(Having said that, I will add that I think it particularly unfair to ask people who generally don’t work in language to try to articulate what it is they do with language.)
My night job as a fiction writer means I’ve answered that question myself many times (always with the suspicion that I’m being somehow untruthful either to myself or to my interlocutor while doing so) - still, I ask it as well, usually of artists who work in visual mediums, who are able to see in a way I cannot, and whom I envy and admire.
Art can be comprehensible where it comes from is often not. Either your response is so straightforward as to deflate your work of its magic, or it is so opaque, even to you, the artist, that it defies articulation. To the artist herself, it can feel like a challenge, as if her interrogator needs a plausible origin story for the work before him: Surely it couldn’t just have come from within her - could it? We revere the imagination, and yet we struggle to accept it as fundamentally elusive: Every artistic biography or critical essay is, in some part, an attempt to pierce the mystery of creation, to explain what is so often inexplicable.Īnswering that question can be a frustrating experience. The shiplap ceilings stayed to keep the beach vibes and there were even a few salvaged ‘barn doors’ re-used.Of all the questions we ask artists, “Where did you get your inspiration?” is both the most inevitable and the most impossible. Internally, we used plywood for new joinery and stone on the bench tops. We always try to keep use a palette of robust, low maintenance but naturally beautiful materials with sparing but punchy colours for special elements like the shutters.
Problem is, the house was so enclosed you wouldn’t know where it was! The site is oriented northwards and looks over the vista of the wetlands. The house is nestled along a spit of land, sandwiched between a surf beach on one side and marshy wetlands on the other. I've also realised that the busy-ness of the overlapping frames and colours from the outside also provides privacy as they are so distracting! When they're open, they also provide a sort of 'spaceframe' density to the façade like a verandah when we had no room - or budget - to build a verandah. They allow the top or bottom part of the window to be screened from sun while always keeping key parts of view open. We investigated a few different configurations, including the conventional french door type but the asymmetrical shapes worked best. The shutters are all about being on the inside looking out - how the views are framed, how the light is filtered, how the variegated green of the shutter frames sit against the landscape of the wetlands. The green shutters may look a bit random if you just look at them from outside but we tried to make all the work here from the inside out so it’s the interior view that counts. They frame the views from the inside, filter the harshness of the sun and the different greens of the shutter frames are designed to be seen against the landscape of the wetlands. The most distinctive element in this reno – the green shutters - may look a little irregular if you look at them from outside but it’s how they work when you are on the inside looking out that counts.
#Home designer architectural 2017 changing window shutters windows#
The existing high-silled windows were removed and the whole front of the house was cut open from floor to ceiling so the ground floor can become a sort of mega-verandah. Our biggest priority was to connect the house to the great outdoors - a MUST for any beach house deserving the name. We like to think that it's finally found it's mojo as a sunny summer beach house. It now catches the holiday vibes and opens itself to beautiful views over serene native wetlands as you listen to the muted roar of wild surf beaches from the dune behind. A few simple changes have relaxed the house into the more laid-back pace of life at the beach. Double-blinded, high sill-ed windows and boxy rooms made the original house frustratingly closed to the great outdoors. Green Shutter House is a little project to convert a dour old post office into a beach house.