#modern style house

[sherlocked-avatar]

Modern Pool - Infinity

Pool - large modern backyard custom-shaped and stamped concrete infinity pool idea

[vintagehomecollection]

The International Book of Lofts, 1986

[arc-hus]

Pavilion in Sandefjord, Norway - R21 Arkitekter

[toyastales]

A modern jungle house

[plein-air-on-gorkhon]

plague city, night

[marzipanandminutiae]

Marzi's Old House Supply Kit: A Non-Exhaustive List

So you've moved into an old house! Congratulations! No, no, look at me. Look in my eyes. Congratulations. You don't need smart lighting. You don't need paltry things like "showers that don't make ungodly noises if you set the water outside a very specific temperature range" or "logical staircases." Because those people who say They Built Them Sturdier Back Then is survivorship bias are wrong, lead paint is only a problem if you eat it, and your new home is basically a tank

also it might have stained glass. so basically you win

(no but seriously the Survivorship Bias argument is just like. tell me you don't live in a city with large quantities of remaining working-class 110-year-old buildings without telling me. I do. they're sturdier. end of.)

but you might need some things to make it a bit more comfortable. here's what I've found, over eight years of living in houses built 1920 or earlier

Power strips. Depending on the age of your house, it may or may not have had electricity originally. And even if it did, whoever lived there almost certainly had fewer things to plug in than the average denizen of the 2020s. There also may have been gorgeous wall sconces that some asshole heartlessly ripped out at some point, forcing you to use the hideous hateful Overhead LightTM or plug in a bunch of lamps. Either way, you're going to need to turn that single outlet in the room into several more. Hence, power strips.

(hey, I never said this list was free of my design biases. deal)

A Good Fan. You may live in a place where retrofitting with air conditioning was commonplace in the last several decades. I do not. So a good pedestal fan can make the difference between comfort and just not sleeping at all from late June to mid-September. Weirdly, I did once look at a place that was from the 1850s and had been retrofitted with central A/C, which is vanishingly rare in even urban Massachusetts. But I digress.

A stud-finder. "Marzi, you spent years of your life explaining to tourists that picture rails existed because trying to hammer nails directly into horsehair plaster and then putting weight on them did Bad Things." Yes I did. "What did you attempt to do the second week of living in your first house with horsehair plaster?" ...shut up. I used the Poltergeist Method to find solid wood- I don't know if it's actually studs or the lath or what; I'm not a builder -to hang my Lady and the Unicorn tapestry from, namely knocking on the wall until it doesn't sound hollow. You might want to go a bit quieter and more advanced. Or, if you have a picture rail, embrace the "long visible hanging wires" look. It is in fact there for a reason!

Window screens. You are actually required by Massachusetts state law to provide these to your tenants. Doesn't mean my last landlady did. And if you own your place, live in another state, or have a similarly laissez-faire building owner, you might end up needing to Bring Your Own Insect-Blocking Shield. Just make sure you've got them, one way or the other. Because see above re: fan vs. air conditioning in old houses.

WD-40. When's the last time those hinges were oiled? Potentially before television. And they WILL squeak. UPDATE I HAVE BEEN INFORMED THAT WD-40 IS NOT A GOOD LONGTERM SOLUTION. Find "actual oil." Not sure what the more specific name is. Good to know!

That's just what I've found needful so far, but I'm happy to update the list as required!

And you'd better believe, if I owned my own place, this would include "the name of a preservation contractor to undo all the unnecessary ~*MoDeRnIzInG*~ aesthetic bullshit the past owners did since the End of Mainstream Western House Beauty AKA 1920 (That Brief Rococo Revival In the 1930s Can Maybe Sit With Us)"

[11oh1]

[hometoursandotherstuff]

I don't know why, but I think that I would feel like my house was sticking out like a sore thumb if it had a big round window (and it's not the only round window, either). It's a 1984 modern, in Feeding Hills, MA, 4bds, 3ba, $499,900. It's gray scale inside, but I like it. You can always add color.

For a red house, it's got a lot of gray inside. Anyway, this is a sunken living room. See the round hole in the wall? Spiral stairs go up to a loft above.

There's a nice shiny black fireplace, and lots of round holes so that you can see other rooms. The kitchen is 3 steps up.

You also have to be mindful of the steps. There are various heights in every main room, such as this one to the dining room. I do like the mural, though.

One step up from the dining room to the kitchen. It looks like they put that support under the counter, themselves. I would paint it black or something to match.

The kitchen's okay, but nothing special.

The family room has double holes in the walls, a nice built-in fish tank over the fireplace, (unless you don't want to maintain a tank).

The spiral stairs come up to this lofted area.

Finally located that outside round window- it's in the primary bedroom. So, can anyone walk up and look inside, or do those panels slide over it?

There's another gray mural in here, plus 2 closets with mirrored doors.

It has a nice bath with display shelving.

This room is used as a home office and it looks small, like maybe for a nursery.

Nice 2nd bath.

This room has a nice mural too. But, would it kill them to put up a colorful mural on one wall? Geez.

And, this is the 4th bedroom. Nice size, gets good natural light.

Downstairs there's a large rec room w/a sauna and bath.

Basement shower room.

This is basically a ranch style home except for the loft. Interesting. It has a very large deck and plenty of room for a pool.

Covered patio.

