Home Design

A Family Compound with High Style

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:32:00 -0700

A five-foot-tall metal owl with glowing eyes greets you at the Gallagher residence. Inside, a surprising world awaits: a jumble of coats drapes from a jaunty metal fish, and laser-cut wooden letters above proclaim, “You Dropped a Bomb on Me, Baby.” A painted mermaid smiles from the surface of a sliding door, knitted cozies cover pendant lamps, and grassy green walls provide a verdant backdrop throughout. “It’s cheerful and a little irreverent,” says Gretchen Gallagher. “We don’t take ourselves very seriously, and we don’t fit into a mold.”

The thread that pulls all these details together is a unique aesthetic—part retro-mod, part funky-eclectic, part underwater theme, all unabashedly playful. Gretchen and Tim Gallager grew up together in Southern Oregon, and both studied art in college. Now, Tim is the owner and creative director of the industrial design firm Gallagher Designs—conveniently located next door. “My family and I became my client,” he says. “And in a way, the house became a design experiment.”

Image: Jordan Siemens

Color, pattern, and texture run wild in the Gallaghers’ house, from the wall of printed metal scales that Tim hung in the living room to the back patio illuminated by a steel fire pit, the knitted lampshades in the dining areas, and the inspirational adages throughout.

From the outside, the house is an innocuous 1950s wood-shingled ranch. But for a metal skull over the front door (and that owl), it blends seamlessly with its suburban Northwest Hills neighbors. The place was in poor shape when the couple first saw it in 2000, but they were enticed by the acre lot and the location—so they decided to reconceive every corner of the house and property for themselves.

Over 12 years, which included three phases of remodeling and the addition of three children, the Gallaghers radically transformed their home’s interior, nearly doubling the overall area to 3,500 square feet. Downstairs, they removed inside walls to create an open floor plan, and gutted the kitchen and refitted it with new appliances, concrete countertops, and a backsplash of glass mosaic tiles. They converted an attached garage into a playroom, with funky orange and green plaid carpet tiles underfoot, acid-green beanbag chairs and a camo-print couch, all anchored by a climbing rock wall. A spacious new master suite now protrudes from the back of the house, and a cramped attic upstairs became three bedrooms, one for each of their children, centered on a shared play space with built-in desks.

The family shared a tiny guesthouse (formerly a detached garage a short walk uphill) during the remodels, all five family members rotating through one bathroom. Now, it’s a remodeled guest space for visiting grandparents, as well as where Gretchen sews and the kids play foosball.

Image: Jordan Siemens

In the bedrooms and bathrooms, words pepper the walls: a tongue-in-cheek welcome to the master suite, the nickname “Chop”, and parental admonishments in the kids’ bathroom. Everything is green, with the notable exception of their daughter’s room, which is a powerful pink.

With the help of a neighbor who owns a printing company, as well as tools and designers from his own firm, Tim applied his artwork to every conceivable type of material, from the monsters and undersea creatures printed on the plywood sliding doors to the living room wall covered in overlapping layers of 1,200 metal scales, alternately printed and painted various patterns, then meticulously nailed on by hand. A topless mermaid (who looks suspiciously like Gretchen) printed on canvas is applied to the headboard in the master bedroom. The couple pulled other items from Gallagher Designs’ warehouse of castoffs and leftovers. A globular, shiny black chair sits in one son’s room; a vintage fridge painted bright orange and repurposed as a closet in the other son’s room. Antique glass lamps collected over the years are clustered together and arranged in the living room and stairwell.

It doesn’t stop at the back doors—the Gallaghers transformed the entire acre site into a veritable arts and sports playground. The master suite opens onto a sequence of a bocce court, a horseshoe pit, and a putting green. Up the hill, what used to be a meadow for cows and horses is now a basketball court, a play structure with an inground trampoline, and a lacrosse field. Between the Gallaghers and their neighbors, a shared swimming pool and lounge echoes with splashes and laughter from late spring to early fall. Tim’s metal sculptures—a friendly alligator, a cheerful dog—are sprinkled about.

