Displaying posts labeled "Outdoors"

Toronto based Taylor Smyth Architects create poetry or so they say. Buildings relate intimately to their surroundings, embracing the site, celebrating the vista. The Sunset Cabin at Lake Simco, Ontario is a simple building and simply beautiful. A one bedroom cabin, a private retreat in the woods, a bunkie, a getaway that looks to the setting sun for inspiration.

A beautiful little house perched on a garden allotment in Groningen in The Netherlands. A wonderful getaway on a tiny lot in a communal setting. Don’t pop a portable shed or generic lock up on it. No. Create something as special as the eccentric gardens that surround it. Garden house, summerhouse, shed and hide-away. A marvellous mini villa by Haiko Meijer of Onix, perfect for architect and family.

Saturdays are normally about helping readers with their design dilemmas. Today, instead, it is all about a wonderful retreat in an exotic location, full of creativity and it’s a reader’s home. Maureen Booth is a painter and print maker who lives just outside Granada, Spain in paradise….in a chicken coop. Well her guests actually live in the coop. This bijou building is an artist’s and writer’s retreat.

“Yes, it was a chicken coop. After that it was a dog kennel, then a painting studio, then it was a junk room for years  before we got around to enlarging it, re-roofing it and renovating it. Artists love it, both for the peace, the atmosphere and the five-meter-long workspace.”

Nothing grand, very honest, practical and wonderfully romantic. A reclaimed Spanish outbuilding with a view full of inspiration and a garden full of respite. El Gallinero.

By the king of reclaimed materials Dave Coote… he of locations agency, The Beach Studios, which he runs with his wife, Atlanta Bartlett and his on-line boutique store, Pale & Interesting. A big pot of tea, a sketch book, my dog wandering in and out. I’d be so happy to relax or to potter about. Wonder if I should keep it a secret from my friends? No!  More the merrier.

An old unsympathetic lean-to veranda is torn down and a glass and steel loggia and extension are built to blur the line between inside and out, to provide light and to frame views of the sky. A whimsical stainless steel mesh double height curtain skims across the back of the house providing privacy and shade. A quirky magical place. A modern twist to a High Victorian style house in Sydney. The Glass Loggia House by Allen Jack + Cottier .