In Eye on Design, Dan Gregory writes about homes with a sunny voice that’s authoritative but never teachy-preachy. A passion for the smart and the sensible rings loud and clear. Architecture addicts, you’ll like this stuff. Builders and designers, so will you.
Eye on Design offers useful observations on tiny getaway cottages, using trees in the landscape plan, updated shingle style, salvage and recycling, porches, and a whole lot more. Even sports makes its way into the blog. Seeing San Francisco Giants’ Matt Cain pitch a no-hitter against the Houston Astros reminded Gregory of “perfection in other fields of dreams,” namely, ancient Roman gardens. “It’s hard to see how anything can be added or subtracted—the equivalent of 27 up and 27 down,” he effuses. Watching the Tour de France is “an addiction” for Gregory, because what could be better than modern cycling against a backdrop of classical architecture? While the camera pans riders in Besançon chatting before the start of the ninth stage, Gregory spots a famed 18th-century salt works in the background. He offers a hat-tip to the building’s Doric order and then shares an aerial view, explaining that the layout was part of a larger vision for a factory town. Today, we’d call it a master planned community with workforce housing.
Gregory has written extensively about houses and holds a Ph.D. in architecture from UC Berkeley. He’s chief editor at Houseplans.com and before that, was senior home editor at Sunset magazine. He grew up in a simple gable-roofed adobe in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains. “It’s a hilltop house of many doors opening to long porches, like an old-fashioned small town train depot,” he says. “I think it gave me a fixation on circulation and fresh air: every in has an out and every space connects to the outside.”
Custom Home will be posting new installments of Eye on Design by Dan Gregory, along with other guest bloggers, on Fridays.
