Steve McKee – Page 14

20 06, 2007

Dream-house for rent (no kidding)

By Steve McKee|2007-06-20T04:28:23+00:00June 20th, 2007|Random observations, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Dream-house for rent (no kidding)

You’d think that someone who wrote about building and design topics for the local paper (kind of like me) and was also having a house built for himself (like me) would have something to say about the design and building of said house. It’s a pretty big deal, giving birth to a house. Stuff happens. Anecdotes accumulate. All of it fodder for the ol’ column. But blathering on about myself has never appealed to me, though I seem to be doing it just fine at this very moment. Yet insights, a few of them anyway, did result from this house-building [...]

20 05, 2007

Artist Open Studios reveal creative undercurrent alive in Benicia

By Steve McKee|2007-05-20T04:29:37+00:00May 20th, 2007|Benicia, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Artist Open Studios reveal creative undercurrent alive in Benicia

It was the orange-red door with all the visible brush strokes that got me. It completely transformed a mundane door into something arresting and vivid. This type of door (a standard issue four-panel "colonist" to those of you in the know) is so common in today's built environment that it's usually completely inert, a non-entity really, yet here it had been transformed into something remarkable simply with paint. No big bucks needed, just enough talent to make the paint seem vibrant. This colorful gesture was just part of the zeitgeist of the Arsenal, the abandoned industrial section of our town [...]

22 04, 2007

Rome – 1982 – five weeks

By Steve McKee|2007-04-22T04:32:19+00:00April 22nd, 2007|My favorite columns, Travel Tales, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Rome – 1982 – five weeks

In the spring of 1982 I got to go and live in Rome for five weeks with nine other UCLA grad students to study architecture in the most amazing city in the world. No adventure of mine since has surpassed it in tone or texture, or had such a perfect blend of fun with a-sense-of-purpose that all the most fulfilling adventures seem to have. Those were heady times, at age twenty-three and off to study and play with likeminded comrades in such an architectural treasure trove. There were so many layers to Rome, and we had all those days to [...]

2 03, 2007

Haiku moments and performance art in the comfort of your own home

By Steve McKee|2007-03-02T04:31:10+00:00March 2nd, 2007|My favorite columns, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Haiku moments and performance art in the comfort of your own home

In the middle of the night, when the world is dark and utterly still, my upstairs bathroom has a pattern of rectangles of soft light on the wall created by streetlights that are a block or more away shining through my bathroom windows. These rectangles of light are sort of gold or maybe orange, but mostly are just easy on eyes that have adjusted to the dark of night. The rectangles overlap each other and create a wonderfully abstract composition that breaks the darkness just enough to be a sort of perfect nightlight. When there's a breeze outside, one of [...]

28 01, 2007

Countertops: We live in a stone age

By Steve McKee|2007-01-28T04:33:55+00:00January 28th, 2007|Elements of Design, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Countertops: We live in a stone age

It’s actually sort of thrilling when you enter the warehouse to pick out the stone slab that will be a part of your home. You’re not just picking a color from some chart or discussing a concept, you’re selecting the very slab that will be cut to the shape of your countertop. By the time you enter that warehouse your project is probably about halfway built, you’ve been faxed a list of the stone suppliers that are used by your contractor’s stone installer, and most of the hard work on your part is done, like the decision to do a stone [...]

31 12, 2006

The day the Thompson-Joy house came to town – PART 2

By Steve McKee|2006-12-31T04:35:10+00:00December 31st, 2006|Phil Joy's big house move, Uncategorized|Comments Off on The day the Thompson-Joy house came to town – PART 2

The big house-moving day at last arrived, two days before Christmas. The factors had finally all lined up: the PG&E wires across the empty field had been temporarily lowered, the big barge was available, the railroad tracks the house needed to cross would have no trains running on the weekend, the rain had mostly held off and, although the field was soft and difficult for the big house to cross, it at least wasn’t totally impossible. The Thompson house, one-hundred-and-sixteen years old and weighing two hundred tons, started December 23rd in the Napa countryside that it had always known, and [...]

About Steve McKee

Dream-house for rent (no kidding)

Artist Open Studios reveal creative undercurrent alive in Benicia

Rome – 1982 – five weeks

Haiku moments and performance art in the comfort of your own home

Countertops: We live in a stone age

The day the Thompson-Joy house came to town – PART 2