I already discussed laundry hookups. Now I've patched the holes from the added plumbing, painted the closet, and put the used front load Kenmore Elite HE3 washer and dryer set into place. Having a laundry in your house is nice especially when there's dust and cobwebs all over the place
The electric range!:
Wow... an original electric range shutoff switch from our maybe-maybeck house! I have never seen one this old.
I have never seen a shutoff switch for an electric range this old! You can also tell it's old since newer electric ranges require something like 40 amps instead of 60.
Part of the historical info with my house includes info about the V. Rowland and Maybeck connection. They met in '23 after the Berkeley fire as I believe they developed the buffed redwood technique by reusing burnt timbers, like the Japanese Shou-sugi-ban. (I believe the 1924 date is wrong below).
The most relevant information here is that Rowland and Maybeck were design friends and they both developed the electric kitchen and buffed redwood beams together starting in '23.
Electric kitchens were VERY uncommon in the '20s. Much more common is electric appliances like in the electric kitchens of '40s-'60s mid-century homes. It's actually pretty interesting how modern mid-century modern homes are. Mostly people just add some insulation (double pane windows help a lot) and add a gas line to the kitchen (and maybe the laundry) and call it a day! At that point it doesn't feel much different from a contemporary modern home. Now the ideal is typically gas stove, electric convection oven, gas dryer and gas water heater (in my opinion) although the greater use of solar panels and the introduction of the Tesla home battery may lead to more electric appliances over the next 50 years.
Maybeck was known for his pioneering use of fireproof materials after the '23 Berkeley hills fire. He had lost a few great works to fires before that, but after the devastating '23 hills fire, something clicked. I think a part of that change of course was his use of electric kitchens, as electric appliances were seen as safer since they are not "on fire". Part of his change might be his desire to change with the times and use new and (debateably) improved materials and appliances. In fact, some people call him a proto-modernist. Another factor could be that people were beginning to have what resembled modern kitchens in the '20s - a lot of Victorian houses have "lean-to" style enclosed back porch kitchens as the wood stoves of the time produced a lot of smoke. Another thing that was happening around the turn of the century was indoor plumbing that drains to the city sewer system. 100 years ago was a formative time for plumbing and electrical systems.
" In the United States, even though three companies had introduced electric stoves in 1908, penetration was rare; an electric stove was still considered a novelty in the 1920s. By the 1930s, decreased cost of electric power and modernized styling of electric stoves had greatly increased their acceptance." from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_stove
Well our kitchen was all electric before I put in the gas line to the range and gas dryer. It looks like the house was maybe all electric originally. I don't know when the water heater was put in... that could have been the only original gas appliance though I'm not sure how that worked back then. I found a galvanized tube going up from under the kitchen. Maybe a wood stove for boiling water under the house?
If that's the case that it had a boiler in '27, it may have had no gas line until the furnace in '39-40. If you don't put in a proper central heating setup when the house is built, you may have what I've got: A central furnace for most of the house and a gas line running up to a couple wall furnaces for the additions way up the hill. There's not really room to run ducting where it wasn't before without boxing it inside the room.
Back to the kitchen... Our kitchen had no evidence of a gas line. In fact, the gas line came into the house right to the water heater, went over to the furnace, and a long 1" gas line went over 50' up to the space under the master bath. The gas lines completely skipped the kitchen and laundry but I fixed that. Cooking and drying with gas is still the way to go as natural gas is clean and cheap. The 2031 Del Norte house has been converted to gas. Our house is cooking with gas (using an old '30s Wedgewood). The cubby house has a gas range though I don't know the history of that one since it was originally a "carriage house." Cooking with gas is cool for now, but when will the tides change again?
I was working on the laundry closet and I saw a piece of redwood bark fall off a framing member. Wait a second! Framing is supposed to be Doug Fir! I already knew that the ceiling beams and sheathing, doors, trim, cabinets and flooring are made out of redwood. But the framing too? That would be an unusual upgrade! I know redwood framing was done in redwood rich places like Eureka in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but this much redwood in Oakland is odd.
Redwood door
Redwood bath trim
All redwood
Redwood flooring
Redwood built-ins
Redwood kitchen cabinets
Redwood make-up vanity
Redwood burl front door pull. The rest of the door is... redwood also.
