Layered Black House - Ypenburg, The Hauge

Here in Ypenburg, a new suburb of The Hague - capital city of the provence of Shoth Holland, Netherlands (the world, the universe etc etc) - there is a funny looking house, that is black, and stacked like jenga blocks. Designed by BBVH Architects who are based in Rotterdam (que song: this could be Rotterdam or anywhere, Liverpool or Rome... you don't know the song?) for the owner of the villa who owns a furniture company - this could explain the couch, I really like that couch.

“This modern villa, design by Rotterdam based architecture studio BBVH Architecten, is located in a new suburb of Den Haag and designed for the owner of a furniture company. The dynamic architecture is characterized by it’s dark colors and large cantilevering terraces. Oriented at the waterfront, the house is designed to enjoy the view of the surroundings.

The house is built with a steel structure around a concrete core, and filled with lightweight prefab timber exterior walls. This allows the terraces to cantilever 3 meters. Used materials are gray glass fibre reinforced concrete panels in combination with an anthracite plaster. The ceiling under the cantilevering terraces is finished with a warm brown wooden cladding.

Contrasting the dark exterior is a bright white interior with spacious rooms. The ground floor has a modern open kitchen and a large living room overlooking the water. Three children’s bedrooms and a bathroom are located on the first floor, with access to a large terrace. The master bedroom with bathroom and walk-in closet is located at the top floor, connected to a private terrace to enjoy the evening sun.”

Artist: Andrew Salgado

I could own one of these. I find them quite beautiful. The series is called "Anxious"

The harsh brush strokes emphasize the masculinity, and the bold colors highlight Salgado’s aggressive and politically-charged narrative.

If you want to see more about the artist his website is here.

To brighten up your Friday...

Dulux Let's Colour Project

Dulux believes that colour makes a difference, that everything can be improved with colour. The Let's Colour initiative involves communities improving their towns by painting them in vibrant colours, donated by Dulux.

This advert was filmed in 4 cities:

Rio de Janeiro - Brazil, France - Aulnay Sous Bois, UK - Tower Hamlets and Jodhpur - India.

About Jodhpur:

The local community joined us in painting the Purohiton Ki Haveli community square, a boy’s school and a building on the high street. Widely known as the blue city, we splashed several tones of blue, pink and purple and left an already vibrant city even more colourful than before.

In total it took them:

Five Weeks

Four cities

with 450 people

and 4000 liters of Dulux paint

And they painted:

1 Housing block

1 Carpark

2 Schools

48 Houses

See more here and here.

The BF (best friend) is getting Hitched...

...and I've done the invites!

Its been months of drama sorting out these invites.

With a 200kb picture of what she wanted to go by - which I can't even remember now, hours of plotting patterns on CAD, drafts, more drafts...

Drafts

...my laptop crashing with ALL my software on it, a 960mb downloaded trail of photoshop and then completely redoing everything in one week to get to printers in time, the invitations are finally out! I have received my very own printed invitation (with +1). Meag's had them printed on shiny, cream coloured card and it looks fantastic. I'm very happy with them, and most importantly, she is very happy with them.

Final invites front & back...

Happy Friday!

Happy Friday!

I am having an early day (hopefully) and I'm going to watch several hours of "So You Think You Can Dance" with my mother and eat snacks and wear my pjs (or jimjams as my gran might call them) and adopt a generally lazy attitude.

Have a great weekend. Support the Boks at 7am Sunday morning!

Snoozing at the Airport...

My final project at college was to design an airport lounge which incorporated several different features such as a kids play area, smoking area and... an area to snooze.

So when I saw this today it intrigued me. It's called a Sleepbox and it is, as the name suggests, a box for sleeping.

The concept:

Street Murals by M E S A

Animation by: The Sun

Skylight House in Sydney

Husband and wife team, Tony Chenchow and Stephanie Little of Chenchow Little Architects renovated this beautiful Victorian terrace house in a heritage area in Sydney, Australia. In Aus they call it a conservation streetscape. So they weren't allowed to do anything but restore the facade in order to keep the streetscape in tact. But it didn't stop them from doing this...

The Skylight House won the Australian Institute of Architects NSW Chapter Award 2011 Residential Architecture Award for Alterations and Additions.

From The Cool Hunter.