Anne-apolis

  Natural light in a room can be a truly wonderful thing, especially if there is just enough light, of the right intensity and coming in at a good angle - it is far better for your eyes and mood than artificial lighting. But what can we do when we have too much light, or the light is too intense? From the 1960s to the 1990s, there was a tendency for rooms to be designed with floor-to-ceiling glazing, often for the full width of one wall. While this can be pleasant in winter, it can be quite oppressive for the rest of the year, and undesirable if you are a shift-worker or like to lie in on the weekend. Fortunately, the solutions can be relatively simple and inexpensive if the problem is to reduce the amount of light entering a room. If you need to block out the light completely, there is an excellent selection of blackout fabric that can be used for curtains or blinds, or you can buy ready-made ones. You will see in my photo that the daylight is still 'leaking' on the sides and ...

  If you are thinking of embarking on construction work in your home, it is essential to have a clear idea of how long it will take, whether you plan to live with the chaos surrounding you, or whether you are going to move out and stay at an AirBnB or with friends or relatives for the duration. If you are using a small contractor, their time management can be excellent, or quite the opposite. I was recently overseeing a small wood restoration project that the contractor assured us would take five days and ended up taking nine working days!  Time management becomes even more important if you are project managing your alterations yourself and have several contractors coming in to do demolishing, bricklaying, plastering, plumbing, electrical and cupboard installations. You need a clear time map so that you can sequence the work and arrange for each group to start when the project has reached the right stage and to make sure you don't have too many people at once, falling over eac...

  While packing to move house, my daughter found some sketches that I had done several years ago for a pergola outside her living room. The room has full-height glazing across the entire width of the east-facing room, making the whole flat very hot in summer. Pergolas are an excellent way of adapting your indoor temperature, especially if you use deciduous plants to cover them, providing shade to the window in summer and letting the winter sun into the room when the plants lose their leaves. They are one of the most cost-effective and environmentally sensitive ways to adapt indoor climate, on any sun-facing side of your home. In the southern hemisphere, pergolas or awnings can be quite narrow on the north side of the building - the sun angle at mid-day is about 70 degrees on the equinoxes, so the depth of the pergola should be about half the height of the window or glazed door so that the sun is not blocked through the winter.  The angle of the sun in summer, winter and at the...

  Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. (William Morris) Morris was born in 1834 and lived through one of the most profound changes in design and manufacture of everyday objects, brought about through the industrial revolution. His rejection of the over-elaborate designs of this first generation of industrial design is seen in his passion for hand-crafted work, something of a luxury in his own day, but even more so now. The question is whether we can still uphold his philosophy, but capitalising on the wide array of industrially produced goods that are now available. Wallpaper design by William Morris We live in an era of overwhelming choice, ranging from the most tawdry or over-elaborate to extremely beautiful pieces, the latter often very reasonably priced. I find my own taste will be met either by the cheapest or the most expensive item on offer, perhaps an indication of my Modern Movement upbringing! So what should we be looki...

  If you have ever needed plumbing work done on the cold or hot water feed in your bathroom or kitchen, I'm sure it brings back stressful memories. Apart from the bashing and banging, exposing these pipes generally requires demolition of parts of the walling, often taking out some of the tiling, which inevitably gets damaged in the process. Here the bath had to be removed to get at the pipes in the wall This is but the start of the troubles! Identifying the source of the problem is often not easy, even with sophisticated leak detecting equipment. Here we had to fill the bath and shower with water over several days to be sure that the leak was coming from the water feed and not from the outlets - water travels in mysterious way. In total, the detection part of the job took several weeks, with both bathrooms out of action for the duration. The next challenge for the owner was to find tiles to match those that had to be removed, an adventure that required much hunting at tile speciali...

  As the weather is getting warmer, it is a good time to look into how to make our spaces cooler and more comfortable for summer. For centuries, people in Africa, the Middle East and other hot climates have developed ingenious ways of ventilating their spaces and cooling the air that flows through their buildings. Traditional ways of building in these hot climates include building rooms around a courtyard, often with a water feature and vegetation in the courtyard to cool and refresh the air. Their streets were traditionally very narrow, so that one building would shade its neighbour, preventing heat buildup. Their buildings were crafted from clay with very thick walls and roofs to  keep the rooms cool, and they often included wind catchers that act like chimneys to draw the air through their buildings. Windcatchers on the rooftops in Iran Creative commons licensed from  https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captador_de_viento But how can we capitalise on these traditional ideas ...

  I recently was alerted to some research that is being done on our perception of temperature  when there is wood present in a room - as the amount of wood in a room increases, so our feeling of warmth increases. This and other studies have been carried out in cool climates, so it would be interesting to see whether this makes a hot room feel even hotter in a warm climate. Instinctively, I would say not - my apartment is full of wood - floors, furniture and artefacts - and my experience is that the rooms feel warm in winter, yet cool in summer. An elegant kist made in the 1980s - the bookcase in the background is simple pine with a dark stain to complement the woodgrain of the kist Moreover, wood gives a feeling of luxury and is very visually satisfying, even if the pieces are not top of the range - a very modest piece of furniture or artefact can make a room seem more complete. This may be attributed to the properties of natural wood: anything made from this material automati...