.
Those designers who thought all they needed to do was add a sculpture or a bench off to the side of their dead-end courtyards to make them work have another thing coming.
Or do they? Will anyone every call them out for a failure that could have been prevented by following the tenets of life-centric design? Almost certainly the answer is no. All that will happen is that the world will be a slightly worse place and we’ll all go about our business.
There are architects who are whizzes at getting their work published in magazines and books. Almost always the images are visually compelling (at a glance), and many times the true livability of the space suffers. An example I recently saw in a book showed a dramatic two story wall of windows (never mind that they face west and make the room uninhabitable for much of the afternoon and that the two story height severely limits the ability to use window treatments) and another image that showed a rectangular pool of water that spanned between the inside and the outside under a glass wall (never mind how truly useless that portion of the house becomes.) How cool these photogenic features look at first, yet how unresponsive to the actual life of the inhabitants they are. But, hey, they got that architect published, so it’s “mission accomplished.” (Sheesh, I’m getting cynical as I get older.)
So my favorite architects are the ones getting all the little touches correct, even if such touches make for quality that is not easily detected at a glance. These are the “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” sorts of nods to quality. Ones that don’t just clobber you over the head with their supposed wonderfulness but work their ways into your life in ways you might not ever fully comprehend.
A couple days ago my son was walking down the hall past my office when a loud beeping began sounding somewhere in our house. He and I have a tendency to fall into goofing off pretty easily, usually instigated by me on days when I’ve been working alone all day. So the sound of another false alarm inspired lame jokes by me about running for our lives and comments like “Oh no! She’s about to blow!” (Sadly, this is what passes for wit during the long afternoon hours at McKee Associates.) We followed the sound down the hall to his bedroom. When he got to the door he suddenly rushed in while shouting a certain expletive over and over. I quickly followed behind and saw flames one foot high dancing up from a sweatshirt on the floor by his desk. He scooped it up and I got out of his way.
“The bathtub!” I said, but by then he had committed to the laundry room sink, another fine choice. A turn of the faucet made quick work of it and the crisis was over.
Wesley had only a very minor burn on the side of one finger because the blaze had been confined to the middle of the sweatshirt, leaving the edges available to be grabbed. We returned to his room where the loud beeping continued. The air seemed completely clear to me, but that smoke detector knew better.
Wesley turned on his window fan and within a minute the beeping stopped and a calm returned. I pressed him for details and learned that he had a minor moment of playing with fire, an impulse I also had while growing up and understood. He seemed sufficiently chastised. The carpet looked fine. I noticed how close the flames had been to the corner of his wood desk and then I looked up at the smoke detector and suddenly experienced admiration, even a strange happiness, just to look at this ordinary six inch piece of plastic with its little red button to one side. We had just narrowly avoided disaster, and it was due to a ten dollar plastic appliance that’s usually known for its annoying chirping when its batteries get low.
I felt a need to talk it out, assuring Wesley that my excitement wasn’t because I was angry, but rather because I was giddy that things had worked out so well. The system had worked, I said, and worked well, and that has made all the difference for us. There was some luck too. What if we had just left to go somewhere? It was not a good thought.
That evening over dinner we shared our story with Melody. It occurred to me that in newer homes all the smoke detectors are wired together so that if one sounds, they all sound, thus creating a general house-alarm going off. Good for waking everybody up. Not so good for finding the source of the alarm.
“I’m sure that would have screwed us up if our house was wired that way,” I said. There would have been the loud beeping coming from all corners and I don’t know how soon we would have made our way down to the problem bedroom. Especially because our first instinct had been to treat it as another false alarm. We’ve all been there many times after some tiny incident of dinner candles causes obnoxious beeping to erupt and then just go on and on. Sometimes even dust in the air does it. At those times the smoke detectors are not our friends. I suggest to all of you that you treat every alarm with diligence and quickly perform a room by room search to inspect all possible sources of a cause. You never know when a sweatshirt on the floor of a bedroom is going to be spewing flames.
The McKees used the incident as an incentive to review the family policy for house fires. “If it’s smallish and approachable we begin to fight the fire ourselves,” I said. If it’s so large that moving through the house is a danger then we all exit out a window if need be and meet in front of the house. That’s so we can see who got out safely. No exceptions, even if you are scantily clad. Neighbors will somehow get over seeing you in your undies.
Wesley looked for the family fire extinguisher. It took a full half minute for us to find it under the kitchen sink. Well, we confirmed where it was, which was valuable. I studied how to activate it. Pull this pin and then squeeze here, we agreed. I hear little ones like this empty out fast, so use it wisely.
Then Wesley asked about how things had gone during my parents’ fire, the big one that gutted their large one-story house in Alamo twenty years ago. I explained how the smoke detector had been disabled because its battery had gotten low causing it to chirp and my dad simply took out the battery without putting in a new one. Some weeks later an electrical wire shorted out at a small under-sink water heater in the kitchen. It was the sounds of jars exploding from heat in the pantry that awakened them at three in the morning. There was panic and finding their way outside through blinding and choking smoke. Phone lines were dead. By then the fire was so large that my Dad’s attempts to fight it with a backyard hose resulted in the water turning to steam before it reached the fire.
The house’s position on one of Alamo’s ridge lines resulted in people seeing it from miles away and calling it in. Then came the excruciatingly long wait while fire trucks, heavily laden with tons of water, lumbered up the long and steep winding road. It didn’t help that a sheriff’s deputy arrived minutes ahead of the fire trucks and chose to park her car in the long driveway before walking away in order to look things over (or who knows what) and precious minutes were lost while fire fighters tried to find this idiot to get her to move her car. The end result was that the house was gutted. My parents and sister escaped, as did all the cats and two out of three family dogs. I received a call from my sister an hour later as they all sat shell-shocked wearing underwear and blankets at a neighbor’s house. (Those four a.m. phone calls are rarely good news.) We built a new home on that site a year later.
Maybe this is why I was so happy last week when I got to experience my dumb smoke detector doing its job so well and, you know, saving our house and lives from ruin. Sound your alarm all you want, oh noble smoke detector.
Remember to change smoke detector batteries during Daylight Savings weekend. Or now.
The Great Kitchen Remodel of 2011
McKee Kitchen
Long before my current kitchen remodel, there was the Great Family Room Addition of ’98 in which my wife and I and our two small children passed the rainy season with the back corner of our house missing its walls and roof. Instead of risking our hardwood floor, we chose to stop work on our do-it-yourself addition for the winter and hunker down against the cold rains by covering the back of the house with a massive sheet of clear plastic sloped toward the backyard. We chose clear plastic because this was our Family Room and it would keep the room bright. We installed it well, overlapped sensibly with heavy folds that kept it from flapping. It all worked out fine, and even delighted us whenever we looked overhead and watched rivulets of rain running harmlessly down the deep folds of the plastic on their way to the backyard. Our big plastic cocoon swelled outwards whenever anybody opened the front door and then slowly settled back into place, as if our house had just taken a breath. There was a 2×4 post wedged into place just behind the TV cabinet like a tent pole to gain us extra headroom. Our home had central heat, but this tented end of the house had a chill to it, so we added extra blankets to the pile on the couches, snuggled with the kids more than usual, and generally just enjoyed the adventure of it all.
It was in this spirit of optimism that Melody and I and our now teenage kids entered into our current project – the Great Kitchen Remodel of 2011. The family had grown up but the kitchen had merely grown old and worn out. It’s not like I have a psychotic need to tear apart my house at certain intervals. (Gosh, I hope I’m right about that.) It’s just that my skills designing kitchens have grown considerably in the twenty years since the first design. We’d talked about a new kitchen for years. The new layout would be more utilitarian and “live” better, and also look great, like a farmhouse kitchen with a sense of style.
“Sort of like a kitchen in a Nancy Meyers movie that was so interesting that we’d pause the movie to admire it,” I explained to Melody.
“In other words, you want a pause-worthy kitchen,” she said. That was it. I wanted a pause-worthy kitchen.
It will be mostly black highlights and a grey quartz countertop on white cabinets with some colors accents added here and there. An eyebrow arch will frame the sink wall. The sink counter will be extra deep to accommodate a broad tiled “mantle” under the extra wide window, as well as allow for toasters and other kitchen realities to be pushed further back. A hanging pot-rack will add ease-of-living and also make a great accent in the arch. Paper-towels will be mounted on the side of the cabinet right near the sink in a nod towards no-nonsense livability. Gorgeous three inch thick curved corbels will act as elegant brackets that seem to support the upper cabinets and add a hint of formal grace to keep things from getting too casual. Hanging light fixtures will be simultaneously “retro” and “fashion forward.” I’ve been thinking about this kitchen for a while.
While this is all taking shape, I can tell you it hasn’t been all that terrible living out of a temporary kitchen. The refrigerator and microwave were moved to the breakfast nook. The removed upper cupboards were simply set on the floor of the Family Room and used as temporary kitchen storage. Cardboard was added to the top of the end table behind the sofa to help protect it. The old drawers are still here for a while longer, stacked on each other in piles with the most popular items on top. Dishes are done in the Laundry Room sink, which has proven to be not such a big ordeal. (Yes, I do my share.) It sure helps when everyone remembers to rinse and presoak everything. We’ve always been fond of eating out anyway, so there’s plenty of that.
It was the first act of demolition that indelibly signaled that this kitchen remodel was for real. With my son enthusiastically smashing apart the old cabinets we had surely “crossed the Rubicon” and the only way out was to keep moving forward. Quite a few people really like smashing things, I learned.
Doing the project in the balmy days of summer has its advantages. The daylight hours are long and easy for building. There is no cold outside air to worry about when the kitchen wall is open to the outdoors. And it’s easy and even relaxing to set up a backpack stove in the shade on the back patio, read the morning paper and stir the oatmeal.
