Contemporary Energy Efficient Laneway Home in Vancouver

The Mendoza Lane House was designed by Lanefab after the authorities in Vancouver encouraged owners to replace their garages with laneway houses in order to increase people density in certain neighborhoods. According to the architects, “the Mendoza Lane House is 710sf with combined living/dining/kitchen upstairs along with a balcony. It’s built on a standard 33′x122′ lot and has the same footprint as the garage it replaced. The project was built with Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) a prefab system that allow us to create buildings that are 2x as energy efficient as typical new home in Vancouver.  The windows are triple glazed, and most of the materials for the building were manufactured locally.” We are interested in knowing what you think of  this home’s interiors- appealing and interesting or too plain for your tastes?  (Photography by Krista Jahnke)

How to Save Time Spring Cleaning your Home

Every spring when the warmer weather starts, the excuse to want to spend more time outdoors then indoors is always attractive. Although, the reality is, if you spring clean your home now, you will have more time to enjoy the outdoors and have a healthy conscious about your interiors at the same time! Spring cleaning is a chore that many look forward to and many do not. The time it takes to clean is usually at the top of the list of why spring cleaning feels like a burden rather than a reward.  Here are tips on how to save time spring-cleaning your home.


• Tackle one room at a time: While you may want to finish your entire home in one day, the reality is you will be exhausted and you probably won’t do as thorough of a job as you would like. Instead, make a checklist for each room and what needs to be cleaned ahead of time. Take one weekend and go buy all necessary cleaning supplies, tools, and cleaners necessary and then pick a room and start. Pull out furniture and dust behind as well as appliances in the kitchen. You will save more time tackling one room, than doing a little bit in every room.
• Don’t forget what you can’t see: While most house cleaning involves what you can see with your eyes, spring cleaning involves also tackling what you don’t see. Underneath beds, and behind entertainment centers are an ideal place for dust to collect and add to seasonal allergies in your home. To save time, each day you inhabit a room, dust behind and underneath objects in that room. After a week, your whole home would have been dusted!


• Treat your exterior home like the interior: When spring cleaning, take a walk around your exterior home and look at what is obvious. From cleaning up debris from trees, raking leaves, and general cleanup to washing the exterior windows. To save time on exterior projects, do a project each time you go take out the trash, or get the mail. Instead of exhausting yourself cleaning the entire exterior of the house, tackle the porch one day, the driveway another, and the windows another day.


• Make it fun: Since spring cleaning isn’t always on your top of fun priorities to do, consider making a reward for yourself and family members for cleaning up! Make a checklist for the entire house, and delegate jobs to your teenagers, spouse, and even have toddlers pick up toys in their play area! If you attach a reward like going to get ice cream afterwards, or going to the movies, you will be surprised how quickly your house may be cleaned – without you spending all month to do it.

Spring cleaning doesn’t have to be time consuming and once broken up among family members and days, the entire house won’t seem as daunting as once thought. If your life is too hectic and you don’t have enough time to think about cleaning your home thoroughly, consider having friends and family to help, or even hiring a professional cleaning service. A cleaning service can get your home to a higher level of clean that you could maintain afterwards. Either way, spring cleaning will pave the way for you to enjoy yourself outside or even inside this season!

Semi-Circular Apartment Design: The Fontana Apartment by Mark English Architects

The Fontana Apartment, located in San Francisco, California, received a beautiful and modern interior design from Mark English Architects. Part of a semi-circular apartment tower near San Francisco’s Aquatic Park, the exceptional apartment had an interesting plan to begin with. Using the available space as the base for reconstruction, the architects removed all non-bearing walls, leaving the space open and without secrets. Sweeping views across an intensely beloved area, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Bay Bridge, make this apartment an excellent living space with an exceptional panorama. One of the architects speaks about the team’s efforts in creating a unique interior design: “My clients wanted the feeling of a very high-end resort hotel getaway, and our goal was to create a sexy, streamlined City pad. The materials include custom designed built-in illuminated ultra-suede sofa, white marble flooring, radiant heat, Venetian plaster and sparkling Laurentian Green Granite slabs. The project was realized in collaboration with Interior Designer Gary Hutton and his associates.”

