Well, that is Nob Hill. 
Nice flat, but man real estate is insane again in the Bay Area.
I remember in the later 80’s I knew someone that lived in a pre war building @ Bartlett and 24th which is now heavily gentrified of course. She paid like 600/month at the time for a huge studio. Walk in closet, eat in kitchen, dark oak floors, 12 foot ceilings.
Lord knows what that goes for now. 3k or close to it, probably.
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Jeeze, that tiny apartment looks really unpleasant. I mean, I personally would rather skip that type of thing and just have a sleeping tube with a storage space underneath. Either a place that isn’t an insult, or a place that’s overt insult, rather than the veiled insult of an “apartment” about the size of a pickup truck bed.
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Aw man. That thing looks pretty cool to me. If I owned it and had money, I’d convert one of those dome things into an observatory.
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I think the guy is doing a wonderful job. If it is snark, is top-quality snark.
It’s informative too. You don’t have to be an expert in the architectural vernacular to recoil from something that is clearly ‘wrong’. But he explains why it feels wrong by comparing it to something that works. And he is not being snobbish and ticking off your house’s features against his copy of Vitruvius: I feel he would not slate you for having an unorthodox house, but if people did not like it, he might explain why it wasn’t working in clear terms.
I would like to see him rate Buckingham Palace. With all due respect to The Lady In The Shiny Hat (sorry ma’am) I have always though that place was a bit vulgar in the same sort of way.
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A lot like the Mr. Plinkett Reviews of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. I knew I hated Phantom Menace a lot, but I couldn’t figure out why until he pointed out it had no compelling characters, no compelling plot, and terrible use of the set in any scene involving two people. Either it’s walking and talking, or sitting and talking, or walking and talking then sitting and talking then walking and talking a little more with utter blandness as the dressing on the shit salad.
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That looks like an Olive Garden that went through a dog-fighting mill and got beefed up with constant abuse and steroids.
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I know exactly what I’d do. Start paying off zombie medical debt for people. Pennies on the dollar, completely turns people’s lives around.
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Glorious, glorious 80s! Thanks for sharing - reminds me a bit of the set for Terrorvision!
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What do you mean they’re made of meat?
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As are we. The problem with trying to infill neighborhoods with affordable housing for residents in a place with a tourist economy is that the the housing doesn’t get bought or rented by stable residents, it gets bought as investment property and rented out as tourist condos. If your studio apartment is filled for only 300 days/year at tourist-level rental, you get a lot more income from it than if you rent it out to a single person or young couple working the kind of jobs that are common in such areas (eg hotel employee).
A bizarrely better solution is to keep multiple occupancy in such housing illegal, but don’t enforce it unless the neighbors start to complain. That way the owner can’t legally rent it out as transient tourist housing, so settles for people who are happy to live on slightly shady terms. In my neighborhood this mainly means students or employed young people, all of whom are vastly preferable from the neighborhood stability POV to tourists. (There is an immediate problem, however, which is that in illegal rentals the landlord has too much power over the tenants, who are not protected by normal tenant law protections.)
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You plan to send them hate mail about their concrete lawns?
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Followed by a link to faecesbook. Figures.
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#?
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Edwin Lutyens, apparently. I don’t know enough architectural history to grok where where @jerwin is going with this, though.
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But…REBELLION!
Seriously bro. If you don’t like how stuff’s going, and feel these “part-time” residents have too much authority…then go the the mattresses.
So to speak.
Dig out plan ‘B’, I mean. Or ‘C’.
Or coughcough “fix” your environment so the offending lifeforms find it inhospitable.
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In England, it was common for large houses to combine several successive styles, as successive generations renovated the old pile to reflect the current trends. What Lutyens did was offer that sort of thing in a ready made, harmonious whole that was built using steel and other modern materials, prewired, and pre plumbed.
The snarker proposes these elements of a mcMansion
Conflicting secondary masses. (See the Required Reading: Why McMansions Are Bad Architecture for more info about mass)
It would seem that there are quite a few secondary masses
Conflicting architectural details or design elements (e.g. corinthian columns on a craftsman house, or tudor windows on a colonial)
It’s an elizabethan house with neoclassical elements
The use of three or more exterior materials (e.g. a house whose exterior is composed of brick, stone, and vinyl siding)
Looks like brick, stone and wood.
The overuse of decorative elements such as columns, keystones, decorative brickwork, and others.
Those chimneys!
Anonymous asked: i think like the main failing of mcmansions is that they aren’t thought of architecturally. the mcmansion is designed as a feature wrapper. “vaulted ceilings, open concept, master suite, spacious windows”. the a facade is thrown up around that. you can even think of the exact details of the facade as another feature: building a new house lets you choose exactly which of several architectural “flavors” you want tossed up on the front road.
This is 100% true. McMansions are definitely designed from the inside out.
Well, the interior of Little Thakeham certainly is designed-- lots of corridors and halls opening up into dramatic rooms, and the exterior seems to support that.
The difference comes down to design. A McMansion is designed by someone who has neither the budget nor the imagination to properly execute the idea, while a Lutyens house is.
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FOUR garages? And it sold for under $20M? What a steal!
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LOL, I know, but seriously…that’s one of my bigger-percentage ethnicities. Very difficult to track down info. So, it’s totally personal.
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