Pirate Ship Room, Climbing Cave and Golf Simulator Make a Home A Playhouse.

Kuhl Design + Build of Minnesota is a full service, residential design/build company specializing in large remodels and whole house renovations. Their way of doing business is dynamic, interactive and as they say "fully transparent." They feel that it's your house, and it's your money. Recognition of this fact is seen in every facet of their business because they respect their clients enough to be honest about the numbers. In exchange, their clients trust them to do the right thing. And the results are beautiful. Kitchens, bathrooms, interior and special projects like this amazing home dubbed "Pirate Ship House."





The Pirate Ship House was initially created for builder Steve Kuhl's brother as part of a 6,800 square foot home in Medina, Minnesota (the house has since been sold.) The project is complete with crow's nest, brig and a wood plank bridge.



The ship's hull was made with ribs of laminated plywood ribs and flexible masonite and the coating was made by combining epoxy and drywall compound with brown colorant to find the perfect mix. After applied, it was combed to give it a rough texture:



The bridge that extends across the room to a pirate's ship can handle the weight of four adults:




"This hole (behind the Captain's Wheel) provides a quick escape down to the closet below the ship for emergency wardrobe changes," Kuhl says:


Approximate budget for a pirate room like this one: $40,000


A Secret Superluge in the Mudroom:



In the mudroom, one of the four doors conceals a secret passage that takes you into a closet where you will find a spiral tube (the SuperLuge) that when slid down takes you to the Climbing Cave which includes a climbing wall fit for both adults and children as well as an indoor golf simulator room that has carpet mimicking a golf green and sand trap.





Approximate slide budget: $2,500 to $5,000 for the components

The Climbing Cave:

Approximate climbing wall budget: $15,000

The Golf Simulator Room:




Approximate budget for the golf simulator: The software was around $18,000 when it was purchased; Kuhl is not sure how much it costs today.

About Kuhl Design + Build:


In 1999, Steve Kuhl and Dan Murphy started Kuhl Design & Build. They set out to create a little something different in the remodeling industry. Their business plan would hinge on a bold idea. They would only work with people they trust and only for those who trust them. They used to keep this a secret because they were afraid people might take it the wrong way. Now they announce it proudly because they realized it has allowed them to grow into a truly unique organization. This approach has also resulted in them having the most excellent clients on the planet. Nothing beats doing what you love for people you adore and then getting paid for it.

images and info courtesy of Kuhl's Design + Build and Houzz

Kuhl Design +Build

Denmark Home For Architect Jesper Brask Is Made From 150 Local Trees and Kolumbia Tiles.

Both New Zealand's Elle Decoration magazine and the Stylepark website have featured small glimpses of this beautiful weekend house located on the Kattegat Fjord in Denmark designed and developed by architect Jesper Brask of Brask & Leonhardt for himself. Intrigued by the design, I searched for more images of both the exterior and interior and after much digging, found them.





The home was called the Tree House in the July, 2011 issue of New Zealand Elle Decor and the article mentioned how Brask harvested 150 trees from the very forest in which the home was constructed, cut them into raw beams and left them to dry for three years before beginning to build his long-awaited holiday home.





Stylepark features the home in an article about the "Kolumba" tiles used as building materials. The Stylepark article states that it took two years for a Finnish carpenter to erect the house's wooden structure using only wooden dowels; no screws. The living area is on the ground floor, with a column in the center combining the fireplace and kitchen island.



A large chimney core made of "Kolumba" tiles is now the architectural centerpiece and the anchorage to the plot of land. On the outward-facing side there is a fireplace for cooler days, while inside, where the chimney dominates the interior design, it has a work surface for preparing food and is at once a stove and airless oven. Brask was looking for a suitable material himself to serve as a harmonious counterpoint to the dominant spruce when he came across Petersen's "Kolumba" tiles in an architecture magazine.




"I wanted a stone of the same size and with the same surface effect, and so I visited the brickworks, which, together with the architects Lundgaard and Tranberg had just developed a new version of the "Kolumba" tile for the theater in Copenhagen. "Kolumba" was available in two versions then, but I wanted a stone that looked like another stone from the Petersen range. The brickworks obliged and produced a new version in yellow, English clay: The tiles are shaped and painted with white clay paste by hand before they are dried and fired. The result: light colors and a very special transparency, which blends harmoniously with the light, untreated spruce wood."



images courtesy of Brask & Leonhardt, Stylepark (by Anders Sune Berg), and Elle Decoration



Petersen's Kolumbia tiles can be found here

From Rashid to Hadid, 12 Top Designers Create Cool Laminate Flooring for Parador.

World-renowned designers Ross Lovegrove, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Jean-Marie Massaud, Karim Rashid, Jean Nouvel, Konstantin Grcic, Ben van Berkel, Matteo Thun, ORA ITO, Piero Lissoni, Werner Aisslinger and Zaha Hadid have all designed exclusive indoor laminate flooring for manufacturer Parador.

The Truffle - A Rock Like Shelter Built With The Help of a Hungry Cow

The Truffle (or Trufa) is a piece of nature built with earth in Spain. A space within a stone that sits on the ground and blends in with the territory. It's camouflaged by emulating the processes of mineral formation in its structure, and integrates with the natural environment.

The interior of the Truffle (Trufa):
The structure has a fireplace, plumbing and quite a view.





The exterior of the Truffle (Trufa):




The building process (with some help from Paulina, the calf):
To build it, Ensemble Studios made a hole in the ground, piling up the removed topsoil on its perimeter. Then, they filled the volume with hay bales and flooded the space between the earth and the built space to solidify it. The mass was then filled with poured concrete. Time passed and they removed the earth discovering an amorphous mass.



The earth and the concrete exchanged their properties. The land provided the concrete with its texture and color, its form and its essence, and concrete gave the earth its strength and internal structure. But what they had created was not yet architecture, they had fabricated a stone.



They then made a few cuts using quarry machinery to explore its core and discovered its mass inside filled with hay, now compressed by the hydrostatic pressure exerted by concrete on the flimsy vegetable structure.



To empty the interior, they brought in a calf named Paulina, and she enjoyed the 50m3 of hay, from which she was nourished for a year until she left her habitat as an adult and weighing 300 kilos.





She had eaten the interior volume, and space appeared for the first time, restoring the architectural condition of the truffle after having been a shelter for the animal and the vegetable mass for a long time.



Time lapse video:

All images and video courtesy of Ensemble Studios