Gratitude

Every Thanksgiving, before I start the barbecue and make a turkey breast for the dinner invitation we have later that day, weather allowing I go for a motorcycle ride.

And already, that little custom of mine – both rituals, ride and 'cue, I celebrate without my wife's participation, who is busy preparing other dishes – hints at plenty of occasions to be thankful for. Typically this day's ride is slow and reflective, thinking of major events of the past months. I once had lost a riding buddy the previous summer, and found myself the whole ride in prayer for him and his family.

Unity of Fort Lauderdale taught me to thank the Lord for what I have and for what I affirm.

And if I open my eyes, there is so much more to be grateful for than to bitch about. Yes, I didn't close every single client this year I planned to; yes, my wife and I will have to move by end of January; yes, I didn't have time to do a major task this year so I have to face it next.

But when I look around, I am always astonished about blessings large and small, hiding within plain sight. A ride, a feast, a building, the love of friends and family, the fragrance of an orange groove  riding through it, recognition for a job well done, a happy client, a flourishing business, a beautiful basket of pears, my health, my marriage. I am grateful. Try it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

____
Photo: Pears Bad Oynhausen/Lake Constance, ©tckaiser

Frank Lloyd Wright's Auldbrass Plantation

Few modern architecture aficionados know that Frank Lloyd Wright designed a complete plantation, located in South Carolina's low country: Auldbrass in Beaufort County, near the town of Yemassee.

Known since 1736 as Mount Pleasant, Wright renamed the property Auldbrass (from "Old Brass") and designed the (smallish) main house, stables and other buildings for an industrial engineer, Leigh Stevens, who had joined five parcels to form the plantation.

After quite a tumultuous ownership history – last in line a club of local hunters with little interest in modern architecture or preservation – movie producer Joel Silver ("Matrix", "Hudson Hawk", Die Hard", "Lethal Weapon" etc.) bought the property in 1986 for $148,000. With a permanent staff of ten including an architect, Mr. Silver since has sunk considerable funds into preserving and restoring Auldbrass, as well as finishing buildings designed by Wright but never built.

The plantation is open to the public every two years for only two days, thus tickets sell out within days of becoming available. During this year's window, I was able to visit Auldbrass on November 3rd with a fun troupe from NCMH, the North Carolina non-profit for the preservation of modern architecture.

The wait to get in was well over 1.5 hours – no timed tickets, yet – so I unfortunately did not have a chance to see every building; in addition, interior photos are strictly (and understandably so) verboten by the owner.

Entry

Path to the main house

Main house, pool on the right, entry on the far left

Dining room on the left, main house adjacent to the right

Dining room shows angled walls and copper rain spouts

Kitchen windows details

Clerestory windows, main house with 2 bedrooms, 2 baths

Window detail, main house

Window detail, dining room

Dining room from opposite side

Angled walls at bedrooms (not to be entered by the public)

Pool and main house

Stables

Gate

More details about Auldbrass and South Carolina plantations can be found here. If you have visited Auldbrass, I'd love to hear your impressions!
–––
All photos ©tckaiser

Happy Halloween!

Seen in Boca Raton, Florida. Photo ©tckaiser

South Florida Housing Market, 3rd Quarter 2013

I know I have been neglecting the blog for a bit; my apologies: work got in the way. Summer seems to come to an end in South Florida – about time, we're all well-done by now – and so is the overheated single family market that ruled from approximately April until about mid-August.

Falling relative and absolute inventory, rising asking prises, increasing selling prices: for now all this is over. Middle of August I first could feel a bit of slack, from one week to the next. What most August numbers hinted at, September confirmed: the froth is gone.

A 36 months-overview:

SE Florida single family homes: inventory, median asking prices and median selling prices, Sep 2010 - Sep 2013. Break indicates end 2012. Source: Kaiser Assoc.

Note how list prices and selling prices trend downwards, while inventory points upwards. The break in the lines indicates 2012 year end.

More specific, Q III 2013 vs. Q II 2012 by the numbers:

      +9.8%  Number of Houses for sale
    +19.8%  Inventory for sale (absorption rate in months)
      –3.6%  Median list price
      –8.2%  Median list price/sf
      –8.1%  Number of Houses sold (quarter)
      +4.3%  Median selling price
      +0.1%  Median selling price/sf

Outlook: we are hopefully returning to normal ranges, avoiding further overheating and the inevitable speculation that accompanies it.

But that doesn't mean we're in bargain territory again. Right now those days seem to be over, and I do not anticipate a return any time soon: the quiet Holiday season is coming up – quiet for buying and selling – and that will carry us into January. By then interest rates will be the next deciding factor.

In the meantime, vulture buyers who are hoping for bottom deals – "Hi, I'm Billy-Bob, and I'm looking for only really good deals. Got any for me?" "Yes sure, I held them secretly just for you." – have zero chance in any good market segment for single family homes, be it by location (water front, ocean front, good school districts) or be by expertise like mine, modern architecture.

But do you know which buyers really get the juicy deals?

Stay tuned.

For Sale: The Wheeler house, by Don Singer

Over the years, I observed that undisturbed and unaltered modernist homes do not become available very often – yet that is exactly what many modernist-deprived buyers are pining for.

 

A fine example and great opportunity* is the Wheeler house in Fort Lauderdale, designed by noted Florida modernist Don Singer for his friend Dick Wheeler. 

