Watercolor paintings based on Julius Shulman photos

If the famed architectural photographs of Julius Shulman sketched a story about California, then New York artist Amy Park has added her own chapter, painting color into images that many of us have seen over and over again.

Park creates large-scale watercolors from architectural photographs, and Shulman's images of California homes and other buildings were inspiration for a show that opens Saturday at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles.

“His photographs capture such an idyllic time in California,” Park said by phone from her studio. “The landscape, the light. It is magical for someone like me who grew up in the Midwest and now lives in New York.”

The painter, originally inspired by the documentary “Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman,” did not work on site or even visit the buildings. She worked exclusively from Shulman's black-and-white photographs, on loan from the Getty Research Institute. Though Shulman’s archive does include color photography, Park chose black-and-white images as a challenge. The colors in her paintings of the Eames House in Pacific Palisades, for instance, are based on her recollection. 

'Atomic Ranch Midcentury Interiors': Modern living with 'Mad' looks

During a recent trip to San Diego, I drove by my childhood home in Point Loma. The low-lying 1956 ranch house still looked the same from the street. Were my hand prints still in the patio concrete? I also found myself wondering if the home’s period details inside remained. The lovely diamond pane windows with the stubborn hand cranks were gone. And surely the small kitchen with its funky brown appliances had been edited by now. But I hoped the wide brick and flagstone fireplace -- the one that could easily seat four and doubled as a stage for my sister and me -- was still there.

Retaining those classic ranch-house elements while adapting to modern living is precisely what Michelle Gringeri-Brown, editor of the quarterly Atomic Ranch magazine, tries to encourage through her new book, “Atomic Ranch Midcentury Interiors.”

“We try to point out the charm of original features,” Gringeri-Brown said in an interview. “We encourage homeowners to be cautious. Don't rush to gut the whole thing before you make interior design choices that can’t be undone. The period pieces often stand out as things to be appreciated.” 

Gringeri-Brown credits the popularity of “Mad Men” for fueling appreciation of ranch houses. A new generation is attracted to what she calls “retro cool.” Ranch houses also appeal to aging baby boomers who are wary of stairs. “Because ranches were built when property was cheaper, they tend to sprawl on one floor and have a larger yard,” the author said.

This is her second book on ranch houses with husband, photographer Jim Brown, and it highlights eight homes, from a tract house in Calistoga, Calif., to a split-level in Ohio. (That's a 1958 house in San Mateo, Calif., at the top of the post.) Homeowners share their remodeling stories, offer tips on projects such as windows and plumbing, and detail the design elements they have retained. In one case, homeowners found original metal kitchen cabinets in their garage. The book is filled with creative ideas as well as informative sidebars, floor plans, vintage photos and a list of nearly 200 resources.

'Girls' on HBO has a breakout star: Charlie's apartment

Sorry, “Girls.” When it comes to home design, the latest breakout star of the HBO series belongs to one of the guys: the apartment of Marnie's wet-noodle of a boyfriend, Charlie.

“It looks awesome in here,” Marnie says upon seeing the studio for the first time, even though they have been a couple since 2007. “It looks like a Target ad. It's perfect.”

“A Target ad?” an annoyed Charlie responds, showing a hint of an emerging backbone. “It's not quite a Target ad, but whatever.”

Whatever, indeed. Charlie's apartment turns out to be more complex than Marnie could imagine. Conceived by production designer Laura Ballinger Gardner, submitted to series creator Lena Dunham for her approval and then built from scratch — all in just four days — the fictional 12-by-12 studio set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn is a character unto itself.

“We knew from the script that he lived in an older, not good apartment, but he had taken a small studio and done something wonderful with it,” said Gardner, who also is production designer for “Veep.”

2012 AIA housing design winners announced

The American Institute of Architects announced the winners of its 2012 national housing design awards, a list punctuated by a Hollywood Hills home dubbed the Nakahouse, pictured above, by XTen Architecture. Other winners include a wood and glass retreat in Carmel, an apartment complex for the formerly homeless in San Francisco and a steel and glass prefab in the Arizona desert. You can see them all in our 2012 AIA housing winners photo gallery.

Photo credit, top: Steve King

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2010 AIA housing design winners

Homes of the Times: California design profiles

Sheditecture: Vote for your favorite cabin design

  Minutes before the three cabins were to be unveiled, 17 exhausted architecture students in Woodbury University's design-build program raced to finish like a construction crew awaiting a city inspector. Ladders were still propped against the structures. Tool belts and Skilsaws lay about. "They were drawing and redrawing until the end," said architect Jeanine Centuori, chairwoman of the undergraduate program.

As we reported earlier, the challenge had been daunting: Take the components of a hardware store shed kit and build a cabin that can sleep two, with light, ventilation and insulation. Read our full story on the process and click through a photo gallery of the finished projects, then tell us: Which team created the best cabin?

 

 

Vote! We'll keep the poll open for a week and will share the results.