Along the way it’s been the small triumphs that loom large, like how I was able to immaculately match the new hardwood floor to the old by personally hand-staining each piece before installing it. I needed enough variation of color from piece to piece to match the gold and brown tones in the various boards of the existing floor. I decided early on that the time I spent fussing over this work would become my new “hobby” for the week. Therefore the hours spent perfecting the color mixes was to be considered fun. There were really only about forty boards that needed this treatment, so this level of fussiness was doable.
I set up a little workshop under the shade-tree in the backyard on a length of removed kitchen countertop, complete with seven or eight varieties of Minwax stains ranging from “Golden Pecan” to “Red Oak.” There were paper cups in which I mixed my color combos and then carefully labeled them like a good mad scientist.
Family members voted on which boards best matched the existing floor. I beamed with pride over some of my finest matches. The losing boards ended up in the firewood pile. Six applications of clear-coat were then added to the winning boards and now the new floor blends so well with the old that you can’t even tell it wasn’t always there. It’s a little strange how pleased I am about something that can’t even be noticed.
We still have a ways to go with wall paint and adding the subway tile backsplashes. We’ll do what we can to keep it enjoyable, and meanwhile reward ourselves with another dinner out at Sandoval’s or Matsuri. You find your fun wherever you can with these remodels.
Where the new hardwood meets the old needs to be pointed out. You've got to love it . . . .
I’m in the midst of my own small kitchen addition. I’m pushing out the side wall of my kitchen twenty inches. Why only twenty inches, you ask? (Everybody else does.) It’s because that’s all we need to cure our ills, and going further would block a view out a family room window. It may be a small addition, but it’ll be a much-needed makeover of the whole kitchen.
Builders are available these days for the lowest rates I’ve ever seen. That’s part of the reason I’m doing my project now. I’m doing enough work myself just to make sure I still “got game” when it comes to assembling a house.
Cutting through the side wall of my hundred and twenty-five year old house became a history lesson. The seven inch thick wall was built up from multiple layers of sheathing and siding, two of which were installed by me a mere two decades ago. The original layers of planks included boards as wide as 18” with barely a knot in them, such was the plenitude of lumber in nineteenth century California. I saved many of the antique nails as souvenirs as we cut the wall away. They’re like modern nails except square and tapered.
Later, when we were framing in new studs, I honored the old house by using one of the old nails to help stitch-nail together a couple of studs. It drove in just fine and provided that satisfying solid anchoring that the best nails always do. It was easy to imagine the original driver of this nail standing in this exact location in 1885 sinking this very nail into place with a few confident hammer swings. I pictured these home builders of yesteryear to be dressed better than I, being Victorians and all, surely with suspenders, long sleeved shirts and a hat of some sort, certainly nothing like my torn cargo shorts and faded logo t-shirt.
A horse-drawn cart would have come up the dirt road that was West K Street to this sparsely settled end of Benicia to deliver a thick stack of long knot-free boards and a box or two of new square nails and the lads would have set about their task. In an era without power saws a carpenter must have had tremendous strength and endurance in his “sawing arm.” Keeping sharpened saws on hand was surely job one.
Despite the lack of such conveniences as power tools, these carpenters excelled at the manipulation of cut wood. The houses of that era generally had well proportioned roof lines and sturdy siding and substantial trim elements that gave these houses a stateliness that will always be admired. Where these nineteenth century houses are not so wonderful is the substantial lack of closet space, low bathroom count, minimal kitchen amenities, lack of earthquake engineering, no insulation. To name a few.
It’s often said that we don’t build them like they used to. Fact is, we build them far better. From the ground up. Foundations are vastly better, deeper in the soil to prevent heaving, reinforced with high quality steel to prevent cracking and separation.
Even the old nail that I hammered in to honor my 1885 counterpart has been improved. A modern straight-shafted “sixteen penny sinker” has a green vinyl coating that acts as a lubricant when being driven into wood but then dries as an adhesive. The list of improvements goes on from there. Our houses are sealed against water and drafts by metal flashing and durable vapor barriers placed under our siding. Low-E glass in windows prevents fading of fabric and increases energy efficiency. Water lines are done in copper to last forever instead of galvanized steel that eventually corrodes. Simple two-by-four fire blocks added inside walls and ceilings help control the spread of fire. Underground sewer lines made from ABS pipe don’t clog with roots like old ceramic pipes do. We have programmable climate control that is very easy to get used to. Standards for electrical features have gone from non-existent to off the charts.
This list could go on, and become evermore arcane. But there is something profound that can’t be ignored. These new features have undeniable utility and are appreciated but, alas, are not beloved. And that’s where the old houses exert their self-confidence.
Nineteenth century houses have front porches that invite lingering. They have tall ceilings that give rooms more poise. There are bay windows accented by hand-carved corbels. Doublewide passageways between the front rooms add a feeling of openness to the formality. Windows have wavy glass that literally softens the view of the outside world.
Fans of these older houses are devoted to these aspects. We could build new houses with these touches, and sometimes we do, but often not with the focused determination that our elders did.
These houses evoke a simpler time, even if the so-called simpler time truthfully had more than its share of problems, with some really big wars, depressions, not to mention lack of antibiotics and more. In my case, these houses recall childhood visits to the Queen Anne house of my grandparents in Rock Island, Illinois. For me as a young boy, that robust house truly did represent simpler times.
A PBS reality show called “1900 House” followed the life of a modern family placed inside a nineteenth century home. For weeks on end they lived just like the Victorians did, eating and dressing and entertaining themselves in all the ways of that era. These modern-day transplants coped fairly well with the major inconveniences brought by this assignment, or so it seemed until the teenage daughter was caught on film sneaking into a nearby drugstore to secretly buy some shampoo. This transgression was not supposed to be part of the show, but to me it became a defining moment of the whole experiment. Apparently, using regular nineteenth century hand soap on your head in the manner of the era wasn’t an easy thing to endure. Not if you were accustomed to a more livable alternative.
Each generation wants its comforts. We like our hair to be bouncing and behaving, just like we like our kitchens to have a two drawer dishwasher ergonomically placed just to the side of the undermount kitchen sink complete with three-quarter horsepower garbage disposal. Even purists who restore historic houses to their original period usually make an exception for the kitchen. A typical compromise is to imbue these updated kitchens with historic-seeming touches like old style cabinet faces, subway tile, and a pot rack that hangs from the ceiling.
That is what I’m doing to a lesser degree in my semi-historic house. There have been some eye-opening moments for me with my kitchen remodel, some reality checks that will surely make it into the next column or two.
Way back in the late nineties I needed convincing by an old college roommate about the value of having my own website for my architecture business. He worked in Silicon Valley and was hipper than I to this notion. “People will be able to check you out on their own. They’ll be much more willing to do that, compared to having to call you on the phone to ask questions.” Hmmm. That sounded like it made sense. No wonder this Internet thing just might catch on.
A week or two later I happened to be laid up in Kaiser for a couple days getting IV’s to prevent an infection in a finger tendon that had been pierced by a wood splinter. Being forced to remain in one place with nothing to do was just the opportunity I needed to create the text for my website. I wrote it all longhand, scratched out sentences and added others with arrows and then word-processed it back at the office. I sought the help of a pro to handle the shaping and technical work of assembling my website. After a detour through a mildly talented friend-of-a-friend I arrived at the services of the more talented Bree DeMoss of Oakland. After Bree drove out for a meeting in Benicia, all my interactions with her were via email and sometimes the phone.
It was important to me that my website not seem too corporate or pompous or anything else that I am not. I also wanted to avoid tricky visual effects and text that relied on buzzwords to try and dazzle. I believed people would respond best to sincerity. In my text I admitted right up front to being a small office that’s run out of my home. But I also pointed out that I’m a rare combination: a licensed architect who spent ten years as a full-time house builder and remodeler who also knows how to do his own structural design. Almost nobody in the design world does that level of Siddhartha-esque career shaping, but various circumstances led me to do it.
The personality of my website would come largely from my own words describing my process and background. But then there were the photos, lots of them. I was warned by Webmaster Bree that, even with the photos, my site might seem “text heavy,” but I figured that those visitors who wanted to merely skim it would just look at the photos anyway and those who wanted to do serious research would dig in deeper to the words. I was talked out of my initial idea of letting my text run as if it were one long letter to my would-be client and instead agreed to break it into separate sections.
I visited other architects’ websites and found nifty ways of displaying photos and also pompous things like quotes from intentionally obscure intellectuals. (Oh you architects, can you please just lighten up a bit?) Then there were the mission statements, usually so all-encompassing and bland as to be meaningless. Some of these sites did have cool photos though. I paid attention to what sorts of photos worked and which didn’t.
How to handle the testimonials was another subject. I had some pretty good ones to share too, mostly because I didn’t just collect written ones from past clients because most of the best ones occurred verbally and were spontaneous outbursts of praise. So whenever anyone left a phone message or just told me something with a particularly effusive bit of praise, I jotted it down immediately to make sure I got it right. I kept everyone’s privacy intact by listing only their initials. Bree suggested we sprinkle the quotes about here and there off to the side throughout the website, but that seemed too braggy to me, so we settled on having them all together in a section called “What my clients say about working with me.”
After all that work getting my site set up, it was nice to have it in place working for me without any effort on my part. I made sure it appeared in my small yellow page ad (back in the days when we were all still using the yellow pages!) and on job signs. I was starting to show up on search engines like Netscape Navigator and that new upstart Google. A hidden counter on my site showed me that people were indeed visiting. It amazed me that few other local architects at that time were using the web to promote themselves.
