Myla and Davis

Herne Hillers might have spotted Jim and I working away of late on the beautification of the lovely Myla and Davis salon.

We took a thorough approach here: a sand-down-and-repaint wasn't going to suffice, as the years of paint build-up had become cracked and unstable. The most recent redecoration had also left no visual separation between the masonry and the woodwork, with a block of the same colour extending across both substrates. We burned off all the old paint, re-rendered then repainted.

Sharpening up the woodwork in white has given the fine details of the masonry, such as those lovely corbels, the prominence they deserve.
 

 

Homemade

It's not wise, I admit it: giving in to, and even revelling in, envy is surely a path to agitation and unease.

To hell with it -- let's just do this...

Have a look at this expansive conversion of two London terraced houses into one home by Bureau de Change.

More photos at Design Milk.

Hall, stairs, landing

Fine colours, well chosen -- with pleasing results...

Jim Kazanjian

Some fascinating work from Jim Kazanjian, via Ian Martin. 

The following summary is from Colossal...

Without the use of a camera Portland-based artist Jim Kazanjian sifts through a library of some 25,000 images from which he carefully selects the perfect elements to digitally assemble mysterious buildings born from the mind of an architect gone mad. While the architectural and organic pieces seem wildly random and out of place, Kazanjian brings just enough cohesion to each structure to suggest a fictional purpose or story that begs to be told. 

The oak beams of New College Oxford

What a fine, faith-enhancing tale this is...

Founded in 1379, New College, Oxford is one of the oldest Oxford colleges. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with huge oak beams across the top, as large as two feet square, and forty-five feet long each.
A century ago, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, which met the news with some dismay, beams this large were now very hard, if not impossible to come by. "Where would they get beams of that caliber?" they worried.
One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some worthy oaks on the College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country which are run by a college Forester. They called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him if there were any oaks for possible use. 

He pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”
Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”
A nice story, one which raises an immediate question, “What about the next time? Has a new grove of oaks been planted and protected?”
The answer to this is both yes and no. The truth of the story, is that there was probably no single patch of trees assigned to the beams. It was standard practice for the Foresters to plant oaks, hazel, and ash. While they would harvest the Hazel and Ash every twenty years or so, they allowed the oaks to grow quite large for use in major construction work. (The oaks were also occasionally used in ship building.)
Additionally, the trees from which the oaks used to rebuild the hall came from land that was not acquired by the college until 1441, nearly sixty years after the hall was originally built, and the roof of the hall had already rebuilt once before in 1786 using pitch pine timbers, because the large oak timber was apparently unavailable.
The answer to the question, have new oaks been planted, is probably. Somewhere on the land owned by the New College are oaks that are, or will one day, be worthy of use in the great hall, assuming that they are managed in the same way they were before. It is in this management by the Forester in which lies the point. Ultimately, while the story is perhaps apocryphal, the idea of replacing and managing resources for the future, and the lesson in long term thinking is not. 

The original post can be found here.

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Update, 4 March 2013.
Paul the carpenter sends me an email...

I do like things like that -- there was that sort of forethought at that time about forestry. Oaks would be trained so that their branches would form the curve of a ship with one or two branches, rather than five or six. It was recognised by James I that it was a finite resource though -- every substantial landowner had to put some land over to growing oak. Iron smelting used oak charcoal, and so did kilns for pottery and lime making. Almost every artefact of that time used wood in its making -- oak was the strongest and burned the hottest.

Carpentry

Some simple but effective shelving: the classic London alcove .. and a separate pair, defining the corner of the room, above head height...

The pleasures of the right lighting

Before...

A satisfying job, this: take an old but handsome light, of brass and stained glass .. test it to make sure it works ..  shorten its chain, earth wire (or CPC/circuit protective conductor, as I've been taught to call it) and flex .. install it on a porch ceiling .. and wire an infra-red sensor into the fitting. In essence, we're talking about a security light which, for aesthetics, knocks your average B&Q option into a cocked hat.

With thanks to Dave Levinson, my lecturer at South Thames College, and my Dad, for clarifying the intricacies of wiring a sensor into a ceiling rose.