Spring Is Here

Mackenzie & Gravois
Affton, MO

My favorite indicator that Spring is truly here?

When the ‘ole fashion Dairy Queen in Affton opens for delicious business!

The Athletic Mothership Has Landed

West Ripa & Conn Avenues
South County St. Louis, MO

It was an idle cruise on a summer day, heading up West Ripa Avenue between Telegraph and South Broadway, when the sight above hovered into view.  In and of itself, an arresting sight, but in the context of dense rows of tiny, 1920s bungalows, it was outright alien.  What is it?

It is the gymnasium for the Hancock School complex, also known as the Tiger Dome.   It floats like an extraterrestrial among a sea of much newer, post-modern buildings, and because the campus was so shiny penny clean and new, I wondered if the gymnasium was also new, but built to look like The Jetsons.

Venturing in under a canopy that thrusts its tentacles to the concrete walk ringing the circular gym, it was clear it was an older building.   No one would spend the time or money to construct something like this today, especially an old, established school district tucked into a confined space within an established neighborhood.

The E.T. gymnasium was built in 1964, and the rest of the campus was revamped in 1996, which was a major undertaking that required voter approval for increased taxes to fund such a major project.  What amazes me is that the gym survived !  It sits almost dead center in the campus, and you know it required all kinds of special planning to make the new buildings rotate around it, or butt right up against it.  In most cases, this building would have been sacrificed to the gods of progress, demolished without a second thought.  Yet it - and its smokestack - still stands.

The roof’s wooden frame would require regular patch and paint maintenance, as would the roof itself, which is brighter than freshly laundered tennis whites.  The deep eaves are ultra inviting to birds, so pigeon poop is a major issue.  You know the custodians know these things, and deal with it constantly, yet they opted to keep the alien gymnasium!  It fills a heart with gladness, it really does.  Go Tigers!

If any of you know the story about why this alien, mid-century modern gym was spared during a major remodel, please do share the story with us.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

Theiss Road, South St. Louis County, MO

While discovering a new neighborhood in South St. Louis County, I ran across the above scene in a 90-degree curve on Theiss Road.  A large front yard thoroughly festooned with thousands of magenta, pink, red and white petunias. It was such a gorgeously florid display that I nearly crashed the car!

I even did a U-turn to go back and take it all in again, which is when I noticed the gardener tending to his beds.  He was tall, thin and suntanned, with a wide-brimmed straw hat against the sun, and he and his flowers were breathtaking in the most poetic way possible.

From the limited view I could gulp down while driving, I wondered if the beds were in particular shapes.  An aerial view of the home (obviously taken off-season) shows a distinct heart-shaped bed, which just melts the heart, and also shows how extensive his work is.  He has obviously cultivated these beds for several years, and all petunias.  That dedication to one flower over such a wide swath of ground spins all kinds of imagined romantic yarns.

An overwhelmingly lovely sight like this surely brings gawkers into his drive way, as there’s no shoulder or sidewalks along this road.  And it’s such a vivid sight that it must elicit enthusiastic responses.  But in the two brief moments that I entered his world, I could not bring myself to invade the peace and contentment his body language conveyed.  It was more than enough that the time, love and care he puts into these gardens for himself also enriches everyone who drives (or flies) by.

If you ever need an enchanting break from reality, do cruise Theiss until you find this minature wonderland, and if any of you know this man or his story, please do share.

An LV Home in St. Louis County

The July/August issue of St. Louis At Home lists an LV Home for sale in… South County? How odd, but very cool. Even cooler: it’s the only LV Home built in the St. Louis area and one of the few to be built atop a full basement (the majority are built atop concrete slab on grade), which doubles the size of this kit home to nearly 3,000 square feet. I exceeded all speed limits in a hurry to see an LV so close to home.

Summer 2004 is when I originally saw the LV display home in Perryville, MO, on assignment for a now-defunct design magazine to interview the LV creator and architect Rocio Romero. After a scenic drive through deep rural country, it was pleasantly jarring to see an ultra-modern metal box standing alone at the start of a farmer’s field. It appeared to be floating over a random, ironic site, and this urban/rural juxtaposition created a light tension.

Inside, the house felt spacious, sturdy and serene. The back wall of the house was a continuous series of floor-to-ceiling windows, which flooded the spaces with glorious amounts of natural light. The display home was the perfect size for two people, but the kits can be built to any custom size, so the possibilities for accommodating a family of any size was immediately apparent. The LV was sophisticated, casual and enchanting. The architect was passionate, industrious and detail-oriented. Altogether, it was a great concept cleverly executed and it was easy to understand why sales of the kits were on the upswing. Over the years, a cover feature in dwell helped spread the word, and it’s exciting to imagine this design dotting landscapes all over America.