Fancy old redwood fencing boards next to redwood grape stake fence next to redwood retaining wall
Even redwood in the front yard!
If there is redwood framing, that would explain how the house held up so well without having a new roof since 1960 since redwood has natural anti-fungal properties (which is why it is used as an "exterior wood" like cedar).
EDIT:
Upon closer inspection, it appears the redwood used for framing here is a "rough hewn" type which has an undulating angled mark on it that might be caused by an old saw blade
Below you can see this bit of door trim is redwood, while the member to its left is flat.
I'll remember this distinction to see if it gives me some insight. For example, it would be interesting if the original house was framed in redwood, while the rest of the house was not. I'll add it here if I find more redwood in any more interesting spots...
A few weeks ago I picked up some sweet C chairs and an Eames style lounge for the bedroom from our favorite thrift store in Alameda.
Sounds like a lot of furniture for a bedroom but the room is large and oddly set-up. There are three loosely defined areas:
The C chairs are for next to the corner fireplace which is next to the reading nook in this especially long bedroom. Trying to establish little zones that make sense is tricky but I think we're off to a good start.
Then there's a solarium-like (glass sun room) nook feature off the bedroom with a bookshelf that I assume is now a reading area (built-in bookshelf was added). I was looking for a lounge/arm-chair or reading chair and I found the comfortably padded and reclined Eames-style lounge for that. A reading chair is a good thing to have in an old world house like ours and the versatile mid century style looks oddly at home in this '27 house. A few of our mid-century pieces are holdovers from the previous house - a big 1954 mid century modern house which was the original impetus for their purchase. The bookshelf was added sometime after or during the '39 as it looks '40s and shares a wall with the mid century closet which was built out from the original exterior wall (stucco can be seen inside the closet so clearly not original).
The third area is the queen bed that fits into a nook next to a box that is headroom space for the staircase that spirals down over the fireplace as it heads towards the kitchen/bath/LR hall. It's weird
Back to the Eames-style lounge chair - it is in caramel vinyl and walnut plywood and is a copy of the iconic Eames chair and one of the most popular chairs of all time. Usually in black leather, the caramel vinyl looks awesome in the room which is white with yellow and gold accents. The dark, curved plywood on the back is similar in color tone but different in feel to the dark stained redwood floors. The modern lines give a welcome boost of modernist lifestyle vibes to contrast with the Hansel and Gretel feel of the house.
"You kids got any leads on mid-century modern furniture for reasonable prices in the SF Bay Area?
I had always liked the Eames lounge and ottoman but I had assumed it was something that was like a '69 Shelby GT500 - iconic, but almost nobody actually owns one. I assumed this since I never saw one around until now. I have come across and bought some mid-century classics like a pair of Wassily chairs, some Bertoia chairs, Dansk teak curved back chairs etc. I even passed up some "plycraft rockers" I had assumed were Eames knockoffs. But as is often the case, it turns out the truth is even more interesting than assumption.
The modernist furniture movement is about making simple, often curvy and ergonomic furniture out of new materials and design ideas. Plywood had been around for a while, but people were beginning to try to bend it into ergonomic furniture shapes in the '40s. The first commonly available bent plywood chair was Eames in '46 which was a very new twist on the concept of bent wood chairs. The first bent-wood chairs were the Thonet café chairs made out of cane that were arguably more revolutionary than the Eames plywood chair. Before Thonet people actually carved and glued together pieces of solid wood to make chairs. Heavy, expensive, and not very form fitting.
Bending plywood so that it looks draped or spread open like a flower is not easy. Plycraft, a furniture company based on bent plywood as the name suggests, was working on the cutting edge of plywood furniture, more or less contemporaneously with Eames. Eames may be credited with the first plywood chair, but Plycraft had design cred of its own, at least early on.