 

It's a very private 3/2 – which was quite a challenge for exterior shots –  with a 2-car garage and pool, built in 1976 on a double lot with mature foliage. With ca. 2487 sf under air (ca. 220 sqm), the house is spacious for modern architecture of that age, but so seem a lot of Singers. 

 

Curious? Read more about it here.  

 

___

*Viewings currently by invitation only. Photo ©tckaiser

---

Mies designs a Golf Club

1930, only one year after he created the Pavilion for the Barcelona World Expo, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed a golf club house for the newly founded Krefeld Golf Club in Krefeld, Germany.

The Krefeld Golf club had a location staked out, but what it didn’t have was a club house. It seems the two main initiators of the KGC then both asked their favorite architects for concepts. Mies won and designed a spacious single story structure, sitting like a star on top of the slightly elevated site.

Due to the Great Depression, the KGC founders did not manage to raise the estimated building costs (around $36,000 at the time). So Mies received his fee, but the house was never built, and several years later, the KGC put down its roots a few kilometers to the south, utilising a more modest club house concept.

The plans – fully preserved in the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the MoMA in New York – show that the golf club house would have been one of the most spectacular works of Mies. The building would not only be an excellent example of the International Style, but it would also reflect Mies’ mature and superior language of form. Its large panoramic windows would have provided visitors with a stunning view of the surrounding landscape.

This year, on initiative of MIK (for “Mies in Krefeld”, as he had built several other structures in town) and based on Mies’ plans, Belgian architect Paul Robbrecht created a 1:1 walkable architecture model of the club house, in the middle of rye and wheat fields only a few hundred feet from the originally planned site at the Egelsberg in northern Krefeld.

The model – no windows, partially roofed, constructed from wood, steel and concrete – is open to the public until 27 October, when it will be disassembled before the cold and rainy November weather sets in.

The day in July my wife and I visited the site, the model was officially closed, but we drove over from nearby Düsseldorf nevertheless; it was our last day in town.

That turned out to be a brilliant plan: the site was deserted, and my wife and I had the model to ourselves except some crickets, bumble-bees and a warm breeze. 

Walking the model felt nearly surreal, especially since the hike along an unpaved road was about 10 min. from our car. That bit of remoteness only added to the major impression of the architecture.

Without a guided tour, any sort of floor-plan or explanatory literature, we took our time wandering the model, taking photos and experiencing Mies’ sense of spatial arrangement and crisp composition:

Aerial photos ©Kleczka, ©Werthebach, all others ©tckaiser

Dropbox' Hidden Dangers (OT)

A nasty incident last night is the motivation for this Off-Topic post today about Dropbox.

Scare: Last night around 11 pm, my wife called while visiting her family: quite a few files in Dropbox, which we use extensively – and typically flawlessly – for business and some private stuff are missing. Did I delete them?

Details: A quick survey discovered that over 3 gigabyte of data of a total of circa 7 gb were deleted. Even stranger, they supposedly were deleted from my personal laptop, over a period of about two hours. Two more oddities: the files were deleted while I was nowhere near my computer; and: the deletions were very selective. Not complete folders went AWOL, but perhaps 90% in one folder, 5% in another, 60% in a third and so on. Some personal things, some business files, some software, some phone apps. You get the idea.

Solution: Neither the hidden Dropbox cache nor the Events Timeline showing deleted files were complete and practical solutions for restoring several thousand lost files. But since I had worked in my office until lunch, the office computer did have a complete Dropbox snapshot, lacking only the last six or eight hours (the time between my shutting it off and the deletions).

So last night I unlinked the office computer (and all others), changed the Dropbox password, and created an external backup of what was left of Dropbox and of the hidden Dropbox cache.

This morning in the office then, I immediately turned off Dropbox sync (with an unlinked computer technically not necessary, but I had to be sure), then synced the office Dropbox folder with my the external backup and thus created a second identical copy, minus about eight hours of changes.

Syncing that back to Dropbox on my personal computer restored 3gb of data, missing only a few files from yesterday afternoon, which I still have to hunt for in either “Previous Versions” on Dropbox or in the saved cache. 

Possible Explanation: From a logical perspective, I see five possibilities: 1. I personally deleted the data, or someone else at my laptop. 2. My wife deleted the data. 3. Our Dropbox is shared with another person/s. 4. The Dropbox servers conched out. 5. Our Dropbox account got compromised.

Going down the list: 1: nope – I was not at my computer and home alone. 2: nope – cui bono? My wife and I work together, and she has neither reason nor time nor incentive to torpedoe our work and selectively delete over 18,000 files. 3: nope – it isn’t shared. 4: possible. 5: possible.

Consequence: Despite Dropbox being brilliant most of the time, reliance on cloud-based storage is simply not justified as we all should know; I got my personal reminder last night. Only the fact that I have several computers linked to Dropbox saved my Speck.

In the light of my experience – and I’m sure I’m not alone – the ever-increasing push in favour of cloud storage from mobile phone manufacturers to eliminate SD-card storage or from companies like Google to offer Net-Books without hard drives is deeply flawed, risky and plain irresponsible. Do not fall for it.

Did you have a similar experience with any cloud-based storage? Please share it, and also any preventive measures you implemented – thanks!