“The house is an extension of our family motto,” Tim explains. “Do good. Be good. Kick ass.”

Historic Kitchens Tour

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:00:00 -0700

Image: Courtesy Architectural Heritage Center

One of the kitchens on this year's Architectural Heritage Center Kitchen Revival Tour features this sweet scrollwork cabinetry and arched opening to the dining nook.

For 15 years now, the Architectural Heritage Center has organized an annual spring tour of “revived” kitchens. That means kitchens in old houses (at least 50 years old) that have been restored, renovated or otherwise brought into the modern era while still remaining true to their original period of construction. Sounds simple, but that can be a tricky task.

You’d think what a person needs from a kitchen would stay the same – it’s a place to store and prepare (and maybe consume) food. But really, kitchens are much more than that. Their design expresses how we feel about those daily, utilitarian needs, and what role it plays in our lives. Cooking in 2013 ain’t what it was in 1913.

And it’s not just because of the refrigerator (and the microwave and the toaster oven and the dishwasher). The kitchen of a hundred year old house was likely smaller than we’d want today; it wasn’t intended to be the gathering place and hub of our home the way it probably is in food-centric Portlandia circa 2013.

And while we might like the elaborate woodwork and high ceilings of an 1890s Queen Anne Victorian house, or the rustic, sheltering feeling of 1915 Arts and Crafts bungalow, we might not be too crazy about how how separate the kitchens were from the dining room. But that was the way to keep those nasty cooking smells away from the rest of the house, and the servants out of sight.

The eight houses on this year’s tour are all located on the east side of Portland, in relatively close-in North, Northeast and Southeast. The tour is self-guided, so you can go at your own pace and take the time to talk to the owners and contractors, who generally are on site to tell their stories and offer tips on “everything from retaining original material to disguising a dishwasher.”

Kitchen Revival Tour
Architectural Heritage Center
701 SE Grand Avenue
Portland, OR 97214
When: Saturday, April 13th, 2013
10:00 am - 4:00 pm
Cost: AHC Members – single ticket $20, couples ticket $40
General Public – single ticket is $25, couples ticket $50
Tour is for ages 12 and over, although babes in arms are welcome.

You can order tickets online here.

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Design for Small Spaces: The Fifth Unit

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0700

Image: Lincoln Barbour

On the darkest, rainiest of winter days, Los Angelino Heidi Hu relishes the light falling into the 970-square-foot Portland pied-à-terre she shares with her husband, Dan Hsieh. “You don’t even have to turn the lights on to read,” says Hu, book in hand, while controlling ever-present music on her iPad from a vintage Grete Jalk chair in the living room. “There is this beautiful natural light that changes constantly.”

The airy, luminous feel is no small feat, given the home is wedged into a 21-foot lot, its entire interior footprint a mere 11½ by 40 feet. But with nearly a quarter of the roof sliced open to the sun with a 20-foot-long skylight, even the most cloud-filtered rays still reach every corner of the lofted, two-story home.

Designed by Dao Architecture, what can only be described as an “ultra-skinny house” began with a now-popular urge: to turn a crumbling garage into an accessory dwelling unit. “I thought it would be cool to rent to some poor student for $300 a month,” Hsieh recalls. But his and Hu’s part-time Portland home was a fourplex and, in spite of the city’s liberal policies (and, for the past three years, waiving of development fees) for these so-called “grandma flats,” city codes prohibit them on multifamily properties.

Image: Lincoln Barbour

The stairs offer prime space for art and books.

The couple is used to stepping around, over, or through problems. Hsieh describes himself as the “utility infielder” (officially, chief innovation officer) for Ion Media Networks, the conglomerate that locally owns Channel 22. Hu is a retired financial trader whose undergrad studies at Lewis & Clark College led her back to working for Portland causes like Friends of Trees and Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center.

