Water Water Everywhere, I Think I Need a Drink

Something we're going to have to start thinking about soon is water. Apparently, it's all the rage for bathing and cooking, with some people actually drinking the stuff!

We have a drilled well on the property, but any time I've tried to walk from our building site to our well, I get lost in the woods. Bad sign. So initially, we'll try rainwater collection, but regardless of whether we pull from the well or use rainwater, we're thinking of building a water tower for storage and pressure.

If our water tower is from the old school, the "alien blob" pictured above, which my friend Dave sent me earlier today is a spacey yet practical solution. They've worked the water storage tank into the living space as a room divider, structural support, and cooler. Nifty, but I can only imagine how much this thing cost. (Images by Peter Bennetts)

Via 1o9.com via Materialicious (my new favourite blog)

I'm Dubious About Midnight Trips to the Outhouse

Don't be fooled by the uber-modernist pic John posted a few days ago. All I can say is, I'm glad there's a bylaw prohibiting trailers as long-term residences on the island, because otherwise I can picture him trying to talk me into one of these:

(Via Apartment Therapy)

Bunkie Concept

Via Cribcandy...

The finish isn't really our style, but I could see adapting the concept for some groovy little bunkies built onto the hillside, or in the woods on the property. The size is something like 2m by 2.4m by 1.4m.

Below is the architectural gibberish that accompanied the original post, which is very hard to find because there is no direct link. Funny that... why is it that so many architects have problems creating good websites?

The Lit Clos puts forward a simple idea. It’s a box that’s sufficiently closed to accommodate a bed and the intimacy that it presupposes, and at the same time sufficiently open not to be claustrophobic. The box is on an architectural scale, between a bed and a bedroom.

It uses techniques from furniture manufacture: painted plywood, soldered steel, and above all there’s the DIY assembly of the kind that you get with a piece of Ikea furniture. These characteristics give you a certain ease of assembly and of installation. While it's admittedly more complex than an ordinary bed, it’s still simpler than putting a bedroom together. There is a play on the scale of the space.

The « Lit Clos » frees you from the necessity of building a whole bedroom, and opens up numerous possibilities in relation to the place where one sleeps.

The « Lit Clos » exists in a low and a high version, respectively 70 cm and 180 cm off the ground.

Extracts from the book Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, released by Phaidon in 2003.

Upside of the Down

Is there an upside to the recession that may be bearing down on us? A recent essay in New York Magazine makes the case, albeit sort of badly.

There's obviously not much to look forward to during a recession, but I was hoping that writer Joel Lovell would look for bright bits in the fact that it might inspire people to once again realize that you don't need a Viking range to be happy, and that thrift can be sorta sexy. After all, isn't the true meaning of "cool" all about making a dollar out of a nickel? (I stole that from somebody else, btw.)

But mostly he spends his time bitching about the current high price of cheese, skyrocketing home prices, and how poor he feels compared to the other yuppies that have moved into his Brooklyn neighbourhood.

He's aware of the fact that he's overly smitten with the desire to own all the same shiny things the moneyed folks do, but not enough to stop talking about it throughout the entire article. Still, there are a few gems, such as the one below, that make it worth reading:

Is there a moment you can point to when you thought, Things aren’t like they used to be?” She contemplated. “I guess it was the personal juicer,” she said.

She was referring to our friend’s boss at an Internet start-up, a guy who got paid ten gajillion dollars about fifteen minutes after he started his company and then went bananas. Among various eccentricities he hired a Rastafarian to travel everywhere with him and make him juice.