And, then way back here in a corner, there's a small stone patio around a fire pit. .42 acre lot.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/79-Barbara-Ln-Feeding-Hills-MA-01030/56143064_zpid/

[fit-lifting-girl]

Tall, spacious kitchen in Edmond, OK. Follow me for more!

[anghraine]

Okay, breaking my principles hiatus again for another fanfic rant despite my profound frustration w/ Tumblr currently:

I have another post and conversation on DW about this, but while pretty much my entire dash has zero patience with the overtly contemptuous Hot Fanfic Takes, I do pretty often see takes on Fanfiction's Limitations As A Form that are phrased more gently and/or academically but which rely on the same assumptions and make the same mistakes.

IMO even the gentlest, and/or most earnest, and/or most eruditely theorized takes on fanfiction as a form still suffer from one basic problem: the formal argument does not work.

I have never once seen a take on fanfiction as a form that could provide a coherent formal definition of what fanfiction is and what it is not (formal as in "related to its form" not as in "proper" or "stuffy"). Every argument I have ever seen on the strengths/weaknesses of fanfiction as a form vs original fiction relies to some extent on this lack of clarity.

Hence the inevitable "what about Shakespeare/Ovid/Wide Sargasso Sea/modern takes on ancient religious narratives/retold fairy tales/adaptation/expanded universes/etc" responses. The assumptions and assertions about fanfiction as a form in these arguments pretty much always should apply to other things based on the defining formal qualities of fanfic in these arguments ("fanfiction is fundamentally X because it re-purposes pre-existing characters and stories rather than inventing new ones" "fanfiction is fundamentally Y because it's often serialized" etc).

Yet the framing of the argument virtually always makes it clear that the generalizations about fanfic are not being applied to Real Literature. Nor can this argument account for original fics produced within a fandom context such as AO3 that are basically indistinguishable from fanfic in every way apart from lacking a canon source.

At the end of the day, I do not think fanfic is "the way it is" because of any fundamental formal qualities—after all, it shares these qualities with vast swaths of other human literature and art over thousands of years that most people would never consider fanfic. My view is that an argument about fanfic based purely on form must also apply to "non-fanfic" works that share the formal qualities brought up in the argument (these arguments never actually apply their theories to anything other than fanfic, though).

Alternately, the formal argument could provide a definition of fanfic (a formal one, not one based on judgment of merit or morality) that excludes these other kinds of works and genres. In that case, the argument would actually apply only to fanfic (as defined). But I have never seen this happen, either.

So ultimately, I think the whole formal argument about fanfic is unsalvageably flawed in practice.

Realistically, fanfiction is not the way it is because of something fundamentally derived from writing characters/settings etc you didn't originate (or serialization as some new-fangled form, lmao). Fanfiction as a category is an intrinsically modern concept resulting largely from similarly modern concepts of intellectual property and auteurship (legally and culturally) that have been so extremely normalized in many English-language media spaces (at the least) that many people do not realize these concepts are context-dependent and not universal truths.

Fanfic does not look like it does (or exist as a discrete category at all) without specifically modern legal practices (and assumptions about law that may or may not be true, like with many authorial & corporate attempts to use the possibility of legal threats to dictate terms of engagement w/ media to fandom, the Marion Zimmer Bradley myth, etc).

Fanfic does not look like it does without the broader fandom cultures and trends around it. It does not look like it does without the massive popularity of various romance genres and some very popular SF/F. It does not look like it does without any number of other social and cultural forces that are also extremely modern in the grand scheme of things.

The formal argument is just so completely ahistorical and obliviously presentist in its assumptions about art and generally incoherent that, sure, it's nicer when people present it politely, but it's still wrong.

[saltavista]

[vintagehomecollection]

In this view, the dining room is to the left of the living room; beyond the reflecting pool to the right is the master bedroom.

The Los Angeles House: Decoration and Design in America's 20th-Century City, 1995

[architectureandfilmblog]

The Glass House, Philip Johnson, 1949

INSIDE THE ICONIC GLASS HOUSE (2023)

If you haven't had an opportunity to explore this building in person, there are several films which allow us to visit it remotely. This video from Open Space introduces us to the house and grounds, and gives some context and background on Philip Johnson, who, prior to designing it, had made a career change in his 30's to begin studying architecture. Another film which nicely illustrates the property is GLASS HOUSE (2019), in which photographer David McCabe revisits it, and talks about the images he took there of Andy Warhol.  (Photo by Eirik Johnson)

[arc-hus]

Dzen House, Kyiv - SHOVK

[toyastales]

How much fun could you have in this moody shower?

It's a whole vibe.

[box-dwelling]

With all love in the world to fic writers, and this isn't a set criticism just a trend, being a British person and seeing what colloquialism people have Wyll use will absolutely take me out of a fic at points. Like this is difficult and I'm not gonna hold it against any writer who does this but I very much do notice it. I don't even have advice because so much of it is a weird feel thing of the type of age of the people who use certain slang.

Wyll talks with pretty archaic British slang. It's not too ancient. It's still like stuff you might hear an older guy say, but it gives a certain feel to him speech of it being kinda old fashioned.

But sometimes people either don't get this or, honestly more common in what I see because most of the fics I read are from people who do understand him, people who, fairly because they aren't from here so wouldn't know, use slang that feels a little too modern and it just reads like Astarion just called someone bro.

But I don't know how to explain that lad singular is a word he does use in canon and makes sense, but lads plural feels so fundamentally wrong.