Plycraft worked with George Mulhauser and some other designers to produce a few really awesome plywood lounge chairs. Charles and Ray Eames always seemed to be a step ahead, producing their classic Eames lounge 670 and ottoman 671 in 1956 which inspired countless imitations of the concept, but nothing comes anywhere close to the power of their design form. However, the Mulhauser designs are so cool that they almost look like Eames designs abandoned in the process of developing the concept of the classic 670 plywood lounge chair. These were the "plycraft rockers" I had come across a few years ago (which would easily get $1200 each today, even though they were offered at $600, I just didn't have that kind of money lying around). Here's one I saw
Link below
Another really cool Mulhauser design is the "Mr.Chair" design.
http://midcenturymodernist.com/2007/furniture-objects/lounge-chairs/plycraft-lounge-by-george-mulhauser/
Well, unfortunately Plycraft devolved from the cutting edge of modern furniture to simply ripping off the iconic Eames design after only a few years. Whereas Henry Miller had, and still has the exclusive rights to produce the Eames 670, Plycraft is probably the maker of the most common "version" of this chair, though if you see them side by side, it's not worthy of calling it a clone.
http://manhattan-nest.com/2013/03/25/real-vs-fake-the-eames-lounge/
Compared to the plycraft copy above on the left, I think mine is lookin' a lot closer to the one on the right 😎 though of course it's not real Herman Miller by Eames or I'd have to sell it for $2000 before someone could ruin it.
Not a bad copy at all. Actually one of the best vintage copies I've seen in a couple hours of Internet research
Well, apparently Meeko could tell it was a fake. He peed on the vinyl and I woke up to his scratching at 5AM - a sign that he had peed on something he wasn't supposed to and now wanted to clean it up. I rushed to soak up as much pee as I could and decided to try to get the seat cushion off - I noticed black screws were holding the cushions in place, which is not something you would see on the real thing. I decided to look up features of the Eames chair and how to tell a fake, and there are a bunch of things I'm now aware of and feel pretty confident I could identify a real one in a group. I'll list the "inaccuracies" from bottom to top:
-The base has five legs. This is the correct number of legs. The ottoman originally had 4. Copies often have the wrong number or style of base on the chair or ottoman or both. 5 and 5 or 4 and 4 are the most common since it's easiest to make just one base for both.
-The base on mine is cast aluminum with plastic wood veneer on top. The real base is black powdercoated aluminum. Very few of the copies have anything close to accurate looking bases. Plastic wood veneer probably means my chair is '70s.
-The base has big springs on it. It looks weird underneath like this may have been added later for more bouncy, lean-back comfort.
The Eames chair, on the other hand, is fixed in a cocked back, reclined lounge position permanently and is not a recliner chair but rather a "reclined chair". Because of their design, original Eames chairs can break since lounge chairs take the full weight of a person and there are no springs to divert force. Also the originals are 5 ply which is now 7 ply in the current version since the old ones are known to crack near the "wings" of the lower back ply shell.
-There are screws through the plywood into the cushions on my copy. Again, the real design is supposed to be sleek but sacrifices of structural strength, practical serviceability, and comfort have to be made to this end. The original Eames chair has cushions that clip inside the curve of the plywood so the back is just one uninterrupted piece of plywood. Apparently they've changed at least once. I bet they are a pain in the butt to deal with.
-The arms are L shaped and turn down in towards the seat. This is correct. A later, more common copy from Plycraft simply has round oval armrests. They really stopped trying.
My clone is more accurate than about half the clones that just have simple oval arm rests
-The headrest support has wood braces instead of aluminum. Mine seem to be solid teak or walnut, which look really good. The real thing has cast aluminum arms with odd rubber bushings connecting the wood
The black dots are screws that hold the cushions on - nearly all clones have screws through the plywood for practical reasons... the original has none
This last feature, the wood headrest supports, makes me think it is made by Charlton since the wood headrest supports seem to be exclusive and the atypical veneer base matches pictures I've seen online of Charlton. After going over this chair pretty thoroughly, it's one of the best copies I've seen. It wouldn't fool an expert but the low shape is true to the Eames design - most copies are Plycraft which are sitting very upright so they can reclined and that look is less relaxed than the original which is supposed to be made to help one relax. "A special refuge from the strains of modern living."
In terms of vintage copies, it looks like Plycraft is more than half, the rest are, in order of frequency, '80s models that are much more accurate (made in Japan?), Selig and lastly Charlton. I really like this chair and it's good quality and I got it for $200. I hope to find the matching ottoman for cheap but now I know after this research, that's going to be hard.
Now that you know all about it, don't be like this guy and buy a fake for $2600!
http://www.designaddict.com/forum/General-discussion/eames-or-fake-need-help