Most everyone I know who has toured the LV display shares this observation: all the windows are great, and it makes total sense on an isolated lot, but could you insert it into a typical urban or suburban lot and keep a decent level of privacy? Would you wind up ruining the aesthetic by covering most of the windows with drapes to keep neighbors on 3 sides from knowing your business?

This is why I needed to see the South St. Louis County LV: how does it function in established suburbia?

It functions very well. Yes, it does immediately stand out from its surroundings, but within the context of the neighborhood it’s surprising rather than jarring. Plus, the homes along this stretch of Theiss Road come in a wide variety of architectural styles, so the LV is just another flavor. The galvanized aluminum can make it a bright flavor at certain times of day, but it’s not fussy or flashy. Initially, the immediate neighbors were skeptical as they watched it going up, but now they love and accept it as a normal part of the landscape, so the LV adapts very well to denser surroundings.

I learned this important piece of information because the homeowners - Joe and Jeanne Marie Spezia - were kind enough to give me a tour. They love their home and are rightfully proud of it, and are comfortable with the attention it brings. Their decision to build one was included in a cover feature about Romero in a 2007 issue of At Home, and in June 2009 was featured in both St. Louis Homes & Lifestyles and on the front page of South County Times newspaper.

Because the Spezia’s love living here, the home is not officially for sale, but if someone were to come along and pay the right price, they’d seriously consider it. Until then, the LV has become the unique template for expressing who they are and how they choose to live.

The place expresses an immediate and vibrant personality courtesy of the creative mind of Jeanne Marie, whose re-purposing aesthetic and mosaic art punctuates every room of the house. Her studio is in the basement, and you can see more of her work here, as well as in these pictures of their home.

The couple designed a unique back patio, whose half-wall is made of metal roofing straight off the Lowe’s shelves. Actually, many significant features of the home come from Lowe’s (like the foyer light fixture, below), which proves two things:
1. It’s not what you use, but how you use it
2. Limited budgets create imaginative solutions

And budget rapidly became a huge issue for the homeowners. Their house-building adventure wound up costing far more than anticipated because of an endless string of complications. But most everyone who has been through a custom home build has a similar list of complaints and complications without achieving such a spectacular end result.

Joe Spezia enthusiasticly pointed out every structural aspect of the house that makes it so exceptional: money-saving energy efficiency, 12″ thick vertical steel beams that make the place earthquake-proof (he jumped hard on the living room floor to illustrate that there is no vibrations, no movement), perfectly plumb surfaces and extra-thick walls and floors that effectively soundproof the house from the outside as well as create privacy inside.

For instance, Joe is a licensed massage therapist with a huge and relaxing studio space for his practice in the basement of this home. He recalls a time when, after clients had left, his wife asked if working in her studio next door with the TV on had bothered them. Joe replied that they heard nothing and he didn’t even realize she was down there. That’s how thick and insulated all the walls are.

The large master bedroom (above) has an equally large bathroom with the most gorgeous clear, green glass tile walls, a bathtub you could swim laps in and a walk-in closet bigger than most bathrooms!

The entire home is about natural flow of space creating instinctive comfort, and even more so than experiencing the original LV display home, it conjured within me the intense desire to live in this home, exactly as it is. But the mercurial mind of an artist like Jeanne Marie is constantly changing things up and she is seriously considering removing the metal siding on the exterior of the home and replacing it with cedar.

Initially, I was a bit shocked at this idea, but then I saw this photo of another LV Home that went with wood instead of metal, and it looks great. Which just goes to show two things:
1. Artists “see” things that the rest of us can’t
2. The very nature of the LV allows one to exactly create the home you see in your head.

See more photos of the Spezia’s LV Home here.

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Something Nice About Bella Villa

Bayless & Ruprecht Avenues in Bella Villa
South St. Louis County, MO

I love this house, though I don’t get to see it as much as I’d like because of where it’s located.

The tiny,  St. Louis County inner-ring suburb of Bella Villa has a reputation much larger than its population of roughly 700 residents.  It’s a notorious speed trap, with 59% of its 2005 municipal budget coming from traffic tickets.  And though I don’t typically drive crazy fast while gawking at scenery, it does conjure abrupt stops and lane changes for the sake of a photo, and that’s enough to get pulled over and ticketed in Bella Villa.

On the afternoon I took these photos a cop seemed to magically appear from nowhere and pulled someone over.  I kept that business out of the left side of the frame in the photo above.  Even though I was relatively safe being on foot, all the horror stories heard over the years ran through the memory bank, and I slowly slinked away to my car parked around the corner.

Ah yes, the house itself!  It was built in 1938, and the houses right around it on this end of the block all range from 1938-1940.  It’s vaguely art deco and reminds me of some of the places Harris Armstrong was designing around the same time - like this or maybe this.

I also love the Lego look and feel of the house, especially in the way the garage, front steps and entry are attached to the main house.  Also, the house is nicely situated atop a hill, so has the added drama of a stone wall on the side, and a nice high perch from which to watch the speed trap below.