There followed the era of writing columns for the Benicia Herald beginning in 2004. I wrote a thousand words each month about design issues and travel experiences and life in Benicia (and more!) The columns appeared on my website and, just last month, got transformed into a blog. (For the less hip among us, that clever word is an amalgam of “web log.”) I was inspired to have it ready by the end of March so that I could mention it in my interview that ran in Benicia Magazine in April. I’m not sure how critical it was to actually have it ready by then, but such imposed “deadlines” are a good way to get things done. Getting the blog ready required a whole new bout of work for me, but it was pretty fun, because I could take my body of writing (over eighty columns) and add photos and drawings to show things and make things clearer. For instance, the whole experience building the houses in Mexico, including the land rape that later occurred in our cute little harbor by the evil developer, could be shown in vivid color.
Headings needed to be decided and columns sorted into categories. Because my daughter happens to be a legitimate whiz at photo-shop, I solicited her help creating icons to serve as entry points to my categories. It was fun collaborating in this way, combining photos and words into graphic images to represent each category, and I was impressed with how well Gwenna handled the demands of a paying client as me.
I must say it felt slightly self-indulgent spending so much time poring over which personal photos to highlight and share with the world. But that is the nature of blogs and websites. We get to make them our own – to be true to ourselves – and trust it will all work out for the best.
An Interview with Steve McKee
by Sue Sumner-Moore
Benicia Magazine / April 2011 / An Interview with Steve McKee
http://www.beniciamagazine.com/Benicia-Magazine/April-2011/An-Interview-with-Steve-McKee/
Benicia architect Steve McKee has put his drafter back to work after an 18-month hiatus.
“I’m the first guy in the chain of command who gets to see when things pick up,” says Steve, who specializes in designing home additions and remodeling projects. “I’m the right amount of busy these days. Three years ago, I was too busy and a year and a-half ago, I wasn’t busy enough.”
While residential work was slow, Steve did some architectural layout work on commercial businesses, including the Rellik Tavern and Lucca restaurant downtown. But he’s best-known for his work in homes around town and for his architecture-themed column that appears monthly in the Benicia Herald. He is launching a blog—www.smckee.com/blog—in part to learn more about what people want to know about his profession. After more than 20 years in business, he knows some projects never make it past the planning phase. His first design as an architect was not built.
“It was a multi-family senior housing project—34 units, three stories—that was never built. It was going to be on Military. I still know it by heart. I would have loved to have seen it built,” he says.
That project brought Steve, 52, and his wife to Benicia at the end of a year-long trip around the U.S. and Mexico. They moved here in 1989 and started remodeling their own home as he built his business. They have two children, a daughter in college and a son at Benicia High School.
You earned your bachelor’s degree in economics and ended up in architecture. How did that change come about?
There was no love of economics on my part. … I was pretty far along with it when I rediscovered architecture, which was a path I’d been on since boyhood. I got sidetracked in high school by several things, like an oafish drafting teacher.
I applied to the master’s program in architecture at UCLA and I didn’t really have any projects. As an Economics major I had a simple portfolio that I submitted and it wasn’t very dazzling. But a professor I’d had (as an undergrad there) pressed them on my behalf and I got on the wait list. I’m not sure what my life would be like without that.
Did you always plan to specialize in home architecture?
I gravitated to houses. You can never quite master them. There’s a human layer of living that goes into each one in different ways. People know how they want to live, I know how to give it shape.
What trends have you seen in home design over the years?
In the 20 years I’ve been in town, if there is a trend, it’s that people like being in historic-type housing but want to live with convenience, openness. There’s a need for just enough enclosure to give an area some style, to define it. They like to work with the kitchen, to open it up to the life of the house. …You can set the dining room off with a little half wall and a Craftsman column so you can have a dining room table with a light fixture centered over it and not have it just floating in space.
How are people incorporating green building ideas and materials into their homes?
People are very into calling for stuff that makes sense— more insulation, tighter-fitting windows—but not this obscure stuff you see in all the magazines. There’s a level of green building that’s not always easy to do.
Then there’s stuff that makes sense, things like putting a radiant barrier in roof sheeting. It keeps heat out of the attic. That’s an easy one to embrace. I’m also a fan of thermostat-activated attic fans.
California is pretty far out ahead on this stuff. Before we single-handedly live with only fluorescent lights, I’d like to see the 49 other states embrace some of these things.
Do you have any design signatures?
I hope not. I like to adopt the wishes of the people I work for. This is their home.
But I am known for doing my own structural drawings and calculations. Normally an architect passes off that work to engineers; very few architects do the structural engineering.…It streamlines the process for the clients. You can think about the structural elements while you design, and you’re not waiting for drawings to come back from the engineer.
Do you have any favorite projects?
Yeah, a few. There’s one on the corner of Elane and Cove Way with shingles that makes a strong Craftsman statement. There’s my house—we’re about to do some more work here. It was built in 1885 and I got it about 85 percent right 22 years ago, and we redesigned it eight years later and got to 97 percent. Now we’re about to start on the kitchen. We’ll redo it and then this house will be a humdinger.
I’m in the process of having a T-shirt made with five houses on it: those two plus a neo-classical Queen Anne in the 100 block of West I Street on a rare vacant lot downtown, there’s a Mediterranean on West K Street, and a cottage on West J Street that had some fire damage.
You also worked as a builder early in your career. How does that affect your work now?
For about 10 years, I spent more time as a builder than as an architect. Working as a builder was an invaluable education. I learned to think like a builder, to understand the reality of building a project.
What did you learn?
That there are some really smart builders out there, framers who are really keen of mind. I learned to respect that, and that makes it easy to go on job sites and have rapport with the crew. I also respect that there’s real money here. People are putting their life savings into this.
How do you start the design process with new clients?
I get a phone call and we talk for about 5 minutes and figure out if it will work for both of us—the timing, the work to be done.
We take three, maybe four, meetings. … The first meeting is wish-list making. The final meeting is lighting. It typically takes two and a half months.
How do you encourage good design decisions?
I let everyone talk at the meeting. Sometimes there’s a weird dynamic between a husband and wife. Sometimes it’s important to state possibilities so everyone sees the big picture.
Sometimes they don’t know if they want an addition out back or to add a second floor. They don’t know what they can do that structurally. I’ll get a call because they’re tired of spinning their wheels and need to know what’s possible. That’s usually a most productive meeting.
What would you tell your 25-year-old self?
There’s not a whole lot I’d change—well, maybe buy this stock or that. That’s half a lifetime at my age. Life’s worked out pretty well for me. I’ve reconnected with some old friends on Facebook and not everyone has that experience. Happily, I don’t have many regrets, though I wish I’d redesigned my kitchen earlier. I only wish I had known then what I know now.
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When Melody and I decided to move to Benicia twenty-two years ago it was about getting a water view, but we were of limited means, so I knew our best strategy was to buy the worst house with the best view we could find. Of the two of us, I was the only one with passion for this particular strategy, but she sensed my enthusiasm for throwing myself into a “fixer upper” and trusted me. It was years later that I learned that her challenge during our house-hunting had been to relax and have faith in me and my vision, even if she couldn’t see much past the grease-stained yellow vinyl floor tiles or the duct tape being used to finish the corners of the sheetrock in the kitchen.
If I saw a house that had potential, I would return with a ladder to go on the roof to check out views from the future second story addition as my realtor stood in the yard below fretting over my safety. Inside the house I jotted a map of the floor plan and used a tape measure to quickly get some key dimensions so that I could happily plan remodel strategies at my drawing board that night.
In the spring of 1989 the economy was good and there were really only two houses available in town that met my standards as affordable with a water view. We chose the one on West K Street because it was near the Ninth Street Park and was a bigger basic rectangle of a house for us to carve up into something better.
A trip to the County Assessor revealed that our house was originally built in 1885, though decades of remodeling had completely stripped it of any charm it may have once had. It was now characterized by metal siding that had highly exaggerated “wood grain” embossed throughout each piece. There was 1970’s lava rock in the front and cardboard wall paneling throughout the interior. All these cheesy touches made it easy for us to tear the house apart in order to make it into something different.
After our escrow closed I carried my wife over the threshold into the stale aroma that permeated our new home. Thus began our life as homeowners and three years of construction in which we moved our mattress from one dust free enclave to another depending on what phase we were demolishing or framing anew. Bathrooms were phased in and out. One of them doubled for a time as my closet. The kitchen counter was wiped free of sawdust before beginning dinner. We worked evenings and weekends. We got a dog.
I knew Melody was game for rigorous adventures ever since we spent a big part of the previous year happily touring North America while living out of a small camper shell on the back of my pickup truck. Having a construction site to camp in was a piece of cake after that.
The day the plaster ceiling came down
I dare say we actually thrived in this endeavor. I finally got to shape a house into one of my own, and my industrious wife got to have a project for her considerable energies. I can see now that we were sort of an ideal team in this regard.
The hundred-year-old house had its quirks, like studs spaced eighteen inches on center instead of the now standard sixteen, which meant the four foot construction module used in products like sheet rock required many more custom cuts. We started saving the antique square nails as souvenirs until we had so many that we lost interest. The original minimal kitchen was kept in place at the back of the house until the new one was made functional.
When I look back on it now, I tend to remember the adventure of it, not so much the struggle, though there was a particular hammer blow to a thumb that had me shouting many bad words very loudly. Loading all the sheetrock upstairs ourselves was a sweaty affair with much huffing and puffing, but we did it happily because that’s what was needed.
Mostly I love the quixotic memories, like how our first Christmas tree stood in the corner amid the exposed old dark lumber as if we were living in some cabin. And how our cats, adventuresome little kitties at the time, used the half-completed framing like a jungle gym. With our dog Nimby we could have major fun with indoor fetch by throwing some cut off piece of wood the entire length of the house through the open framed walls.