Dao’s Joann Le and David Horsley investigated every possible code loophole, finally discovering they could build the house as a “fifth unit” to their fourplex—albeit one that the constrained lot shrunk to three feet narrower than even the so-called “skinny houses” that controversially proliferated across the city during the 2000s. “It seemed like an interesting thing to do for us and for the city,” Hsieh says, “take this nothing garage and make it into something.” He and Hu liked the challenge, and their only requirement to the architects was to make it spacious. Or as Hu flatly puts it: “I was worried about feeling claustrophobic.”

Image: Lincoln Barbour

“I was worried about feeling claustrophobic, but with high ceilings, it doesn’t,” says Heidi Hu of her 11 1/2-foot-wide living room. The slide-out kitchen pantry storage under the stairs further maximizes the space.

Horsley and Le had to navigate numerous appeals of city codes to build the house. (For instance, they won a challenge to energy rules allowing only 2 percent of any roof to be skylights by using a double-walled, thick polycarbonate version more than twice as energy-efficient as conventional skylights.) Hurdles hopped, the design fell into place: living, dining, and kitchen on floor one; a stairway that also serves as storage; and on the second floor, Hsieh’s office at one end and a bedroom at the other, connected by a bridge that allows the space above the first-floor dining area to soar to 18 feet. Le and Horsley believe the key to making a small dwelling feel big lies in the circulation. So they began with an exhaustive study of how to arrange the stairs. “We probably did five configurations: straight run, switchback, an ‘L,’ etc.,” Le says. “It was an exercise in efficiency, but also in how to still allow a lot of natural light.” Conventionally, Le adds, illuminating a house is solved “horizontally”—by windows. But with the fourplex and other neighbors only a few feet away limiting both privacy and sunlight, “it finally occurred to us to bring the light in vertically.”

Image: Lincoln Barbour

A custom fabricated dining room table and banquette allows for both ample legroom and storage beneath--and a place for Maya, a German shepherd, to hold court.

“We got more than we expected,” Hu says. “It’s a lot more spacious, comfortable, and maybe even luxurious than I ever expected.”

That’s saying a lot: the couple’s LA home is a 3,800-square-foot, ’20s-era Spanish Revival—much like the style of their Irvington fourplex. Indeed, they never considered that they might one day build a modern-styled home. Ironically, were they to try to build the same house today, they couldn’t—courtesy of Irvington’s sprawling new National Historic District.

“When you have this little box, it would look a little dorky making it look like a traditional house,” says Hsieh, who now finds himself fantasizing about developing other unused pieces of space. “I’m a geek at heart. If you think about geekdom, it’s about new.”

Design for Small Spaces: Little & Luxe

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0700

Image: Lincoln Barbour

“Play with volume. Compact rooms—like bedrooms and baths with low ceilings—can contrast with more voluminous rooms, increasing a sense of spaciousness.” —MICHELLE JERESEK, ARCHITECT

Image: Lincoln Barbour

Once a dark space hemmed in by walls of bamboo outside, the upstairs has become an elegant, light-filled apartment. “We wanted to find a balance between a modern and period feel,” Becca Werlin says.

The recent inhabitants of Becca Werlin’s Humboldt duplex span a lifetime. A baby learned to crawl on the smooth concrete floors. Various young single professionals, from an architect to a lawyer, have lived in the modern-styled space downstairs. A couple got engaged in the sunny apartment upstairs. That couple’s parents recently rocked their granddaughter to sleep as the sun set through the home’s French doors.

“We wanted to make the space adaptable over time,” says Werlin, who works at the N Mississippi Avenue children’s boutique Black Wagon. “From parents with a newborn to aging grandparents to college-age students.”

The duplex was formerly a single-family home across the backyard from Werlin’s home with husband Eric Engstrom, a city planner. Decrepit with striped silver and purple wallpaper upstairs, the house had once been home base for a prostitute. Walls of bamboo formed a fortress outside, darkening the interior and blocking all views. “We figured that whoever bought it would tear it down,” recalls Werlin of their decision to buy. “We wanted to have control over what was there.”

