Note from Marty: As you may have noticed in the byline below this post’s title, Looney Listing welcomes Emerald63 as a full-fledged author to the site.
Nothing about this place is average, nothing at all. It’s not your average entry.
Or sofa.
Not your average bedroom. (A marble platform bed – really?)
Or bathroom.
And especially not your average listing butler.
Thanks for the post, Emerald63!
Oh, heck yeah! If I had to pay to live in the desert, a place like this would be a nice consolation. I could turn one of those rooms into a nice library. Gotta have a place for my books. I would have to figure out the shower with all the space shuttle controls in it. I wonder where it blasts off to.
There is a lot of beige and other earth tones here, but there is enough variety that it actually seems to work. I like the blue filtered windows for accent to tone down the earth tones.
The oddest place is the TV wall behind the pool table. Not sure if I like it so much. It might make a nice video editing studio – an occasional hobby that myself and my kids all do to different degrees.
@Marty E.: And thanks for inviting me aboard, Marty! :D
The highly colored sofa must’ve, er, “colored” my perception of the listing. I didn’t remember so many neutrals until I read Frodo’s comment and looked at the photos again. Um, yeah… there are. But, as you say, variety helps, along with large spaces and numerous windows.
Speaking of windows, they don’t see tinted to me. Rather, the photos seem to have been taken around twilight. There’s a gorgeous sunset (Pic 54) and an outdoor shot with the same intensely blue twilight sky (Pic 38). Color filtered windows do sound like a cool idea, almost literally in this environment. Definitely worth considering.
Couple questions… What’s going on with the “fireplace” in Pic 28? It looks like a fireplace, but also looks like it has astro-turf on the bottom, as well as the arguably more incongruous tan bricks set at a 45′ angle… huh? Equally “huh?” is the glass enclosure in Pic 34. I think it’s a wine cooler (looks like a refrigeration unit on the back wall near the ceiling). But not only wouldn’t it keep the room dark, it’s purposefully designed to expose whatever is inside. I’m not a wine drinker, but I thought prolonged light exposure was bad for wine.
Final thought – Frodo, the shower (Pic 22) reminds me of the size and shape of a Federation transporter pad. So maybe no blast offs at all? ;D
@Emerald63: I don’t know what’s up with the fireplaces. They are obviously not used. I wonder if they could be converted into Middle-Eastern style wind towers. I wonder if that method of cooling would work as well in the US Southwest.
Looking at it again, I think you are right about the windows. The factory I work with has blue tinted windows for natural light. It looks great on the outside and isn’t overly blue on the inside. What I didn’t notice too much before was the accent lighting. It looks interesting in the photos.
Now that you mention the transporter pad, all I can think of is, “Clean me up, Scotty.”
@Frodo: Clean me up, Scotty! LOL!!
I’m not familiar with “wind towers” but I think I can imagine the concept. Chimney like features used to draw the hot air up and out?
@Emerald63: You got it. It’s how they do air conditioning without air conditioning. I’m sure this place isn’t hurting for AC, but if you wanted to make it a little more energy efficient, there are times when there’s no need for the AC to run if you had a couple of wind towers. There’s a short article on Wikipedia under “Windcatcher”. It says they are originally Persian, but I saw them on the Arabian peninsula. So it works well enough to have spread throughout the region.
@Frodo: Thanks for pointing me to the Wiki article. I had no idea the windcatcher concept involved such dynamic forces. Pretty ironic for a “passive” cooling system. I was thinking only along the lines of a solar chimney, which allows hot air trapped inside to vent upwards, thus causing fresh air to be pulled in through windows.
What really caught my attention was the concept of the qanat, or underground canal. Somewhere I learned that satellite images way out in the Sahara Desert showed strange circular patterns. When investigated, they turned out to be a really big qanat with multiple openings. The conjecture was that this allowed camel caravans to travel more direct routes through the worst of the desert rather than have to go the long way round.
Also, my best friend in high school was half-Iranian and lived in Tehran from age 7 or so until moving permanently to the States at 15. She talked about the use of evaporative cooling. It was so dry there that just pointing an electric fan across a pan of water would create a breeze much cooler than the the fan alone. Back around 1990, Wal-Mart tried this concept in the first of their attempts to build greener stores. Too bad it was in eastern Kansas, which is usually pretty darn humid in the summer. Needless to say, that plan didn’t work.
Wow, what a house. The kitchen chairs (pict 16) kind of look like cactus. Some of that furniture needs sunglasses