I got pretty good at knowing what TV weather forecasters to trust, especially in the autumn of ’90 leading up to the day we tore off over a third of our roof and left a massive gaping wound in the side of our house. I was strangely proud as I stood there sharing beer with my two laborers as curious neighbors walked by to look. We dodged a weather bullet and had our addition framed up and roofed before the rains came, but I still remember being speckled lightly by tiny sideways-moving raindrops one blustery day while sitting on my couch in the mostly-finished part of our house. It was just surreal enough without being a real threat. I liked it.
It helped that we were familiar with construction techniques and became versed in the ways of things like compressor-driven nail guns and water-cooled table saws for tile. I developed strongly held opinions about what types of “Sawzall” blades were the most useful (bi-metal 9 inch inserted upside down.) We subbed out some specialty work like texturing the drywall, but did a staggering amount of the work on our own, much more than I would ever be willing to do now that I’m on the high side of fifty. Doing so much to create my house sure helped complete my education as a residential architect. Invaluable training for sure.
Whenever we finished some notable construction detail we often proclaimed it to be “the most beautiful thing in the house” because our eyes were constantly drawn to admiring it, whether it be a handsome front-porch post or a resplendent oak stair rail, at least for the next few days until some new “most beautiful thing” took its place.
There is a family photo of a very pregnant Melody painting baseboard right after I had quickly installed it, a set of chores that immediately precedes arrival of carpet which is the step that always seems to transform a construction site into a home – which then was quickly followed by the birth of little Gwenna, the new Most Beautiful Thing in the house. I’m happy to report that nesting impulses had been met! We had a house that was complete (at least in all the areas that counted) and fit to raise a family.
I’ve heard that remodels are a source of marital stress for some, but I can tell you our adventure in remodeling brought us closer. It’s all in the attitude, and whether the both of you share the dream. If there’s an imbalance in the desire for the change, there’s a possibility that one of you then becomes “responsible” for the upheaval. Current economic conditions have created a buyer’s market in which deals on fixer-uppers are available for adventuresome couples who want to use sweat equity to take them up an extra notch. It can be the adventure of a lifetime. To those of you about to remodel, I salute you.
It must have been quite a sight to see fifty or more boats fishing commercially for salmon off the Benicia shore, as was common in the early 1880’s before they overfished that waterway and screwed it up. According to one observer, the entire fleet usually numbered three times that amount! Since most of the salmon in California needed to pass through the Carquinez Straits to get to their home rivers, it was easy for these boats to haul them in like crazy. Right on shore were large cannery buildings to process the catch. All very convenient in a Benicia sort of way, a city that owed much of its 19th century brio and vitality to the fact that it had a deep water channel directly adjacent to the shoreline.
To this advantageous geographical mix was added the arrival of train tracks in 1879 – made possible by the use of two jaw-droppingly huge train ferries that ran between Port Costa and Benicia and created a shortcut that shaved sixty miles off the original 1869 train route – and this was the catalyst for yet more industries to locate in Benicia. This rejuvenated the city, which had been limping along ever since getting passed over as the permanent state capital a quarter century before. Benicia happily turned itself into a factory town, with large buildings along the shoreline, mostly on the west side, and a very active wharf area at the base of First Street.
These big factory buildings were a huge part of Benicia’s essence that is easy to forget now that most of the evidence is gone. There remains the large empty building of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company on the east side of town, currently unused and foreboding and deemed unsafe ever since a fire damaged key beams in 2006. By its appearance it’s not an easy building to love – that is until you learn of its crucial role in history. It was built in 1850 – Benicia’s infancy – decades before the train came through town, and was the first industrial building in all the west, with the ability to manufacture metal machine parts and even steamship boilers.
- Pacific Mail Steamship Building
Industries like cowhide tanning, cement manufacture, ship building, a milk creamery, fish canning, flour processing (and more) transformed Benicia into a real working town complete with belching smoke stacks and strong smells and clouds of flies that accompanied shipments of the unprocessed cowhides.
These strong industrial images of Benicia as “California’s Manchester” are right out of the “Benicia Historic Context Statement,” the newly written history of the city that I am once again using for anecdotes to create this column (making this column the last of a series of three based on this theme, in case you wanted to know.) Just about everybody who reads the Context Statement finds it to be an interesting and worthwhile read. It’s available online. Just Google the keywords.
Most of the workers in these factories were men emigrated from Europe to live in crowded hotels and boarding houses. Those who did well could then afford a small house somewhere in town, modest and often bedecked with some amount of Queen Anne filigree. Those who did better could afford to build bigger homes, and pockets of these upscale neighborhoods were created near where the Riddel-Fish house and the Crooks Mansion are now.
Happily, the Benicia breeze carried most of the smokestack discharge eastward making it someone else’s problem. Turnabout occurred in 1913 when particles from highly toxic air pollutants from a Rodeo smelting plant (in which metals are burned) accumulated in Benicia soil and killed livestock and grapevines.
Labor unrest and a major strike occurred in 1902 that resulted in one of the tanneries bringing in strikebreakers under armed guard and tempers flaring and a Benicia citizen being killed by gunfire. Populations of Portuguese, Greek and Italian workers were introduced to Benicia at this time when the tannery imported them from Chicago to take over the jobs of the strikers.
A year later, in an unrelated story, the number of saloons was restricted to fifteen, though the actual number in place was twenty-three (this in a city with a small fraction of its current population) thus requiring that no new licenses could be issued until the number dropped.
There was little to cheer about in Benicia when the train bridge was built across the straits causing the trains to forever bypass the downtown area. The bridge was completed in 1930 – just in time for the second whammy of the Great Depression, making the thirties a not-so-great decade for city-by-the-straits. What saved the day for Benicia’s economy was the arrival of the second World War. The Benicia Arsenal had been in place just about since “day one” in the city’s history, and would become the definitive hub for supplying the war effort for the United States in the 1940’s. Suddenly Benicia was extremely active again with housing needed for all the new Arsenal workers. The city made itself over to squeeze people in wherever possible. For example, the house I bought for myself in 1989 on West K Street still had a tiny detached garage that had been converted to a very minimal living space during the war.
Two decades later when the Arsenal closed forever it was a dark day, one many current Benicians have visceral memories about. Some people were virtually giving away their houses, just as long as the new resident would take over the payments.
Now we find ourselves in an era with an economy not dependent on the train or a multitude of factories, unless we count all the small businesses in the industrial park or the Valero Refinery. Benicia still has smoke stacks; they’ve just been moved to a far edge of town. They’re taller now, but the emissions are a lot safer. The foot of First Street is decidedly calmer these days. It’s a good place to walk a dog. Fishermen still turn out in droves to get the salmon when they are running, especially on the First Street jetty formerly used by the big train ferries, just like they’ll be doing another hundred years from now, and a hundred years after that.
In the Capitol Building on West G Street you can see the original city map from 1847 showing how the streets were originally envisioned for the city of Benicia. Only slightly faded with time, it is a glimpse into the unbridled optimism of the city’s founders Robert Semple and Thomas Larkin for a place that was then just empty fields with some marshy creeks along a coastline. Over the rolling hills and even out into the water they planned a vast array of city blocks with wide streets.
Less than a third of these planned streets came into being. Almost none of the imagined city squares and parks depicted on the map got built quite in the configuration originally shown. The City Cemetery is an exception which exists today exactly as the big rectangle up on the hill where it was designated on the original map, occupying the equivalent of four city blocks, even as it is surrounded now by modern curved streets and cul-de-sacs.
The 1847 map shows the lettered streets continuing a full six blocks beyond the Cemetery. I scanned the map for the furthest extension of the imagined city and there it was in the upper left corner.
West X and West Fifteenth Street.
It sounded so cool that I had to say it out loud to my wife. “Just think,” I added. “That spot exists somewhere out there, even if it doesn’t have such a cool sounding name.” I wanted to figure out where it was.
Out of curiosity, and because I still keep a functioning drawing-board even after switching to computer drafting, I took a modern city map, measured the streets and drew the missing grid of streets over the hills of Benicia. It turns out that the intersection of Fifteenth and X Streets would have existed well up in the Southampton hills, right about where Hastings Drive intersects with Cambridge Drive. Not such an exotic location, I suppose. But the idea that this spot was intended to be on the grid of lettered and numbered streets gave that location new interest in my mind. A person would have to drive thirty blocks to get there from downtown. It would have made for some really steep streets leading up the hills to that part of town. And you can be certain they would have put the streets wherever the grid called for them, no matter how steep it got, because that’s what they did back in that era. Just try riding your bike up West Thirteenth Street by the High School to see what I mean.
In San Francisco they have hills so steep that the streets finally give way to pedestrian stairs (such as in Pacific Heights) or the street zigs tightly back and forth to compensate for the steepness (such as the famous “crooked” section of Lombard Street.) That was typical nineteenth century urban planning for you. Though a grid seems like it would be dull and monotonous, it can actually create variety and interest in hill towns.
In the recently written “Benicia Historic Context Statement” you can read a quote from a visitor who passed through Benicia in 1860 and observed that “Even yet miles from town, one may see stakes marking streets, where not a building is in sight.” He goes on to make fun of Benicia’s unspectacular prospects, despite a decade of a gold rush having transpired.
When I read that, I couldn’t help but fill in details in my mind to make the scene all the more real. I pictured the wood stakes to be old and sun-bleached while the Benicia breeze whistled and the grasses waved on the hillside. It made for a sort of haiku image of desolation and unmet hope. You can’t win ‘em all.
After the gold rush began, Benicia founders Semple and Larkin did their best to secure greatness for the new city’s future. The results were up and down. Thanks to $2500 of “lobby” money the state capital was relocated to Benicia in an impressive two story brick building that had taken just three months to construct and was said to be the most impressive edifice in all the west at the time. Speculators in town buzzed with hope. Wooden sidewalks were added in the area around the Capitol and building boomed. But then the state government moved back to Sacramento after just one session in Benicia because the city lacked sufficient facilities, and the building boom sagged.