Image: Lincoln Barbour

French doors in the upstairs apartment open onto a tiny balcony where renters Jeremy Sande and Amy Dorius eat breakfast above the verdant backyard.

Werlin and Engstrom asked design principal Michelle Jeresek of local architecture firm Departure to reimagine the space as a duplex. “It was an odd configuration,” Jeresek says. “Splitting the house up from down made the most sense.” The couple had two goals for the future rental: keep the budget modest and retain the house’s 1902 historic detailing. Working with Hammer & Hand as a contractor, Jeresek kept the structure intact but gutted most of the interiors, tucking modern kitchens into the center of each apartment, with compact appliances keeping the footprints small.
Upstairs, she had the wood floors stripped of marmoleum and the walls painted in soft creams, greens, and grays. A pass-through window links living room and landing and lets in light from casement windows above. Downstairs, she transformed the formerly dank basement into a cool modern retreat, with an open layout and seamless concrete floors.

Large glass doors in both apartments draw the eye to the lush garden outside, making the spaces feel larger than their respective 800 square feet. A smooth ramp curves around the house from the street to the entrance of the downstairs apartment, separating it from the upstairs unit’s front entry and making both spaces feel distinct. Tables and chairs under banana trees and flowering plums in the backyard give tenants an outdoor retreat.

Image: Lincoln Barbour

In the upstairs living room, boxes are both storage and sculpture, and decorative album covers hold actual records for the turntable.

“We thought everything through,” Werlin says. “We added a lot of luxe touches that make the units feel more like little jewel boxes than cardboard boxes.” Werlin spent hours foraging at the Rebuilding Center, uncovering items like a period bathroom sink and Pratt and Larson tile seconds to live alongside brand-new upgrades like drop pendant lights from Schoolhouse Electric. Hammer & Hand meticulously crafted every inch of the space, hand-carving the molding to replicate the original trim and custom-fabricating a countertop to wrap around the Ikea cabinetry.

“It’s the nicest place we’ve lived together,” says Jeremy Sande, a land-use planner who lives in the upstairs unit with his partner, Amy Dorius, a medical student. “The quality of materials makes a huge difference,” he adds, noting a sense of both timelessness and time-liness. “Even though it’s small, it’s the perfect fit for us right now.”

Design for Small Spaces: Curated Life

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 08:00:00 -0700

Image: Lincoln Barbour

At every turn, Facer plays with scale, whether it’s a giant paper clip or a tiny niche that becomes a desk space.

Every square foot of Robby Facer’s compact apartment lives large with his personality. Paintings with pithy phrases beckon visitors to the walls. A chartreuse Buddha is bathed in light from the 17-foot-wide expanse of windows. Pops of red pillows and turquoise vases stand out against the white walls, and sunbeams bounce against mirrored side tables, scattering throughout the rooms. “Where I live needs to feel like it’s part of me and personal,” Facer says. “That lends itself well to a small space, where you can almost see everything when you walk in.”

Facer has lived all over the country as a corporate retail marketer. Along the way, he lived in a 450-square-foot apartment in New York City. “I fell in love with the space,” he says. Drawn to urban vibrancy and walkability after his Big Apple sojourn, Facer chose the downtown energy of the Pearl District after relocating to Portland last winter for a job at Adidas. He happened upon an open house at the just-opened, 50-unit Janey apartment building, and the place instantly fit.

“The goal of the Janey was to have East Coast living on the West Coast,” says Agustin Enriquez, lead designer on the project for GBD Architects. “We wanted to see how small we could make the units and not compromise the way people live.” The LEED Platinum building’s units range from 487 to 684 square feet. Facer chose a larger one on an upper floor. “Walking in and seeing the light and view to the north reminded me of my New York apartment,” he says. “Plus, I’ve grown up a bit and like having a separate bedroom.”

