I guess this is ruining the surprise but I’m buying this album for quite a few people for Christmas. It’s ridiculously good, very catchy, it topped fancy local charts, it features internationally known art and music stars, and it’s published by Vancouver’s Or Gallery, one of Vancouver’s best non-profit art centres. And it’s on yellow vinyl! The cover artwork makes the album itself a piece of art, too. You could frame it. Do you have any yellow vinyl? Why not? It’s also available at Zulu Records in Vancouver, Amazon, and in Europe you can order it here. Or you can email the Or Gallery and order your own copy direct. The album is cheap direct from the Or at $20 CAD (20% off for members). I am not just shilling for this album because I’m on the gallery’s board. It’s excellent, and Slade can really sing. Click below to read the details.

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This is by far one of my favourite houses in Vancouver. It’s in the municipality of West Vancouver, home to many of the best modern houses in the city, and it belongs to the novelist Douglas Coupland. He grew up in West Vancouver, not far from this house. Just as beautiful as this place is the house below it, a beautiful midcentury modern post and beam house designed by the architect Ron Thom. That’s the house Coupland actually lives in with his architect partner David Weir. Coupland is an artist and designer as well as a writer, and the house shown here serves as his gallery, guest house, and many other things. One of the reasons Coupland bought a second house is that the rate of demolition of midcentury modern houses in Vancouver is accelerating, and he wanted to preserve what was in his own back yard. Everything in the house is original – the flagstone floor, the carport, the railings. Lastly I’m sure it’s partly my visual OCD or some pyschedelic tendency, as well as of course their beauty, but his collections of shapes and objects are completely mesmerizing to me. Spools of thread, lego, polyhedra, modernist vases: I’m fixated. There are informative captions on the NYT blog – click on photos to go there (or link at bottom), and see my previous post on Coupland here. The fantastic photos are by Vancouver photographer Martin Tessler for the New York Times.

For NYT captions, click below:

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Vancouver Island, 2009.

Why can’t cooperative housing look like this more often? The Avenel Cooperative Housing Project in LA’s Silver Lake neighbourhood, supposedly built either for “a bunch of communists” or for a “group of motion picture cartoonists and their families” (click above for informative Wikipedia article) was affordable when it was built in 1947 and of course is now ridiculously expensive. It was designed by architect Gregory Ain for a group of ten families who each contributed $11,000. Ain built ten three-bedroom units of 960 sq ft (89 sq m), each positioned along a common path. They were meant to be a model for low-cost housing, but these particular units have proven so well-designed and constructed that they’re now too prized to be affordable. Someone needs to copy these, both for their looks and for the fact that though a relatively small square footage for a family, they’re so well-laid out that they apparently feel spacious. See comments here for a possible explanation why. As a plan for affordable urban living these days, it’s unlikely that a single storey would now be considered an efficient use of an expensive urban lot. Or would it? Photos from LA Curbed. See also the LA Times and here.

This closet/dressing room is part of a townhouse on NYC’s West Side. The house was decorated by interior designer Samuel Botero in a mad eclectic mix of all possible ornate styles, including Egyptian Revival and Biedermeier and art deco, at his clients’ request. The rest of the place is very dark velvet/chairs with paws/animal print/excess, but then suddenly in the middle of it all there’s this bright fantastical room which actually transcends the general madness of the house and achieves something mythic. I could do without the black cloverleaf casket thing with the ribbon-motif and weird silhouettes, which Botero designed himself, though I suppose it would come in handy for conducting seances while also storing hatboxes or maybe the skeletal remains of small children. But Botero gets credit for extreme daring and for the genius use of emerald green and cream, and all joking aside I sincerely admire the way he just let his imagination run wild, if not amok. This is the sort of room that demands that you re-decorate yourself to match. You’ll need an entirely new period wardrobe, an upgrade from monomania to megalomania, and whatever exotic pet affectation strikes your fancy – an emerald green parrot maybe, or a talking owl. Or an albino cheetah, why not. And a leprechaun. They love hats. Photo by Phillip H. Ennis, via the ever strange AD.

Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland, built between 1937 and 1939 as a rural retreat, is considered one of the greatest houses of the 20th century. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who curated a major retrospective of Aalto’s work at the Barbican in London in 2007, has said that photographs give no real sense of Aalto’s buildings. Short of flying to Finland, though, photos are what we have at this moment. Flickr photos are by  08 ROTCH simoneau, Frans Drewniak (drz image), Siren Fay, Andrew Paul Carr, bttgcm, Ashley Wendell, David Gross and Ettubrutae. For further reading on this amazing house, there’s an excellent article on Aalto and Ban’s curation of his work at designbuild or look at Phaidon’s Villa Mairea Aid. The house shows evidence of Aalto’s various interests in Japanese design, in sustainable architecture, and in simple, natural materials used in an experimental way. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater was also an influence, and you can see that here, but while I appreciate Fallingwater, I love Villa Mairea.

Click below for more photos.

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