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The Dame of Melba House on the Australian Coastline

Seeley Architects designed this beach house overlooking the rugged coastline of Australia’s Anglesea.

A gigantic viewing frame extends out in front of a deck that juts from its second floor.

This captures the sea view from the deck outside.

The Dame of Melba is a residence for a retired couple designed to also house family members on vacation.

A comfortable second floor houses the kitchen, living room and dining, and behind the viewer, the retired couple’s bedroom and bathroom that also overlooks the sea.

An angled deck on the back of the house offers an entry into the living room and a view of the framed deck. Read the rest of this entry »

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Design Trend: Luxury Bedding in Silk

If there’s any time of year to start thinking of luxurious bed linens, it’s now. In November, the days are getting shorter, the nights a whole lot longer, and the temperatures are dropping fast. What better place to be than in bed, wrapped in soft, silky sheets!

Indeed, many of us spend the darkest, coldest nights of winter (and plenty of days, too!) nestled in bed, where we can read mystery novels, watch movies, catch up on email, and snuggle with children and spouses.

But if we’re spending this much time in bed, maybe we should also be giving serious thought to the bedding we’re using. After all, bedding can have quite an effect on our sleeping comfort and health. Choose the wrong bedding — scratchy synthetic sheets for example — and suddenly bed becomes a much less comfortable place to spend time.

If you’re looking to “up” your game this winter, you might consider splurging on a fabric you may have never really considered before. If you’re thinking of luxury bedding, consider opting for silk.

Why silk?
Silk is naturally porous and absorbent, keeping you warm in the winter and cool in the summer. It’s resistant to mildew, moths and dust mites and is naturally hypoallergenic. It’s also a natural skin and hair preserver. Due to its high protein count, silk doesn’t absorb moisture, allowing your skin and hair to retain their smoothness and luster. It’s hard to beat the health and beauty advantages in this luxury bedding material.

Silk as stuffing.

And here’s something else you may never have considered: Not only is silk great for sheets and duvet covers (and of course, great for pajamas!) but it’s also great as a comforter filler. Silk floss filling adjusts to an individual’s body and the ambient temperature of a room. By trapping air next to your skin, silk duvets keep you warm in winter while drawing heat away from the body in summer. It’s also a great alternative for those allergic to duck or goose down. Similarly to down, however, silk floss is light and thin and will envelop your body without weighing it down. You can find silk-filled duvets in summer, winter and all-season weights.

Silk as a new aesthetic experience.

Silk’s got one more thing going for it: It has an elegance that’s missing with plain old cotton sheets, or with too-shiny satin sheets. The silk sheen is a subtle one — Old World Elegance, think a French Chateau, not Las Vegas. Of course, silk bed linens don’t come cheaply, a set can set you back several hundred dollars, but if you’re looking for a luxurious experience for yourself, or for a gift, you can’t do better than this. If you need more evidence as for the beauty of silk linens, take a look at a few examples:

Below, fresh white silk sheets offer a lustrous glow that speaks of all the comfort and refinement of a five-star hotel.

Below a dimpled taupe silk bedspread is a sophisticated take in a masculine setting.

And we especially love the slate gray silk bed linen pictured here:

Okay, so we know what you’re thinking. What about cleaning? You may be surprised to learn that washing silk sheets is not much different than washing cotton. The sheets available at the London-based company Gingerlily.co.uk, for example, are washable at 30°c (or about 86 F) using mild silk detergent. So if you’re ready for a big splurge to get you through the darkest days of winter, consider silk!

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Design Dilemma: Get Rid of that Hallway!

More often than not, a hallway is wasted space. Okay, so not all hallways are bad. Some hallways can provide a needed transition between, let’s say a public area and private space. A hallway can also make for drama, particularly in an entry hall leading into a living or entertaining area. But let’s face it, in today’s informal home, replete with an open concept floor plan and a concern for energy usage, a hallway just feels wrong. It’s a space that calls to be heated and cooled, it must also be cleaned, and yet, it supplies relatively little in return for all the work. So more and more of us are looking for ruthlessly efficient floor plans with as little hallway eating up our precious square footage as possible.

Something like this:

Notice how little of the floorplan is given over to space-hogging hallways. The overall space is 2,588 square feet but only 115 square feet, or 4 percent of the overall square footage, is used for circulation. That’s superefficient and means that these owners are spending dramatically less money to build wasted space than some others might.

So what do you do if you own an older home with lots of hallways? You have two options:

1) Knock down walls.
2) Turn your hallways into functional spaces.

Option one: Knocking down a wall. Knocking down walls and opening up spaces has become extremely popular these days, and with good reason. Getting rid of a wall can dramatically change a layout, allowing for better circulation, more light and air, and a sense of communication between formerly separated areas.

Check out the room below. The old layout included a long hallway and a separate living room and dining room, with a stairway at the end of the hall. The owners knocked down a couple of walls, allowing the living and dining rooms to communicate with each other as one large open space. The hallway and stairway gains light and a feeling of spaciousness that would have been impossible with a closed off hall. The look is far more modern than the old layout.

Option two: Giving a function to your hallway.

Knocking down a wall can get expensive, especially if the wall you want to get rid of is load-bearing. So enter option number two: make use of that hallway! The best way to do this, is to create some sort of useful function for space that would otherwise be used purely for circulation. This could mean all sorts of things like…

A library…

A gallery…

Or a storage space…

The space above, by the way, is perfect for storing shoes.

So what it all boils down to is this: if you’ve got a hallway that you are beginning to resent, feel free to get rid of it. And if you keep it, at least put it to work!