Image: Lincoln Barbour

The roof deck of the Janey offers views, greenery, and a respite from compact interiors.

Ceilings reach over nine feet tall, an enormous wall of windows anchors the exterior wall while extending the inside out, and a sliding door gives privacy to the bedroom but keeps the place otherwise unfettered by doors. Most notable is the built-in storage: floor-to-ceiling kitchen cabinets, an entry nook with a shelf and electrical outlet, and two walls of closets in the bedroom. And then there’s the flow. “You can walk a circle from the kitchen, living room, bedroom, and back,” Facer says.

Image: Lincoln Barbour

“My aesthetic is a fairly modern take with a mixture of vintage to offset it,” says Facer. Case in point: a pair of sleek Eames chairs around the dining table are illuminated by an antique store letter “R.”

Within the outlines of the apartment, the ardent design fan has carved out his own functions from the form. He defined a shallow cutout in the living room as his office area, with a homemade desk on four skinny red legs. He gathered a serene array of furniture in grays, whites, and glass, allowing the vibrant colors of his eclectic art collection to punctuate the room. A dining area consists of a diminutive table with minimalist Eames chairs. Such divisions within the open floor plan give each area a purpose—and help to avoid the pitfall of what Facer calls “a big cluster of things.” The walls are where Facer lets his collections run wild, with objects like a paper zebra head and a massive illuminated metal “R.”

“If I lived in a large space, I’d feel lonely,” he says. “This place feels like an extension of me. It feels like home.”

How to Rent Retro Chic

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 16:10:00 -0800

Image: Courtesy Commonwealth Vintage Rentals

Top: The “Johnny” Chair & Antique Dessert Servers
Middle: A Vintage State Plate & Old-Time Lanterns
Bottom: The “Kristin” Desk & “Above the Clouds” Dessert Tray

Problem: Your hip new boss commands you to stage a product-launch party. (Never mind for what; in this town, it could be an iPhone app or a line of wooden bow ties.) He wants a neo-vintage spectacular worthy of an Anthropologie catalog. Possible solution: Commonwealth Vintage Rentals, a rental and event-planning operation that has turned Portland’s love of all things old and perfectly weathered into a business model.

Launched last year, the four-woman firm offers vintage, salvaged, and repurposed furnishings for short-term rental. Whether clients need full-blown event planning or just some toasting glasses, Commonwealth aims to make a particular Portland aesthetic available by the hour. “It’s not shabby chic and not midcentury,” cofounder Liz Michel explains. “We wanted a classic look that stands the test of time, that isn’t overly trendy.”

It’s a look in demand. Averaging five events a week (10 during wedding season), Commonwealth also recently provided props for a photo session for high-end teamaker Steven Smith, whose company insists that even its foil packaging look just so. “The shoot wasn’t fussy,” Smith says. “It showed us as being thoughtful and creative, which is exactly who we are.”

To achieve this mix, the Commonwealth team scours shops, flea markets, Craigslist, and free-stuff piles. They also build their own faux-old furniture, from salvaged-wood tables to Pendleton-clad ottomans. To the right, six choice items from the Commonwealth collection—all of which speak to a very postmodern fascination with the past.

Wish List: Ideas for a Family Space in the City

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:11:00 -0800

Plan Your Winter Garden

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:40:00 -0800

If you look out your windows in winter and see somber brown and gray and not enough green - much less floral color - consider some tweaking of your winter landscape. As it happens, winter is the best time to evaluate what you need and consider your planting options, when the spring and summer leaves and flowers are gone and you can see what the garden looks like during the long stretch of four to six months when the deciduous trees are bare. And selection at the nurseries is at its peak right now for most winter-interest plants.

Hiring a creative garden designer to take the whole picture into account can be a smart route. But if you're more DIY in nature and wish to just make a few improvements, try these tips for siting winter-interest plants:

Add a framework of evergreen shrubs, trees and perennials to create a sense of snugness and warmth in winter. Plants that retain their foliage in winter help hold the frame of the garden in place year-round. In addition, evergreen plants create a haven for winter songbirds seeking shelter from weather and predators.