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Luxury bath by Italian company pibarmi

It come in two variations, in solid marble or in three marble rings combined together. Such free-standing easily could become a natural centrepiece of the room. With its curved shape the tub would nicely fit in a traditional, transitional or contemporary bathroom interior. Although its better to put it on the first floor because it weights 350kg. This luxurious decadent carved stone bath, produced by Italian company Pibamarmi, swirls around you with soft blended colors.

New Home and Garden

Home and Garden

The most important aspect of gardening includes the front garden design, which speaks a lot about the look and feel of your home and its surrounding. The front garden designs and plans need a lot of care and your attention. If you can plan the things well then your dull appearing house and front yard may get a complete facelift very soon and it will look very attractive to everyone. The designing of your front garden is not so easy, but if you can take some amount of pain, then it will work wonders.


Home and Garden

First start with a concrete front garden plan because once you start the work on it, you also need to maintain it, else it would go out of your control. You can use rock and some drought tolerant plants and bushes to start with because they can survive even in lack of water sometime. A slope way or stairs at the entrance of the house may create some problem, so change and plan things accordingly for your landscape design.
Then the most important aspect in the front garden design is the amount of space that you have at your disposal. You can make a rough sketch of your front garden and see where things can fit in. The main entrance to your house should be a very pleasant one; else there is no point in spending time on front garden design ideas. Wet grass should be avoided as much as possible near the entrance. You can place some matching pots with evergreen plants and shrubs so that they attract the attention of the guests all the tim
around the walkways you can think of placing a flower border over there of different colours which suits your need. You can choose some plants like catmint, geraniums, Dianthus etc for the walkways. Some other choices could be lavender, roses, or sedum etc. In the lawn you can use some soft grass to fill it up. Look for all sorts of landscaping ideas before you move out so that your front garden design looks the best to anyone coming to your place.


Home and Garden






Home and Garden











Apart from anything else you need to take care and maintain your garden a lot. Regular watering of the plants and shrubs, draining away the extra water which might have logged, will be in the best interest your garden. With changing seasons you can consider using different flower combinations to go forward with. In spring you can choose tulips, crocus etc. Try to avoid plants with thorns and pollen as some people have allergy towards them. So by checking all this you can get a best front garden design for yourself.

Green Home Design

Green home design with minimalis type, reason with concept of green house is to respond to the issue of global warming. Designer by streez-id

Millbrook House Design by Thomas Phifer

Mill Brook Houses were designed by Thomas Phifer is an architecture design of discrete geometric objects in a heroic landscape choreographers road mediation unfolds a sequence of thresholds and points of view have built the site of 200 hectares, located in Millbrook, New York, USA. At Millbrook, the first look of the form has built a cantilevered, steel weatherproof box, guest house, facing a limit in the parking lot. Deep red, steel panels surmounted forming a retaining wall that extends from the studio just up the hill, steadily increase with metal sheets from Bluestone steps set into the hillside, as if stepping stone into a pool water.

The climb reached the summit of the hill, a grassy hill, flanked by a rectangular glass pavilion along one side to the other side, a series of four small quantities of mahogany-wrapped, as pure and distilled in their geometric repetition as a minimalist sculpture. This arrangement on the netting long valley view of the Hudson, recalled vista prisoners gesture by Thomas Jefferson University of Virginia and Louis Kahn's Salk Institute.

The glass pavilion is located in Millbrook with lightness and transparency so that the ground seems to flow uninterrupted on the carpet of grass surrounding. After crossing the threshold of the living room-kitchen, open view, radical and in all directions.

This quantity is clearly against monolithic clad wood windows approach opaque mahogany shells echo the rich, earthy hues of patinated steel. Even seemingly independently. Home design and its counterparts in the timber while inside the house, under the grassy enclosure Each mahogany box, partially buried in sloping ground, is a private cabin for sleeping and bathing, came less than a high Glass Pavilion. As if from scratch, these high cabin ceiling, an intimate relationship with the landscape. In counterpoint to the pole hill visually expansive, open only the morning sun, east, each with its own bamboo garden and meadows beyond.