 | This past weekend was a home-centered one. On Saturday, we went to the Arts & Crafts Show at Disney's Grand Californian Hotel. The Grand Californian itself is quite a piece of work: built just a few years ago, but in an Arts & Crafts style meant to hark back to great lodges of the past, like Yosemite's Ahwahnee Hotel, Yellowstone's Old Faithful Inn, or Mt. Hood's Timberline Lodge. Frankly, the outside isn't much to look at (more of a mega-hotel wrapped in Craftsman shorthand than the real thing), but the interior is exquisitely detailed. The show was a mixed bag. Everything on display was beautiful and highly covetable, but most of it came with a pretty steep price tag — for many vendors, "Craftsman" or "Arts & Crafts" is synonymous with "license to print money". Of course, in many cases you're paying for the quality of a one-off, handmade-in-America art item (like the $3,000 secretary that Shelby was drooling over), but you've also got a gigantic field of people selling made-in-Taiwan cheapware, riding on the coattails of their more prestigious bretheren. (And would the founders of an artistic movement built on honesty and simplicity really have sold "Craftsman" media centers, complete with a space for your 61-inch flatscreen plasma TV?) Still, we saw a lot of interesting things, and got some good ideas for our house, particularly in the realm of curtains and window treatments (we're still using the cheapo curtains that the previous owners left behind, until Digory tears them off of their ten-cent potmetal rods). Some exhibitors of note:
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| On Sunday, we took the Anaheim Historical Society's annual home tour. There were eight homes on display, all within a few blocks of our house; we got to six of them. The homes that we saw were built from 1911 to 1917, slightly younger than ours. Some owners had performed feats of extensive restoration (one man had been working on his house for twenty years — and was still going!), while a lucky few had recieved their homes mostly intact, with unmolested woodwork, fixtures, and stained glass (as Shelby observed in her recap, unartful application of white paint over stained wood seemed to be most restorers' major nemesis). It was clear that most people with a house on display had used the home tour as a kick-in-the-butt to get them over the hump of a major project; one house made us put on painters' booties because they'd just refinished their floor a few weeks before!
One house came from our 'class' -- it was part of the same set of threatened homes that was moved and renovated along with ours. So despite today's hollow-core doors and the front bathroom with the Cheesiest Vinyl Tile Ever, we can nourish hopes of having our house be a featured stop in a tour a few years from now . . . | |