Yep, I’ve re-worked my home…again. I can’t go six months without doing something. This time I’ve retained the basic sky platform, but with some differences, and have added a new house.
The last time I played with things, I had no idea what I really wanted to do. This time it was easy: I wanted to get rid of the clutter and go for something clean and more suited to my in-world time. It’s great having things like a swimming pool and jacuzzi in-world, especially when they’re impractical in real life – but unless they’re used, they simply become fluff. Well, to me at least.
There were things in the old build I wanted to keep – the gazebo, which receives a lot of use, especially when friends visit or I’m parked in-world, writing or working out-world; the planters and trees – although I wanted to improve on them and the greenery in general. I also knew which house design I wanted to use as well.
So away I went, and here are the results.
An aerial view
The gazebo, as mentioned, remains, but the pool area that was to the left as you look at the picture has gone, as has the dance stage to the right, leaving me with two lawn / grass areas and room to plant some impressive new trees. The walls / rails around the platform have also gone, replaced by sculpted hedgerows.
Through the trees
The house itself is a variation on my Canaveral 2 design, which I recently re-worked using the new prim size limit of 64m. I’ve wanted to use it for a while, if I’m honest, as I really like the look and lines.
The lounge (click to enlarge)
The lounge hasn’t changed in terms of furnishings, but the house design has meant I can bring my piano back into the lounge area, rather than having it out in the hall; I missed having it as a focal-point for visits.
As per usual, I’ve opted for scripted lights (‘cos I’m lousy with textures), and as the photo shows, have hopefully got something warm and inviting in terms of tone around the fireplace and the indirect lighting.
Bedroom
The bedroom is above the living room, and reached by a stairway and suspended landing I’m rather pleased with. Again, I kept to a central fireplace, as with the lounge, as this nicely divides the room in two as well as giving it something of a focal-point & extra picture-hanging space when I need it!
I didn’t bother with making the windows tintable – haven’t for a while now; being up in the sky, it’s not like I’m overlooked, and hopefully Firestorm will soon be able to access the new land privacy options should I ever need to go that far.
Entrance hall at dusk
All-in-all I’m pretty happy with the way the place has worked out; it still sprawls a littleon account of the scale, and I’m seriously considering taking up a suggestion from a friend and re-scaling this and some of my commercial builds to suit more “real life” avatar heights now things like Penny Patton’s camera adjustments and other ideas for a more immersive experience at catching on. Certainly, this house feels overly large given I have been using one of Penny’s camera positions for about six months now (even though I’m technically over 6ft tall in-world!). I guess time will tell on and further changes. For now, I think I’ll just enjoy the new house :).
Since setting up my new sky house and platform, I’ve felt something has been missing. There is plenty of space, and the house I’m more than satisfied with; but something has been lacking.
Daisy first partially put a finger on it, suggesting the main patio needed a few koi in a pond. She was right, but even so, things were still lacking. The pond looks a little odd, if I’m honest, and while the front lawn provided a great vantage point to watch the sun set, it lacked … something as well.
It’s not often that I start tinkering without some idea of what I want; but that’s what I did yesterday; simply trying out ideas – round gazebos, additional planters, vines, simple rugs and so on. Nothing came together.
It wasn’t until today that I figured out what was needed: plants, water, fish and a gazebo with room to sit and room to snuggle. I had no clear idea of how to put it all together, but I did know the front lawn area was the place.
As first I thought maybe a Japanese-style area, little pools of water, plants, gravelled walkways and a small Japanese-styled gazebo.
The only problem was that it really wouldn’t fit with the rest of the build’s look; I really wanted something that would continue the lines of the rest of the build, but offer rooms to sit, watch the sunset and set itself apart from the rest of the platform.
So I started with the prims and the superglue, and I’m quite pleased with the results: a clean, open-sided gazebo, draped in vines on three sides, sitting over a large pond filled with koi, with planters all around to provide a little privacy, a wooden bridge linking patio to platform.