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Photos: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Woodbury architecture students turn sheds into cool little cabins

The challenge for three teams of architecture students from Woodbury University in Burbank: Design the coolest, smartest cabin that you can dream up. The catch: Your building materials have to come from an ordinary, not-so-cool shed kit from Lowes.

“There was a lot of grumbling at the beginning,” said Jeanine Centuori, chairwoman of the undergraduate architecture program at Woodbury. Each 10-by-10-foot shed had to be transformed to accommodate two people for sleeping. The template had to be tweaked to provide light, ventilation and insulation. And though the teams each had a budget of $1,500 for additional supplies, they also had a mandate to experiment with one assigned material — paper, plastic or wood.

PHOTO GALLERY: Woodbury students tweak shed kits into mini modern cabins

POLL: Vote for your favorite cabin design

Just how much can a simple shed be transformed? The answer becomes apparent before you're even off the driveway at the Shadow Hills Riding Club, the San Fernando Valley equestrian center where the three cabins were built.

The paper team's bright orange cabin practically glows, its exterior pop-outs borrowing an idea from motor homes (imagine dresser drawers left open). The pop-outs provide seating on the outside and space for luggage racks on the inside. Two beds are cleverly hidden under removable floor panels. Colorful hammocks from Craigslist hang from the ceiling, prompting student Sunny Lam to claim (as only a college student could) that the cabin “sleeps four.” (That's Lam in the photo hanging out, with Colin McCarville holding a floor panel that, when lifted up, becomes a privacy screen.)

BuBees beehive: modern architecture for the urban bee

Backyard beekeeping is the buzz of urban farming, with some wanting to replenish bees disappearing through Colony Collapse Disorder and others simply wanting to harvest home-grown honey. Now a Malibu business called BuBees is making beehives that are as fashionable as the city dwellers keeping them.

Designed by commercial artist and Art Center College of Design graduate Steve Steere, the $300 hives are a blend of form and function. A so-called top bar design, BuBees beehives mimic the way bees live in nature. The 36-by-18-inch living space is equipped with 24 bars, under which the bees build their combs. Two solid boards that run the width of the hive can be moved to make the space smaller or larger depending on how many bees adopt the hive. A viewing window lets beekeepers see inside the space, which can accommodate thousands of the pollinators.

For beekeepers who want honey, the top bar system allows easy harvesting. Just lift out one of the bars, cut off the comb and smash it in a bucket.

Venice home tour: A weekend blitz of modern design

The Venice Garden & Home Tour is one of the biggest events on L.A.'s house-snooping calendar, a self-guided walking tour of 30 properties including, this year, the Gregory Ain tract -- an architecturally significant 1947 enclave of modest one-story homes by one of the city's iconic modernists.

Homes will be open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. If you haven't yet bought a ticket, you can get it for $70 on the day of the tour at 804 Broadway, Venice. Proceeds benefit the Neighborhood Youth Assn.'s Las Doradas Children's Center. Information: (310) 821-1857, www.venicegardentour.org.

Stops on the tour this year include a renovated bungalow with a large indoor-outdoor living room addition, right. A wooden footbridge spans the lap pool between the two structures. The landscape was designed by Rob Jones of Jones and Potak.

Keep reading for a look at some of the other houses on the tour ...

On Venice Garden & Home Tour, old blends with new

The driveway has disappeared, and in its place is a verdant entry garden. Walk past the precast concrete block wall edged with succulents, and cross a diagonal stepping stone path toward a covered veranda. A series of thresholds -- some sheltered, some open to the sky -- draw you in. And only when you reach Santiago Ortiz and Mimi Wheeler's front door do you notice the sunken tropical garden -- a lush surprise.

Their garden-focused retreat will be among 30 properties open to the public Saturday for the annual Venice Garden & Home Tour, concentrated this year in neighborhoods east of Lincoln Boulevard and in the Gregory Ain Tract in Mar Vista.

In 2007, when Ortiz and Wheeler first viewed a 1940s California ranch house in Venice, they were impressed by its generously sized lot with impressive stands of mature trees and shrubs. To Ortiz, a designer who was raised in Medellin and Bogota, Colombia, and educated in architecture and fine arts at Rhode Island School of Design, the 11,000-square-foot property on Appleton Way offered a chance to create a new residence large enough for a growing family and his home-based studio.

Petite prefab: Six designs for a backyard office

Small prefab structures are near-instant backyard work spaces, a corner office that feels separate from home but still provides a commute measured in steps instead of miles.  We put together a photo gallery detailing six options, including the KitHaus modernist mini-manse, the Verana assemble-it-yourself studio from Summerwood and British OfficePod trying to make its way to a garden near you. For details on concept, materials and prices, keep reading ...

PHOTO GALLERY: Small prefabs as backyard offices

 

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Photo credits, clockwise from top left: OfficePod, Modern-Shed, Summerwood, Nicolas O.S. Marques for Kithaus, G-Pod, Studio Shed