An attempt followed to try to make Benicia the seat of county government, but this honor was also lost, this time to Fairfield when it was decided that the county’s rural character would be better met in Fairfield. Being the seat for county government would have made for such realities today as certain storefronts open twenty-four hours glowing with neon signs advertising “Always Open Bail Bonds.” Not the worst thing, I suppose, but for those of us who have grown accustomed to our small town patina, these scenarios may seem a little too “Pottersville” and not enough “Bedford Falls.”
Perhaps in an alternate universe there is a Benicia that remains the capital of California and is right now bustling with traffic, especially on the streets near the large Capitol Building (which would have been built somewhere in town to replace the old brick building probably sometime in the 1870’s or 80’s and would no doubt have a grand dome and rows of Corinthian columns and take up at least two city blocks with its grounds and all.) Surely there would be some sort of widened avenue approaching the Capitol lined with trees with the dome at its terminus. The neoclassic dome would look quite lovely as seen from the hills with the shimmering waters of the straits beyond. Such a city as this would have made Robert Semple proud. In that universe the idea of an underachieving small-town Benicia would seem somehow wrong. But we don’t live in that universe – those of us who sought out life in small town Benicia – we live in this one, choosing this Mayberry-esque town with modest cottages and homes lining quiet two lane streets – streets that were originally laid out to be expanded to four lane boulevards if things had gone differently.
And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
‘48ers: Benicians rushed for gold before it was cool – PART 1
I recently had the chance to read a source for interesting stories about the history of Benicia and I’m quite certain that almost none of you have seen it. I plan on sharing the best stories from it with you here.
This history is actually less a book and more a large “document” that was recently commissioned by the city especially for use by the Historic Preservation Review Commission in order to help provide historical background information that may aid with preservation decisions. I’m currently serving on that commission which is why I had access to the early drafts of this slender tome.
It’s named “Benicia Historic Context Statement,” which is as unglamorous and wonky a title as there ever was. (A copy can be viewed online. See directions in the last paragraph of this article.) If you mostly ignore the analytical sections at the end of each chapter and stay with the narrative parts, then it’s a pretty snappy read. Credit is owed to HPRC members Toni Haughey and Leann Tageepera and Historical Society members Jerry Hayes and Bonnie Silveria for their volunteer work with the paid consultant in creating this compelling manuscript. Just so you all know, the cost of writing this history was paid for by a grant. So the city spent zip on this resource.
And now I get to use all this good research to “cherry-pick” the most interesting anecdotes to share with you here. I make no effort to create a comprehensive overview of the city’s history. Rather, if a tidbit of info was intriguing enough that I paused in my bedtime reading to look over my glasses and share it with my wife, then it passed the test to be included.
Native Americans that lived in the Benicia area were rebels
There was native American history of course, but not much of it was recorded, unless you count the two huge “shell mounds” that existed in Benicia (one near the end of First Street) because the Patwin Indians, like most bay area tribes, discarded mollusk shells into the same pile over hundreds of years and actually altered the terrain in the process.
Benicia history, as recorded by Europeans, began in 1772 when Spanish soldiers standing on the Contra Costa side of the Strait observed several native villages at the water’s edge on the other side.
Over the next twenty years the Spanish Missions became established throughout the Bay Area and natives were mandated to be baptized and made to work at the missions. History shows that the Benicia natives were having none of that, going so far as to raid the Spaniards for horses and livestock, and even providing a safe haven for other natives who ran away from the missions. It seems they wanted to live as they wished without being forced into anything. Seems kind of reasonable to me. An effort by Spanish soldiers in 1810 to subjugate the Benicia tribes was fought off by the natives. Seven years later a far larger group of soldiers returned and drove the natives north where they fled to the Fairfield area where many are said to have committed suicide. Such terrible despair for them at the end.
Benicia: “the nearest and best way”
With Mexico breaking from Spain, the vast mission lands became privately held by military big-shots like Mariano Vallejo, who lost much cattle during the American “Bear Flag” uprising (in which the swelling number of American residents in Alta California decided to flex their muscle) and became cash poor in the process. So he gave a half interest in a portion of some good looking land at the big bend of the Carquinez waterway to American go-getter Robert Semple, a dentist from Kentucky who envisioned a major city there to be called Benicia. Semple promoted his new city in print with glowing language extolling the potential for agriculture in the surrounding region and stating that “the country is so situated that every person who passes from one side of the bay to the other will find Benicia the nearest and best way.”
The vast optimistic grid of planned city streets was laid out not on compass points, but so that “First Street” would align well with the angle of the peninsula of land that was clearly the prime area of town. Because of that angling of the street grid, all of us living in the old part of town have houses that face slightly southwest or northeast – which I happen to know is a benefit for getting sun into all sides of a house, a technique espoused by Frank Lloyd Wright many years later.
The first three structures are built
The first settler in Benicia was William Tustin from Virginia who constructed a small adobe house at the northeast corner of West G and West Second Street. (Let’s pause a moment while we all envision exactly where that is.) Then came a wood frame house by Robert Semple himself on the short stub of West C Street (that’s the street that leads to Phil Joy’s boatyard.) The third structure was the small Von Pfister General Store which remains in existence as a tired formation of wood planks and slumping adobe dirt that currently hides under a metal protective structure (also near the boatyard.)
Benicians were the first gold rushers
When news of the gold discovery reached Benicia in the spring of 1848 (and was probably first blabbed about in the Von Pfister store), it promptly emptied the town of most able bodied men. During that first year most of the gold rushers were Californians. By the following year the world had joined in. While Benicia watched rival city San Francisco become the major city for the region, at least Benicia began to grow and benefit from the rush of people. It turned out Benicia really was the “nearest and best way” to the gold diggings.
Robert Semple ran a ferry that crossed the Straits to Martinez. During the height of the gold rush a two day wait was required to get a lift. This fact was reported by William Tecumseh Sherman on his way to Monterey from the gold fields. (That’s right, that W.T. Sherman, future Union General and implementer of infamous “scorched earth” invasion tactics in Georgia.)
A pattern of growth is put in place
By 1850 there were over a hundred houses in Benicia. The original building lots in town were laid out with a very generous 150 feet of width, which put in place the opportunity for future splitting off of side lots of 50 foot wide parcels. These one-at-a-time acts of subdividing happened throughout the city over many decades and resulted in the slow infill and transformation of Benicia’s downtown with houses from a variety of eras. Indeed, just recently such a split was granted for a new lot at West I and West Second Street. The act of splitting off these 50 wide lots is a Benicia tradition.
That’s all for this time. Plenty more to come next column. You can view this recently written account of Benicia’s past by going online and Googling the words “Benicia context statement.”
A tale of two buildings
Melody and I had a nice dinner out the other day in downtown Napa in a brick warehouse that had been a “grain-and-feed” building many years ago but had been cleaned up and converted into a restaurant. It was an old funky building being reused for something it wasn’t originally designed for and of course that made the place even more quirky and therefore enjoyable. “Celadon” was the restaurant’s name.
Half of the tables were outside in a big space with a four sided brick fireplace in the middle under a large sloping corrugated metal roof with big plants that enclosed one edge. This created enough shelter that the space felt both outdoors and indoors all at once. I love spaces like that – an unexpected “in between” layer that add richness to our world. We were ushered past the outdoor tables and the freestanding fireplace through a passageway in an old brick wall to the indoor eating area. I was sorry we were going to miss out on the outdoor dining, until we were seated inside and then I was delighted because we got to enjoy the funkiness of the inside space.
The eccentricity of the old building was put to good use in that way that restaurants do so well. There was a ledge along the back wall used to display art and bottles, while a corner of the room with a sloped ceiling (due to a stair above) created a cozy alcove for a table. There were little spotlights on artwork and candles here and there. A long counter of a bar fit in along the other wall with orange pendant lights overhead that made for nice glowing color accents. Away from the bar, a row of heavy wood posts were painted an accent color. These posts were spaced much closer than you would ever see in a new building, but each column created a place to nestle a table. Near the top of the big posts was a black steel rod from which hung soft fabric drapes, retracted in a swag against each column. This fabric added another color and texture accent, and also gave the sense that the experience of the space could be instantly altered with the flick of a wrist.
Restaurateurs are masters at using texture and lighting to make life just seem somehow richer. People love passing time in such spaces and the restaurants love letting people come and do so. Everybody wins with good design, wouldn’t you agree?
During the drive into Napa, we had noticed that right next door to our old restaurant building was a brand new building along the Napa River, barely occupied yet. It was huge by Napa standards and filled two city blocks while standing four stories tall. It had many different materials and a slightly staggered roofline and seemed to be trying desperately to look like ten or twelve different smaller buildings that just happened to all be touching.
But you could tell it was a big building trying to deny its true nature. It was weird looking, an odd duck that had no business landing in a city of delicate and nuanced buildings. How could Napa let this overgrown pastiche happen in the heart of their city? It felt wrong.
We’ve all seen these types of projects, especially in recent years – the big building that tries to look like a bunch of smaller buildings. Almost every city these days ends up with at least one of them in some form. Apparently they are the “look” of our times, in the way that the thirties produced art deco and the sixties produced avocado-colored appliances. Some sort of communal zeitgeist must lead to their creation. Developers want to maximize their building envelope with a large building. Meanwhile people want to live in human scaled villages. Perhaps this is the attempt to have it both ways.
But wait a minute. These buildings are not so large as to need a re-ordering of centuries of architectural principles. It’s possible to achieve livable buildings without having to Disneyland-ize them. Break the scale down in other ways, I say, by being sensitive to correctly proportioned elements like balconies designed for real habitation and colonnades designed for real user-friendly outdoor dining, not by doing busy color schemes and minimal balconies added like stage-set ornament.