Plant flowering winter-interest plants where you'll actually see them in wintertime. Plant them outside windows you commonly gaze out of, so you'll see them while doing the dishes or having breakfast. Or near the front door stoop, the compost or recycling bins, or where you get in and out of your vehicle every day.

Position fragrant, winter-blooming plants where you'll smell them while they're in flower. Many of the winter-blooming flowers are fairly small and not wildly showy so unless you're on a connoisseur of that plant, you mostly want to be able to smell the flowers, not see them. Place them near doors that you use most in winter, near where you park your car or bike, or close to the sidewalk where passers-by can enjoy them. If they're shade tolerant, like Sarcococca species or Pachysandra axillaris 'Windcliff', tuck them behind or underneath other plants. Winter-fragrant plants are especially effective in courtyards or anywhere the air collects on a windless day.

It's a great time to peruse nurseries, while plants are in bud and evergreen plants have changed from their summer green (usually) to their more burnished winter tones.

Head to your favorite local nursery soon and look for beautiful, winter-interest plants while they are fresh and the selection's best:

- Evergreens including broadleaf evergreens like Magnolia laevifolia (large shrub/small tree) or cold-hardy hebes (ranging from 2" to 5' tall) or coniferous evergreens like monkey puzzle trees or pine trees. Broadleaf and coniferous evergreens can come in sizes ranging from a couple inches high (little evergreen shrublets or dwarf conifers) to full sized trees.

- Colorful or shapely berries or fruit like snow berry, winter berry, or coral berry (Ardisia)

- Brightly-colored stems or twigs such as red-, yellow-, or orange-twigged dogwood or willow

- Interesting, exfoliating bark such as is found on madrones, paperbark maples and Himalayan birch

- Architectural seedheads like certain ornamental grasses like maiden grasses and plants with puffy, spiky or spire-like seedheads including thistles such as Echinops and Eryngium.

- Spikiness like Yucca and Agave

- Fragrance in plants that flower in winter, including winter box (Sarcococca sp.), winter sweet (Chimonanthus) and witch hazel (Hamamelis)

Rejuve Hosts Pop-Up Flower Shop

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 08:10:00 -0800

Rejuvenation is celebrating its 20-year anniversary in the historic Neustadter Building on SE Grand Avenue in Portland. Part of the celebration includes the opening of a charming pop-up flower shop featuring Meg of Fieldwork Flowers.

Between November 12 and December 23, Fieldworks will be selling terrariums, succulents in planters, wreaths and some cut flowers in a beautiful temporary shop tucked inside Rejuvenation.

It's a fitting idea to celebrate this beautiful historic building. Built in 1902, the Neustadter Building originally served as the factory that made "Boss of the Road" overalls and men's work shirts. But by 1941, the building was sold to Standard Investment Company, which began leasing part of the space to the Oregon Flower Growers' Association on December 1, 1946. Before long, three of the city's major floral wholesalers (Robert A Hungerford, Oliver & Thompson and Chase Gardens) occupied a 100 x 200 foot space in the south side of the building. In May of 1946, the Oregon Flower Growers' Association bought the building. By then, the Association had grown to a membership of 80 growers, which were housed in individual stalls in the building.

Over the years, traffic and parking became a major issue in the area, and the Oregon Flower Growers Association moved to Swan Island in the late 1980s, where it now known as The Portland Flower Market.

Rejuvenation is also hosting a one-day pop-up artisan event on November 17, 2012 from 10 am to 5 pm that will feature local artisans, including two pottery studios - Puji Studios and Kelly Pottery. Every gardener can use a few glorious hand-made pots! I'm also told that there may be some great-looking stoneware tabletop composters for the kitchen. Check out this list of artists participating in this one-day event.

Wish List: Restoring a Home with Recycled Materials

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 12:04:00 -0700