Who would have thought, without it looking out of place, you could construct a welded-steel frame, turn it into a wooden house and dump it on an island right in the middle in a Norwegian fjord? I love this man’s work. You can see the whole thing here on his website. And God knows why he bothered, but I admire the effort he made to avoid bringing this flight of stairs down to the ground. It’s a fine looking piece:
Also very interesting, here, but it’s in Norwegian, he’s talking about his own quite modest apartment in (what I think is) a rather ugly pre-War block in Oslo. Interesting because his approach to his own place is exactly like Dyv’s & mine is to ours. We’ve fixed up bits and pieces and left some areas as they have been for seventy years or more. The lived-in look with all its little experiments might seem eccentric, or no doubt slovenly to some, but we like it like this.
-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
A Bad Guide 
At the link about his own apartment: ikke tilgjengelig utenfor Norge.
You write: “We’ve fixed up bits and pieces and left some areas as they have been for seventy years or more … we like it like this.” It occurs to me that that is also what someone would do who didn’t have enough money to renovate everything. For an act to count as an act of choice, there must have been at least one alternative act available at the same time. In this situation, an alternative act was to renovate everything, because you could afford to.
So far it looks as if the rich should have an easy time selling what they do as acts of choice. The fact that they are rich implies that they can do anything they choose, so there are always plenty of alternatives available for each act.
Now it seems as if the idea of (artistic) choice tends to create discussions, but not much conviction. I think I’ll go with the motto: “take it or leave it”.
Yes, although I probably could have got a loan to rip the lot out and start from scratch not enough money has certainly been part of it in my case and probably this Knut guy’s too. Another part is doing it yourself, getting so far and not finishing before you start something else. And you simply stop noticing the faults after a while. But there’s more to it than that, I think.
Here (in the top article) is another, more interesting example of someone experimenting out of curiosity on their own house:
https://www.themodernhouse.com/journal/house-of-the-day-experimental-house-by-alvar-aalto/
Now that is really charming and comfy and reassuring.