Homes and Hues

Coffee-Like Coffee Tables by Kamber CarrollKamber Carroll is an artist who works in a variety of 2D and 3D media. He’s become famous for his massive versions of smaller, everyday objects that serve as tables. These hyperrealistic sculptures take the forms of Dunkin Donuts plastic cups and stacks of pancakes that look so good that you’d like to bite into them.

How Do You Furnish a 12,700 Square Foot House? Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell found a large home for sale in the Chicago suburbs. This one was built in 2001 at the height of the McMansion craze and it shows. It has a large lot, but that is no reason to build a 12,700 house on it. I mean, there are reasons to build a very large house, like if you have a family of twenty people, but that reasonably means more normal-sized rooms, except for a large dining room. In this case, the rooms are just huge for the sake of being huge. Sure, it has five bedrooms and 7.5 bathrooms, but they are all larger than is practical. That means it will be hard to regulate the temperature, especially with super-large windows without blinds or draperies. And where do you find furniture big enough to make it look normal? But that's just the beginning of the details that Wagner points out for us in this home. Not only is her takedown funny, but all her criticisms of McMansions teach us new details about architecture, style, balance, and usability. Most of us could see a home like this and dismiss it for being hard to heat, hard to clean, and too pretentious, but she can explain exactly why big, pretentious, yet cheaply built houses can creep us out. See the latest carnage at McMansion Hell.

Old Police Station Converted into ApartmentsThe town of Dudley in central England has a new police station, so the old one ceased normal use in 2017. The Daily Mail reports that now it’s a different kind of prison—a set of apartments. For £750 ($925 USD) you can have one of the studio apartments, which includes a functional cell inside. The bars are painted grey, which nicely accents the grey floor and grey feeling inside of you.

A Stately Home vs. a Manor HouseYou don't have to read gothic novels to come across the terms "stately home" and "manor house," but if you do read such novels, you see them all the time. If you peruse American real estate listings, you see that some realtors love those phrases but really have no set definitions of them. So what do they really mean? The terms come from Britain, where homes go back a long way, and the aristocracy once had the means to build their houses big, beautiful, and sturdy enough to outlive them all. Although the definitions can change over time with changing circumstances, the stately home is different from the manor house in era, architecture, and usage. Number One London gives us four criteria for each, but since they are qualified with "mostly" and "usually," you can assume that if your home fits most of the criteria, you have either a stately home or a manor house. Or probably neither, sadly. There are other terms such as "estate" and "castle" and "country home" and "hall" that the blog will try to define in the future. -via Strange Company(Image credit: Rodhullandemu)

A Big House With Some Really Interesting FeaturesThe internet has taken notice of a home listing that illustrates the difference in home prices by region. This house covers 2,900 square feet and has five bedrooms and five bathrooms on 3.6 acres. It also has a mother-in-law suite and an extra cabin on the grounds. The asking price? $349,000. Really. This home is in Florence, Alabama, where you can get such a house for under a million dollars.

Do You Really, Really Like Aqua? This beachfront house in Hopkins Landing, British Columbia, takes its inspiration from the sea in a big way. Anything that's not blue is green, or somewhere between the two. This is SeaGlass cottage, a 1,289 square foot house with three bedrooms and one bathroom on a little more than an acre.