There is enough room on the platform for half-a-dozen to sit and chat, while the rug provides a nice little place for snuggles, intimate chats – and simply watching the sun set.
The gazebo is currently unlit, but I’m considering a couple of hanging baskets with candles, or perhaps flames, suspended from a couple of the beams.
The koi, from Jamay Greene, haven’t been used in about two years, so I guess they’re pleased to be back out of the box – although I have to admit the pond probably needs some suitable greenery to help them feel totally at home!
I’ll probably tweak bits and pieces over the next day or so, but overall, I think the gazebo and bits complement the rest of the house. Now I’ll just have make sure it gets used!
Since Christmas I’ve moved no fewer than three times. Not actually to anywhere, you understand – just within my own land. Had it not been for a change of heart…it would actually have been four moves.
It started when neighbours moved into a corner parcel on the sim and threw up (an apt description, now I’ve written it) a 50 metre tall, good-awful home-built “lighthouse”, that utterly cut across Kelly’s view from her home. OK.. it is their land, and they can do as they please, but there were two other corners of the land where views from neighbouring parcels would not have been interrupted, so the arrival of the, umm, lighthouse, was a little off-putting.
Anyway, it caused Kelly much inconvenience, constantly having to derender the monstrosity, and even while I myself didn’t have a direct view of it from my house, I was constantly away of its looming presence. So to make things easier, I boosted my place into the sky, and relocated Kelly’s house (as she has the same basic style of house as me) down to the waterfront and next to the pool there – move 1.
However, being in the sky is not overly satisfying for me; so up came move 2 – logically…to a higher altitude. What would have been move 3 was a failed attempt to move back down to the ground and live atop / inside a landscaped mountain – thwarted by the fact the sim has been so pulled about that it was next to impossible to get the land looking the way I’d pictured before I got fed up of playing whack-a-mole with the land tool.
In the end, move 3 became my latest – not quite back to the ground, but close enough to it so that I can again enjoy sunsets over the sea.
The new house and platform
The new place is on a 50×50 platform that offers the best of both worlds for me: situated a little above the minimum skybox altitude, it provides me with a home and garden in the sky, but is low enough for me to enjoy glorious over-the-water sunsets.
Now, I’ll be totally honest here. The design of the house (for once) is not my own – although the build is. Credit goes where it is due: the basic idea came from Vivienne Schell, who is perhaps one of SL’s top designers of sky homes. While looking at what is out there (having opted for a build by someone else in “move 2’s” altitude-boost mentioned above), I revisited her store and spent time looking at various options. Sadly, all her builds, as fabulous as they are, are too prim-rich for me and offer more space than I could ever hope to use.
SO… I admit, the overall look of the house is very influenced by Vivienne’s work, and as such, similar designs will not be finding their way into the IPD product line. This build is purely for my personal use.
Platform from the pool “side” showing the patio, planters and the house behind
The house itself is raised over the back of a 40×40 platform, which provides plenty of room for fun, relaxing and entertaining friends.
Directly in front of the house, the platform comprises a large patio area, sectioned by planters of trees, shrubs and flowers to provide a quiet seating area, a large poolside area and patio seating. To the side of this, at a lower level, is a lawn complete with dance floor and room for a number of recreational pursuits.
Directly behind the pool, again on a lower level, and sitting under one wing of the house is the mandatory hot tub with a further area of lawn.
The house itself, like my Water Margin design, is a single-level affair (sort-of!), with a central entrance hall linking the lounge and bedroom “wings”. The house is raised above the main platform / patios, and is reached via a broad stairway leading to a smaller patio nestled between the wings of the house.
My new lounge
The lounge combines my own furniture with some elements from Novocaine Islay’s “Hollywood” range of items (usually supplied with her own house builds).