Humans have a real need to naturally gather in cities. It’s built into our DNA in the way that fish swim or birds fly. Cities, even small ones, benefit from the diversity that results when buildings of different styles and attitudes from different eras end up together in the rich tapestry of a city. Can this diversity be created in one fell swoop in one building by one designer who simply staggers its building front in and out slightly and varies the colors and textures? Methinks not.
Later I found a website in which Napa residents discussed their new building and struggled to come to terms with it. A few proclaimed it to be “beautiful” and many complemented the developer for trying to do something with that part of town. (True, the residential upper floors will indeed add people and therefore pedestrians and vitality to the city center.) Others tried to figure out just exactly what was amiss with this odd building. One writer concluded that what made it seem wrong was that it had a roofline all the same height but at the same time was “too busy.” Touche, mon ami.
Meanwhile, back in our quirky restaurant created from the retired “grain-and-feed” building, Melody and I were opting out of dessert. As we left the rich experience of the old building I was visually confronted by the half-assed attempt at architectural interest of the new building.
The contrast for me couldn’t have been more remarkable – the new building tried desperately to be multilayered and diverse but ending up just lying there, dead yet fussy looking all at the same time, while the older building that wasn’t even trying to do any of this, the building that was originally constructed to facilitate the loading of hay onto wagons, was hitting it out of the park.
I recently helped deliver my daughter to her new life at UCLA. While there I made a point to visit “Bruin Walk” to flashback to the best two months of my life when I learned that I could take on the world and win. That’s what if felt like.
In 1983 I was an architecture student and I ended up saving one of the best parts of that beautiful campus from some really klutzy landscape design right before the university was all set to build it. They even had a builder all lined up when I happened to see an article in the school paper. I had no idea of the ride I was about to take.
Bruin Walk is the name of a hillside path in the heart of UCLA, but the name conjures much more for me. It brings to mind an extraordinary eight weeks of my life when I learned that I could take on the authorities and triumph, when I discovered that good design really could make a difference in the world. A time when the LA Times wrote about what I was doing and proclaimed that the students (that would be my pal Brian and me) had a better idea than the university this time. A time when I found that I could take my idea all the way to the top and stand before the Chancellor with his department heads all seated at a really really big table (very much like a White House cabinet meeting) and then sell my scheme like I was born to it.
The news story that started it all included a little landscape plan that showed a new handicapped ramp placed as awkward as could be on the big graceful slope of lawn and trees that is the main entrance for students walking to classes. The ramp switchbacked up the hillside cutting up the natural routes the students had used for decades. They were also going to add some ugly bench height concrete “things” set into the hill along the pathways. I say “things” because they were these amorphously shaped curved blobs (like an amoeba right before it subdivides) that would match the concrete sitting blobs that were already in place further south in the modern part of campus. Except these modernistic blobs were now being proposed in the historic center of campus, in the sylvan grace of hill between the Gothic poise of Kerckhoff Hall and the Romanesque grandeur of Powell Library. It was a terrible idea. Surely handicapped ramps could be integrated into the natural flow of the hill along paths that everybody used. And surely user-friendly sitting features could be added in a way that fit better with the historic ambience created by the traditional building styles there.
This was my seventh year as a student on this campus (getting a second degree will do that to you) and I suppose I felt proprietary about the place. Bruin Walk was the crucible for student life and was used by thousands of students each day to travel to and from campus. At the top of the hill the path turned the corner at Powell Library into the big open quadrangle of grand brick buildings that defines the campus. In contrast, the Bruin Walk area was more informal, like a park where you could bump into friends and talk for a minute under the canopy of sycamore trees that shaded the hillside. Down the slope along the main path there were always student groups and clubs recruiting from sidewalk tables and there was often someone orating about some cause from the slope of lawn in front of the arches of Kerckhoff Hall. Girl-watching was superb and I had done my share of swooning there, if only for the thirty seconds it took the girl to walk by and disappear up the hill. It was arguably the true heart of campus, and now some hack of a designer was about to get it all wrong and mess it up with overdone ramps and modernistic concrete blobs.
Somebody had to speak out about this, and speak out loudly. The next day I submitted a strongly worded opinion piece which ran in the school paper. At that age I wasn’t quite the pithy minimalist whose words you are now perusing, but I had enough fire in my belly to get some passion across. Seventeen of my architecture schoolmates signed it with me. The following afternoon cosigner Brian Harner, my buddy for bodysurfing and tossing Frisbees, joined me at my drawing board and we talked about how they could have designed things better.
A couple days later while walking the hill, Brian and I found our breakthrough idea. The ramp could be moved out of the middle of the hill to the small lawn at the south side which would preserve the hill. The cross slope of the ramp would fit the new location without much digging needed. We drew it up. When we later showed the idea to a wheelchair user who was the leading campus advocate for the disabled, he suddenly got quite excited because a ramp at this location would not only provide access up the hill but also provide great new shortcuts between various key buildings and create a whole network of possible routes for the disabled. This was it. We had the better idea and now we had political ammo to go along with it.
By now the growing opposition to the university’s scheme had taken a life of its own. Student groups collected almost five thousand signatures opposing the plan. Brian and I continued to meet with the Office of the Campus Architect, where the project manager visibly struggled against the idea that two pesky students were messing up his tidy process. He made a few small token changes to the university’s plan and then conspicuously announced to the press that the “students’ ideas had been incorporated.” We rebutted in another opinion piece in the Daily Bruin.
L A Times - April 11, 1983
Then the LA Times got involved by running an article by architecture critic John Dreyfuss. We architecture students had always held Dreyfuss in high regard, so it was a blow when he looked at the university’s plan and then wrote a piece praising it. Tepid praise, but still. Brian and I decided to invite him to come have a look at our alternate plan. We toured our hero around the hillside and showed him why we thought our idea was better. A few days later came a follow up piece in which he cited all the advantages of our plan and concluded by saying “the student proposal has some important practical and aesthetic advantages over the university plan.”
I was giddy with anticipation for that morning’s LA Times to be delivered to my apartment. Hearing the little plop as it landed on the doormat outside was like experiencing the sound of pure victory. If that moment is to be the high point of my life, that’s fine with me, because it was a doozy. It didn’t hurt either that I had just recently moved to that apartment to join my new girlfriend, a very clever and very pretty English major who “got” me like nobody ever had. Years later she and I would exchange vows and move to Benicia and raise a family together, but for now this sort of honeymoon phase helped make these favorite two months of mine all the better.
The LA Times article was the endorsement that finally got Brian and me a meeting with the Chancellor and his Capital Affairs Council. We rehearsed our presentation together a mere half hour before heading into this meeting, a tactic I highly recommend. We nailed it. That afternoon the Chancellor announced the university was going to do a complete redesign in order to incorporate the new ideas. It was complete victory.
The following day I learned that TV reporters had tried to reach Brian and me that afternoon, but we had already headed to the beach at Santa Monica for bodysurfing, beer and our favorite pastime: perfecting the technique for playing Frisbee in an ocean breeze. Which was just about as perfect an ending to this story as I could ever want.
Chadwick Drive - B e f o r e
Chadwick Drive - A f t e r
I like remodeling Southampton houses. Almost all of them are well built with consistent construction details and an extra strong slab foundation system that has advantages when we do additions. Thousands of these houses were built over the span of two decades and they dependably used these same construction techniques throughout and that lets us later-day designers and remodelers know what we’re in for.
Beyond that, the basic roof shapes make it simple to design attractive additions. It’s easy to make such additions blend into the general look of the neighborhood but still add some distinction to the house. My clients and I have been known to delight in the idea that our house makeover might inspire neighbors driving by to wish that our “model” had been available to them. It’s not hard to design additions to these houses that look inevitable, like they were always supposed to be there.
In case you just arrived in town a couple days ago, let me tell you that the name “Southampton” denotes the huge subdivision of homes built up and over the hills above the older parts of Benicia. Over half the houses in town are in Southampton. It is truly a household name in these parts.
Many of these models are not without their peculiarities. Some of these quirks are obvious and others have been pointed out to me by owners over the years. These have included the painfully small ten-foot by ten-foot center bedroom, the lack of light fixtures in many of the rooms, and the lopsided dormer roof shape found on the front of some models. Sometimes a water view is given to a minor bedroom instead of the master bedroom. There are some models with trim on the front that seems to be placed sort of randomly, like the designer threw some lines on the drawing at the last minute to try to add some “pizzazz” right before he handed it in. An all time least-favorite feature among the owners seems to be the lowered ceiling height in the kitchen (ironically achieved at extra effort and expense by the builder just to conceal the fluorescent light box.)
B e f o r e
A f t e r
Almost all these can be fixed or improved in the course of a remodel. Walls can be opened, rooflines extended, views opened up, dormers added, kitchens reconfigured. Brick fireplaces can be updated with tile and crown moulding. Rooms can be added backwards or sideways. Upwards too. (More about adding upstairs in a minute.) When adding a bedroom or in-law suite directly off the living room, usually a short hallway, foyer, or gallery is built in to the new space giving the occupant a more “around the corner” or “tucked away” feeling of privacy.
