Friday, March 13, 2009

remodel: the hallway.

So I had surgery on Tuesday; hence I was a little preoccupied and Cake Tuesday fell by the wayside. (I hope you understand.) (I'm still on all sorts of medications, so hopefully this won't be too rambly...)

I thought it would be more fun to show you a little more of the house - specifically, the hallway. Traditionally Craftsman homes weren't big on hallways - the whole movement was rebelling against the Victorian small rooms and narrow hallways and branched into open spaces that flowed from one to the next. But in adding a bedroom there was no way to easily join the new to the old, and a hallway was the only thing that made sense.

Our designer made it wider than a standard hall, though, and we decided to match the beautiful wood wainscoting in the dining room, since one branched off the other.

Here's the new doorway, on the left, that was cut into the dining room wall (easily one of the most painful changes in the whole process):

On one side we hung a ton of photos and art - my friend Chris' pencil sketch from a book we wrote in French class years ago, an antique map of Santa Cruz, my grandmother Edith on her wedding day, Holga shots from our honeymoon in the Cinque Terre:

It's a wall full of stories and history, and when we have parties it's a surprisingly popular gathering spot. On the other side, above the wainscoting and below the antique light fixture (thank you, Historic House Parts!), we put my dad's block set from when he was a kid. I love that they're not painted - just simple and plain, although a few do have lightly scored designs on them:

When we visited Frank Lloyd Wright's studio last summer, a similar block set was there from his childhood. (Or they were his children's. I can't remember. But I remember thinking how neat it was that they were, like my father's, simple and worn and obviously well-used.)

And at the end of the hall, leading into the master bedroom, we put this transom piece in above the door:

When I was poking around online about Craftsman art and architecture last year, I saw these beautiful wood panels, laser cut by some random guy in the Midwest, and I had to have one. I didn't even know where it would go at the time - over the closets? Built into the bookcases? I didn't care - it was just perfect and I knew it would fit in the house somewhere. And then because there was a step from the upper hall to the lower, the space above the bedroom door was framed perfectly from the dining room, and it all fell into place. It is such a pretty addition, and the light patterns it makes on the ceiling are very cool.