My usual sofas are there, mixed with a nice fireplace and wall unit from Novocaine, and as per usual, I’ve finished the room with my own scripted “indirect” lighting to give the room a cosy feel at night. Of course, my favourite pictures by Rena Sakai take pride of place on the walls, while Himtu Twine’s amazing images allow me a little Ego Moment on one wall. The decor is a little less “earthy” compared to my previous house, with light walls and textured ceiling, although I find the darker floor attractive.
Entrance Hall
The entrance hall is heavily influenced by my own Caprican house designs, offering double doors to the front aspect of the house and platform, and large windows to the front, and a single wide window to the rear.
Given I cannot be without music in SL, my piano (beautifully updated by Persephone Milk and reviewed here) takes pride of place in the hallway, and has a little couch for friends, courtesy of Novocaine Islay (although rescripted by myself). Hanging from the ceiling in the hall is a picture of the house I hope to return to in the future – my version of Fallingwater – which will certainly benefit from the coming prim size increase!
My Boudoir
After some debate with myself – I was tempted (still am, in fact) to create a more “crimson” room with drapes, rich reds and golds, etc. -my bedroom retains a more oriental look, with furnishing from Novocaine once more, and pictures by Rena Sakai and myself.
Like the lounge, the bedroom overlooks the front of the platform and provides me with a glorious view of trees and sea, which I simply adore.
View from the upper terrace at sunset
All-in-all, I’m rather pleased with the look of the place – even tho I have a little urge to go making a few changes here and there even now. I once again feel like I have a “home” in SL, a feeling that has been lacking for the last few weeks.
Certainly I have enough room to done what I enjoy here; even my Skeet Shoot system seems to operate *fairly* adequately, which it hasn’t done in a long time. I’m also rather pleased with the dance floor area, which is a re-working of Muerte Pedro’s excellent dance floor systems.
I’ve tried to include some indirect lighting for night-time views as well. Sunset and night are very much my favourite times of day in SL. Hopefully, with deferred rendering on its way to the Main Grid in a working format, lighting is something that is itself going to get a lot more interesting in the near future. However, for now I’m satisfied with what I have.
Of course…I cannot promise I won’t be moving again…but right now, I like the new place, including the “sekrit” bits I’ve not mentioned (I don’t kiss and tell! *winks), and I hope to be here a while!
*P.S. “Pickfords” is the name of a famous removal company in the UK, if you’re wondering!
A few days ago, I posted about moving home to a new sim. At the time I mentioned that the house wasn’t *precisely* what I wanted. So guess what?
I’ve changed it. In fact, I possibly change house more times than Imelda Marcos ever changed shoes…
Anyway, the new place is much more along the lines I was trying to achieve the first time around, although it has moved very much away from the “inviting nature in” theme that Ari has managed so expertly with her home, and of which mine was but a pale imitation. Instead, I’ve gone more down the Geoffrey Bowa avenue, combining it with a bit of a Mediterranean feel.
The new house is more traditional in that it has things like “walls” and “windows”, rather than being open to nature on three sides. It also has a more traditional “upstairs” and “downstairs”. Like the first build at the new home, it is still built back into a wooded hill, but I’ve moved it further forward so that it embraces the infinity pool.
I’ve also kept to something of “earthy” tones – apart from the white exterior stucco finish – with wood panel on the back lounge wall and on the bedroom ceiling, together with a Japanese wood screen effect on the bedroom walls, carried over from the first build, and muted natural colours to interior walls, ceilings and flooring – with the exception of the Mediterranean tiling evidenced around the pool.
The lounge, slightly smaller than in the first build, does retain a frontage that is open to the world, with a tiled front patio area linking it directly with the infinity pool, which has now been extended back to almost join with the house – indeed, on climbing out of the pool you are practically *in* the lounge area – an idea I first came across in some of Geoffrey Bowa’s hotel designs in Sri Lanka.
The main reason for doing this is so that the full effect of the infinity pool can be enjoyed from the lounge itself – as I hope the picture to the right demonstrates. I hope also that, by drawing the pool “into” the house more, it will be something I can friends actually make use of, rather than it remaining purely decorative – as so many pools in SL seem to.