Chelsea Hills - B e f o r e
A remodel idea that is a favorite with many of the owners has been to add a comfortably sized informal dining area right off the back of the kitchen. It seems they get tired of the small table shoved up against the sliding glass door. The new dining area can easily be made large enough to function even on holidays, but informal enough and in the flow of family life to really be used and appreciated. The old window location can become a pass-thru opening, but usually we open up the whole wall so the counter becomes a peninsula or island in the new larger space. It’s possible to even hide the beam across this new opening by fitting it up in the ceiling framing so that the ceiling flows without interruption. This is an example of how familiarity with Southampton’s possibilities lets us designers quickly come to terms with these possibilities and present them as options to the owners. Vaulting the new ceiling is easy and provides a break from all the flat eight foot tall ceilings.The concrete slab system used throughout Southampton houses is a big help when it comes to adding a second story addition. These houses have eight inch thick concrete slabs with two layers of steel reinforcing; whereas houses elsewhere usually have slabs that are just four or five inches thick with a single layer of rebar reinforcement. This “mat slab” construction was used consistently throughout Southampton over the decades in every house (except in the split-level models on sloped lots that have raised wood floors.) The extra strength added by the thick concrete slab means that the new loads added with the second floor don’t require extra foundation work. This is a major help when adding a second floor addition.
Chelsea Hills - A f t e r
The most significant negative about slab floors is that they add a difficult step when we need to access plumbing waste-lines (to add a toilet or move a sink) because the concrete must be cut and then patched.
This dilemma leads to this nifty idea. If you’re tired of the minimal shower size and tight toilet space of the older master bathrooms, it’s often smarter to leave the old bathroom in place and add a new larger one off the back or side of the house, as part of a new master suite. The alternative of gutting the old bathroom to redo it doesn’t save much money because you are rebuilding the bathroom almost from scratch (including all that concrete cutting) and you end up with only one bathroom in the process instead of two. By leaving the existing bathroom in place, the old master bedroom and bathroom become a nice guest suite (or a room for a teenage princess) and meanwhile you get to have a new master suite off the back or side of the house that is just the way you want.
Over the years we designers have learned the various techniques to best utilize the range of possibilities in these Southampton homes, and this just frees us up to customize the spaces to meet the wishes of the owners. There are countless opportunities and countless variations possible. That’s what so great about custom design. It’s how you get to have your house exactly like you want.
Musei Vaticani
The three hour tour of the Vatican Museum in Rome was a doozy with much to see, like marble statues and elaborate tapestries and even wall sized maps of Europe and the New World that were state-of-the-art for the 1600’s. Near the end of this tour we received a special reward when we got to stand before the large wall fresco of Raphael’s “School of Athens,” in which the great men of ancient Greece are seen gathering to share ideas. It was much more colorful and vibrant compared to the nearby works completed by Raphael’s assistants. We learned that Raphael altered his masterpiece to include Michelangelo’s image among the assembly of great men, after he had seen the astounding artistry that his fellow artist was accomplishing next door on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Pretty cool of him to do that, I thought.
Rafael's homage to the Great Michelangelo
Fresco is harder than painting, because the artist is adding paint to wet plaster as it dries, not just brushing on paint, and there is urgency because the plaster will dry soon and the colors must blend perfectly. (All you readers of “The Agony and the Ecstasy” already know this, of course.)
Then, after the Rafael came the gold standard of fresco: the Sistine Chapel, the magnum opus of Michelangelo.
Right before entering the Sistine there is a small museum café where we could sit and renew our energies. So eight euros later the four McKees had split a couple panini sandwiches and a bottle of cold water each and, thus refreshed, began our walk up the famous Bernini steps to the Chapel.
The Sistine Chapel was long and tall and sort of dim and filled with people. Upon entering there was the obligatory quick glimpse up to the painted figures high overhead. (There they were! Lit softly by the numerous high windows.) Mostly though, it was head down to negotiate the thick crowd. We were urged along like cattle by impatient docents in blue uniforms to a slightly less crowded spot. The murmur of the crowd was broken by the sounds of one of the docents loudly shushing people. Apparently, talking was not allowed! Then we situated ourselves and fully turned our attention upwards to drink it in – the perfectly rendered figures of the Book of Genesis, brought to life by four and a half years of back breaking effort by the most supreme artistic talent humanity ever produced. The various bible scenes were done as a series of panels painted on the ceiling, complete with elaborate painted borders and numerous human figures captured at the most remarkable moment of their story. Each figure was rendered in exquisitely dynamic poses, some elegant, some tragic, as only a sculptor could do so well.
Capella Sistina
Michelangelo did not want this task, but it was the will of Pope Julius II to demand it of him. It has been speculated that Michelangelo, a proclaimed non-painter, was suggested for this painterly job behind the scenes by papal architect Donato Bramante who wanted potential rival Michelangelo removed from competition as architect of St. Peters by being stuck high up on some very tall scaffolding for a very long time.
Pope Julius II was a man of enormous energy, equally at home sponsoring artists as he was donning polished steel armor and leading an attack on a city state that he felt needed to be brought under Church control. The previous century the city of Rome had suffered badly when the papacy fled to Avignon France, leaving Rome as a city of crumbling and overgrown ruins with small-time warlords stripping marble off of grand buildings to fortify other buildings being used as their hideouts. (Not exactly the sort of activity a historic preservationist would like to see. Truth is, ancient Rome was built to hold up very well. It was the looters and salvagers, not the passage of time, that did the most destruction. There was also the Catholic church making sure to destroy any building that smacked of paganism. Good grief.) The popes of the following century and especially firebrand Julius II labored to restore Rome to the grandeur they thought appropriate for a capital of their faith.
So when Julius was tipped off by a trusted friend that there was a Florentine artist worth promoting, history was made when Michelangelo was given a world stage. At first the call was for sculpted figures for Julius’ future tomb, but that project got called off partway by Julius. When Michelangelo was not paid for this work, he stormed back to Florence and the headstrong pope was reduced to threatening war on Florence if the artist didn’t return. Months of negotiation followed and the equally headstrong Michelangelo was finally persuaded to return, thus averting a war fought over the patronage of a talented artist, a dilemma surely only the Renaissance could have spawned.
That was when Michelangelo’s rival Bramante cleverly got the pope to require Michelangelo to commit to painting the Sistine ceiling, thus taking him out of the running as a potential papal architect. (Pope Julius was set on replacing the original basilica of St. Peters with a dazzling new renaissance era church to serve as the Catholic “flagship” cathedral, an amazing architectural commission worth getting jealous over. Michelangelo eventually got the last laugh after Bramante died and he got to revise the design of the half finished church, including the design of the beautiful dome which came to characterize the building.)
God gives life to Adam
Though Michelangelo hated having to paint the ceiling of the Sistine, his perfectionism got the better of him. He sent assistants away when he saw the inferior quality of their work and then spent almost half a decade standing atop the high scaffolding with head arched back and arms reaching overhead doing it all himself. He didn’t lie on his back, as is often thought. The strain on his arms and back must have been enormous. “My beard points to heaven,” he later wrote in a famous poem. “All the day my brush makes my face a rich mosaic floor. I am stretched like a Syrian bow. I am not well placed, nor indeed a painter.”
The area of the ceiling is a whopping 5800 square feet (more than double the floor area of the average Benicia home) and just about every square foot is exquisitely treated. This was a massive effort involving both quantity and quality that resulted in what is arguably the greatest artistic achievement of all time.
Fifteen minutes later the docents lead my group away, down a back hall out a rear door into the warm sunshine of Rome. It was time to catch a cab. There were yet more adventures ahead of us in this land of stunning art and architecture.
With the sun starting to set over Rome, there came a slight breeze that cut the warmth of the day down enough that all four of us McKees could start to get comfortable. No longer dripping sweat, we could be our usual selves with wisecracks and antics all around. When a siren went by repeating its two notes over and over, Wesley joined in and then Melody started to harmonize and then we all did. Whenever we passed a statue, one of us stood in front in the same pose as the statue no matter how pompous (with photo taken to commemorate the act.) These sorts of thing are what passes for wittiness in my family. It’s actually pretty fun.
We were coming from an uncommon treat: a visit to the upstairs flat of a local family, made possible by a facebook connection Gwenna had with a theater arts buddy from UCLA. So we passed part of the afternoon in a simple but charming Roman apartment with round barrel vaulted ceilings. The small rooms were crowded with birthday revelers, many of whom hung out on a delightful large covered balcony lined with art and small plants. The dad in this international family was from Germany and, after twenty years in Rome, had opinions to share about life and society in Italy. (Aesthetically superb, he said, but totally stagnant because projects that should be done for the public good become transformed into private sources of personal gain, rendering the country incapable of any change or progress. He also thought the best thing America had going for it was the willingness of Americans to work, something Europeans have lost.) He didn’t believe in air conditioning, a source of dispute with his American wife, so the end of the sofa near the oscillating fan became a popular spot for party guests.
For this brief visit we had ceased to be tourists and were instead guests of Rome, but now we were back in tourist mode, prowling about the “Eternal City” in search of good visuals.
Away from some key busy streets, Rome is mostly curved narrow cobbled lanes perfect for walking. The sides are lined tightly by very solid four and five story buildings, every window covered with heavy duty shutters in various states of openness. Motor scooters and smart cars are parked tightly together along one side. A narrow street will often times open up to a larger space in front of yet another church or fountain, or maybe even to a view down into a sunken set of two thousand year old ruins – rambling brick foundations and chunks of marble columns. The ruins always sort of thrill me. That’s the genius of this city, the way the ancient is revealed to be under us and all around us. It is us.
Just down the tight curving street from our friends’ apartment we found a very large set of sunken ruins that I later learned was named the Augustus Forum. I really liked the way that four intact towering marble columns with grand Corinthian flourishes at the top right stood right alongside the massive brick remains of a grand wall that set into the hillside. A large set of cracked marble steps at one end helped establish what was the front of the old temple. (A temple to Jupiter, I later learned.) Taken together, it was easy to sense the scale of such an imposing building, and that’s why I proclaimed to my family that these ruins were my new favorite. One look at the remaining foundation and column fragments and the mind could fill in the missing corners of the building and then proceed to populate the whole city with such grand structures.
