Uncategorized – Page 12

27 03, 2008

Benicia versus the country club

By Steve McKee|2008-03-27T22:25:43+00:00March 27th, 2008|Benicia, My favorite columns, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Benicia versus the country club

About fifteen miles south of Benicia is a small town called Alamo, a place really more suburb than town. In the way that Benicia is about the water, Alamo is about hills and oak trees. I know because I grew up there. In the seventies, right before I shipped out for UCLA, developers had the idea of transforming nearby cow grazing land at the base of Mt. Diablo into a “gated community” where quarter acre parcels of land could be sold for top dollar. They named it Blackhawk Country Club. Because I had lived in Round Hill Country Club in [...]

27 02, 2008

Stone arches totally rock

By Steve McKee|2008-02-27T22:26:56+00:00February 27th, 2008|Benicia, Elements of Design, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Stone arches totally rock

Unexpectedly, I recently found myself in a building made almost entirely from stone, created by world-class stone cutters no less. This sort of thing doesn’t happen everyday, not in the U.S. anyway, not in small towns like Benicia, and especially not in secluded little valleys up in the hills of places like Benicia. Melody and I were taking our son to check out the Camel Barn in order to bask in our Benicia-ness. (The Camel Barn isn’t the cool stone building I speak of, but is near said building.) As all true Benicians know, the Camel Barn is a building [...]

23 01, 2008

These are a few of your favorite things

By Steve McKee|2008-01-23T22:27:58+00:00January 23rd, 2008|Elements of Design, Uncategorized|Comments Off on These are a few of your favorite things

While planning a new house or remodel with a client I will sometimes hear them rave about some unusual feature that they’ve lived with and have decided they simply can’t live without in their new house and meanwhile the rest of us have barely even heard of it. I find out about these features mostly from you, my clients, and enjoy hearing about them from people with direct experience. So, without further ado, and so we all might learn from your collective wisdom, here are a few of your favorite things: Dual dishwashers Having two dishwashers isn’t just a Jewish-kosher [...]

6 01, 2008

Another vintage house is delivered to Benicia – PART 3

By Steve McKee|2008-01-06T22:29:15+00:00January 6th, 2008|Phil Joy's big house move, Uncategorized|Comments Off on Another vintage house is delivered to Benicia – PART 3

I almost got to watch Phil Joy’s second house come in to his boatyard, pushed in on a barge, pretty much just like last year’s house-move that you may recall was a pretty big deal, except this time it happened without it being such a big deal. There were a lot of similarities to last year: a cool looking nineteenth century house that was destined to be demolished at its original site in Napa was instead acquired by house-mover and Benicia boatyard owner Phil Joy and then moved by barge a few days before Christmas to find a new life [...]

16 12, 2007

How First Street keeps us together

By Steve McKee|2007-12-16T04:03:22+00:00December 16th, 2007|Benicia, Uncategorized|Comments Off on How First Street keeps us together

In eighteen years in this here town, I don’t think my family has ever missed the Open House Christmas thing on First Street, yet we’ve never attended the tree lighting ceremony that starts the evening. I attribute this to the fact that we live just a few blocks from “Adobe” whose Christmas lights pretty much outdo the Las Vegas strip for visual intensity (really, they do), so it never occurs to us to go watch a single tree get lit. But the shindig that follows, in which cars are blocked from First Street and Benicians lay claim to their downtown, [...]

22 11, 2007

You, the tile shop, the decision

By Steve McKee|2007-11-22T04:04:23+00:00November 22nd, 2007|Before you begin, Elements of Design, Uncategorized|Comments Off on You, the tile shop, the decision

It can overwhelm a person to stand in XYZ tile shop surrounded by so many possibilities. So, so many. But going in, you and your significant-other had a strategy. A ”look” that the two of you discussed a few times already, like when an image of a cool bathroom happened by in the Sunday Chronicle magazine. Or whispered about briefly in the dark of a Diane Keaton movie when the to-die-for kitchen up on the screen caused you both to miss dialog in order to point out the black stone countertop with the subway tile backsplash and the white raised-panel [...]