This midcentury modern house is for sale – or was – according to the Paul Rudolph Foundation website, which links to this great set of photos from ECOHUSET on Flickr.  See also the Rudolph Foundation’s blog for a post on this house. Architect Gene Leedy worked in Rudolph’s architecture firm, and along with a few others the two are largely responsible for the style known as Sarasota Modern.This house is a particularly pretty example of that style. The veneer plywood walls are beautiful and warm, but it’s the well-chosen paintings and objects that really make this place, especially that wavy wood-grain piece on the desk and all the small brutalist or neo-primitive sculptures. Putting the elliptical lamps on at floor level is a moment of genius too. Also the dog.

Also take a look at the book  Paul Rudolph: The Florida Houses

This tiny sample of photos is from the new website of Vancouver interior designer April Tidey. They include shots of her own amazing loft in Gastown, one of Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhoods. April is a landscape and outdoor designer as well, and in that capacity she worked as designer and stylist for the HGTV series “Take It Outside” for several years. Photographs here show great interiors by April in Vancouver and on nearby islands. Photos by Vancouver photographer Heather Ross.

These are all, as usual, from The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press, 1970. I love the photo of the little garden house with the abstract geometric painting, above, and the book actually includes plans for it (click at bottom). One of the things that is so great about 1960s and 70s decor books is that many of the best ideas come with DIY instructions or are just simple to make, like the cedar privacy wall below.

Bicycle wheel potato chip cart! Happy Spring.

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Vancouver artist Arni Haraldsson, known for his photographic studies of modernist architecture and his research on Corbusier, produced these three photographs of the house of another artist, BC Binning, in 1994. Binning, a painter, built a beautiful little modernist house for himself and his wife in West Vancouver, B.C. in 1940. West Vancouver, for a set of complicated reasons, is home to most of the Vancouver area’s best residential modernism. This is a beautiful, functional house; see more photos of it here. Haraldsson’s works appear here courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.  ”Entrance with Exterior Mural, B.C. Binning House (1940), West Vancouver, Bert Binning, Architect”, 1994, details here. “Terrace Doors, B.C. Binning House (1940), West Vancouver, Bert Binning, Architect” can be seen here. And “Picture Gallery, B.C. Binning House (1940), West Vancouver, Bert Binning, Architect” is here. 

The photo above of Binning in his home studio is from an article on the Binning house in canadianarchitect.com and the whole article is worth reading. “Surrounded by Paintbrushes, Canvas and Other Tools of His Trade, Artist B.C. Binning Is Seated in His Home Studio in This Photograph From 1950.”