I must admit that I’m a bit of a geek about these two thousand year old vestiges of the most amazing civilization of all time. At our best, the rest of humanity took another 1500 years to get up the energy to even just imitate what these Romans had created on their own. Though many of the aesthetical forms were derived from Greece, the Romans took that ball and combined it with such imagination and innovative engineering that they invented a whole new game with fully formed cities of dazzling splendor and livability. Ancient Rome rocks. (True, there was all the slave labor that was needed to build it, but that’s not as much fun to think about.)
We almost missed this walking adventure because the kids had lobbied for a cab ride instead of hoofing it back to our hotel, but in my role as the “one-who-hemorrhages-money” during these trips, I was setting the limit on cab rides. There would need to be compelling reasons for these rides that were averaging about seven euros (ten dollars) a pop, like this morning’s need to make it to the gorgeous little oval church by Bernini on the Quirinale before its noon closing, or like yesterday’s need to save a very long trek back to the hotel after everyone had been a good sport about the lengthy walk out through all the interesting things like ancient bridges and world class fountains and the other best-of-Rome stuff.
Not that the cab rides weren’t a hoot, with all of us alternating who got to ride “shotgun” in the front seat. It’s fun getting to flow along in the jostling river that is Roman traffic, instead of dodging it on foot. It’s especially interesting to watch the drama of the scooter riders coping with our Type-A cabdrivers while we all flew along together at top speeds on the curved streets.
I’d started to notice that walking had more potential for fun than the cab rides, and that the best times usually happen when we’re not expecting them.
After enjoying my new favorite ruins, the walk back included an impromptu revisit of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, a three building civic center atop a long stair-ramp in which “The Big Mike” introduced the idea of the colossal column (two story tall) to Renaissance architecture. We also walked through Campo de Fiori, an open-air square favored by locals, with street performers and superb opportunities for people watching. It was there Wesley and I learned how one gets a drink from the always flowing fountain spigots that you see all over Rome. (Cover the spigot outlet with your thumb, thus sending the water arcing out an upper hole.) Wesley blocked the spigot so forcefully that a spurt of water shot out above and sideswiped his sister as she was walking away, causing her to shriek. Of course everybody laughed.
These antics would become the stuff of highly valued family memories, and here we were right in the middle of those moments, deciding how to play them. It was family history in the making, and we were creating the script as we went. It’s the best of times when we’re all getting along and everybody’s personality is adding to the mix. And it’s really very nice to have a beautiful city there to serve as our stage set.
It has happened that I’ll be at a party at someone’s home and notice that they’re not taking full advantage of their lighting scheme, so I’ll take the liberty of adjusting some of the light switches to bring up some accent lights on this wall or that. I should mention that I only do this every once in a while (so I don’t seem like too much of a weirdo) and usually only at the homes of former clients whose lighting scheme I helped design with them. Two seconds effort sliding a dimmer switch and suddenly artwork comes to life and the room is now a richer place.
I guess I dig lighting. Big effects can be had for not big money. Parties that I host at my own house are usually pretty average when it comes to food and drink, but you can be quite sure that I’ll have pretty decent music on at just the right volume and, of course, mood lighting will be doing its thing.
In my dorm room at UCLA I remember changing out the bland institutional light fixture at the center of my dorm room for a chandelier that my roomie and I had found at a salvage place (complete with “tear drop” bulbs and beveled glass accents. Fairly kitschy, but all the more fun.) I used a screwdriver and needle-nose pliers
to change the light-switch to a dimmer while the wires were hot. (It simply wouldn’t do to tell the building manager what we were up to. “Please sir, could you shut off the power to the seventh floor for just a little bit so I can mess around with the wiring?”) It made for two or three zappy moments for me, but the end result was worth it. My roomie Stuart dubbed our room “The Last Bastion of Chivalry and Fine Living.” I still sort of miss that guy.
In grad school I once again put my lighting hypersensitivity to good use.
We architecture students were divided into six different groups who then spent many weeks designing a project together that would then be presented using a slide show and some printed material. The panel of professors would need to look at this printed info periodically during the slide show. Because the classroom had no windows, the lighting in the room needed to be dim enough so the slides were visible but bright enough to allow the written material to be read.
My group was going to present our scheme on one of the last days, so I got to watch group after group go on before us and never get the lighting right. Each group either had the room lights on (which made it too bright to view the slides very well) or they had the lights off (which made it necessary for the professors to try and read the handout using only the dim light bouncing off the wall from the slides.) Months of hard work had gone into these projects and they were not even being fully seen at the critical moment. I guess it didn’t occur to anyone in these first groups to try to solve this problem.
That blew me away. These were students of architecture who were supposed to take the lead in finding solutions to make buildings more livable, yet were so clueless as to not even notice or care about the reality of what was happening in front of them.
The evening before my group was to present, I visited the room and took two minutes to jump up on a desk and aim a row of four or five small spotlights away from the front of the room to instead bounce off the back wall. (These were small fixtures designed to be aimed about as needed.) By switching on only these spotlights the result was perfect – a dim wall in front that would allow our slides to show perfectly, and a light source glowing from the back of the classroom that would give just enough light to let the professors comfortably read our written material.
And that’s how it went down. We had a good scheme and it showed great. We got great comments and were awarded a grade of “A plus.” (In the interest of full disclosure: “A plus” is really not all that hard to get in grad school.)
I’m not even sure if anybody overtly noticed the change in lighting I had created for our presentation, or if they remained as blithely indifferent to such nuance as always. Indeed, the group that presented after us ended up showing their scheme with all the lights on and their slides all bleached out. I think that pretty much says it all.
A day in the life of the architecture student
It’s just before five o’clock, some weekend in March of 1981, and I haven’t been out of the apartment all day. Just me in my bathrobe, hunched over my mostly finished cardboard model of my Winery design, back aching right between the shoulder blades, and two day’s worth of cardboard debris scattered about the apartment living room. My two roomies are gone for the weekend, so I get to go nuts and do whatever I need to do to get my design ready for the final critique in a few days. I sustain myself with music of my choosing and bowls of cereal as needed. So it’s the Pat Metheny Group, Steely Dan and Raisin Bran as fuel. I occasionally alternate between the drawing board in my bedroom and cutting and gluing on my model in the living room – switching between those two activities is what will have to pass for “variety” during finals week.
I love and hate this design of mine.
Love, because it is my baby, my all, the sum of what I have to give the world, at least as a twenty-two year old architecture student. I love the courtyard-within-another-courtyard at the heart of my design.
Hate, because my design has flaws. Not many, but in these final days they are the deferred nuisances that can be deferred no more, so they take all my focus and it’s not fun, not like the early days of the semester when the design was new and perfection seemed possible. I hate how the roof over the utility area seems tacked on.
It’s all for a “pretend” Winery building that will never be built, but to me and the thirty-five other students, our designs are our sun and moon and stars, and have been for the last two months. This last critique of the semester is like a final exam. As with all the students, I will take my turn and stand for a fifteen minutes or so in front of the big wall in the central studio space with my drawings pinned up in a big array, cardboard model nearby for reference. I will then move about among the drawings describing and selling my scheme to the four or five professors and about two dozen fellow sleep-deprived students who stand or sit quietly nearby. If a big name architect is coming through Los Angeles for whatever reason, he will sometimes appear as a guest critic. Egos surely must get stroked by this sort of thing. We had Michael Graves one time; William Turnbull another. These crits are a big deal at UCLA.
The panel will then critique the design, and months of work will be turned into ten minutes of comments and then, just like that, the big deal will be over. I’ll then unpin the drawings and store them upstairs at my drafting station and then come back down to watch the same thing happen to other students. Sometimes the teachers speak directly to the student; other times they speak to each other as if the student isn’t even there.
We all went through this business of final presentations last December at the end of our first semester in grad school, so this time we all sort of know the drill. Half of us will present our designs on Monday and the rest will go the following day. Last December that meant that some of us lucky ones presented the first day and then proceeded to relax and the other half had to make presentations after John Lennon was killed the previous evening. It was particularly tough on my friend Bob, a fellow big time Beatles fan.
For the last week I’ve chosen to work at home in my apartment. At some point the manic vibe of the studio will be missed. There’s a sort of validation that comes from being around others with your same mania, a sense that all this effort for these pretend buildings of ours is totally worth it. I’ve been on a schedule in which I ration my all-nighters and allow myself a full eight hours of sleep every other day, just so I don’t hit the wall like I’ve seen some of my fellow students do and become a walking zombie.
With this final design submittal there is no minimum requirement for the drawings – perhaps there is, but we all quickly exceed it without a second thought, simply because everybody wants to excel. I’ve noticed that about graduate school. There are less overt requirements than regular college, but everybody ends up doing even more.
In one class we each picked what we thought was the ugliest building in Los Angeles and made our case. Please provide a photo and compelling reasons as to why it’s so bad. Boy howdy, did that assignment ever get you thinking.
A glance up from my cardboard model reveals a twilight dimness starting to settle in outside my apartment. I seem to remember taking a load of trash out many hours ago and the resulting brief session of cool brisk air, otherwise I have passed the entire day inside the apartment wearing only underwear and a robe. There’s something slightly dismal about that. So I’ll do what I have done before when I have only fifteen minutes to seize the day – I’ll perform a bike ride of such vigor that the sheer physicality of it will compensate for ten hours of physical inactivity.
My bike and I avoid Van Nuys Boulevard and choose to ride the traffic-free side streets. The streets are straight and I can take the middle of the lane and fly on my ten-speed. I push harder and harder until my legs burn and the palm trees fly by. Sweat comes and is cooled by the sheer speed of my flying body. My Winery design with its niggling problems is gone and replaced by real life, at least for a little while. After fifteen minutes the growing darkness ends my session. Then it’s a back inside for a shower and more cutting and gluing and drawing. Another day down, three more to go.