While the living room is slightly smaller than previously (15×15 compared to 16×16), the house is actually some 8 metres wider than the original build. This has allowed me to both move the stair case out of the lounge and provide space for a separate area where my laptop and “desk” can sit (the laptop cunningly disguising a few things).
The added width to the house means the bedroom is now much larger and lighter, and now benefits from covered balcony overlooking the front aspect of the infinity pool and the open sea beyond. Full length windows separate the bedroom from the balcony, with access between the two via a side arch. Additionally, the bedroom has a set of sliding doors leading to the “back garden” – a lawned area on top of the hill the house backs into. How much this will be used, I’ve no idea – but I think it adds a little something to the place overall, and it’ll probably end up getting a couple of trees and flowerbeds and probably a retaining wall.
The revised house has other advantages over my first attempt: for a start, it is much lower than the original, allowing it to “blend” more easily with the landscape and trees – despite the white stucco. It also means that Kelly gets a much improved outlook from her house, which is more-or-less the same in overall style, just without the infinity pool.
Some re-working of the land was obviously necessary in order to “fit” the new design, but even this proved beneficial, as it has allowed me to better sculpt the hills and slopes and make things a lot more gentle and smooth overall. I’ve also been able to revise and improve the footpath linking the two houses. While this wasn’t vital, there were a couple of niggles I had with it which didn’t lend themselves to easy fixes given the style of the earlier houses. Away from this, one thing that hasn’t gone is the dance area … and I hope that will also be seeing a lot of use in the near future.
Overall, it is fair to say I’m finally pleased with the revised layout – the house “works”, the landscape is subdued and everything (to me at least) has come together quite neatly. I’m particularly happy that despite the drastic changes to the house build itself, I actually managed to get the new place done using just 2 prims over the first attempt; the new house design weighs-in at 84 prims, the “old” was 82.
Now, if I’ll just stop moving around long enough to actually enjoy it!
Santos Isle, the last home location was comfortable, but suffered in two major respects: it was east facing (and I prefer sunsets to sunrises) and the sim itself suffered from the arrival of a *huge* Ozimal bunny farm and a skyhome rental business, both of which impacted the sim – and our privacy – in various adverse ways. Still, when you are opting to live on a unzoned sim, you have to take some of the rough with the smooth.
The new sim is also unzoned, so carries with it some of the same risks inherent with Santos Isle- but its scores in that the parcel is west-facing, and the sim has fewer parcels overall, the majority of which are well-settled.
A third benefit is that the sim is not themed as a sandy tropical island. For me this is important because for a while now I’ve wanted to do something different in terms of living space, and sandy islands, nice though they are, don’t fit the bill environment-wise.
In this latter regard, I have to admit to being influenced by two things: my love for and of Sri Lanka, where a lot of the architecture – particularly as designed by the late Geoffrey Bowa – blends beautifully with the environment (and in some cases works with the environment) – and also the home of my very close friend Ari.
Even so, getting something built at the new place was harder than I’d expected – as several friends are aware. Normally when I have an idea for a place it’s move in, build, settle. No this time: after moving on a Sunday, it was not until the following Wednesday night that I finally got things sorted to a point where I feel comfortable with the new home; in between lay close to 20 builds that were started and abandoned as I tried to make what I had in mind fit the irregular shape of the new parcel.
The new layout features a couple of houses – one for myself, one for Kelly and Vina – and this time I’ve been able to work in some other features I’ve missed recently from other homes in SL – notably a pool area and a “dance floor”.
The houses are an identical build – possibly the first development of an idea I still have in the back of my mind and have yet to achieve – and draw heavily on the aforementioned influences from both Sri Lanka and Ari’s own home, from which I’ve borrowed the same basic concept, and very much hope she won’t mind me doing so; this is the first build I’ve made in SL that is so clearly drawn from the work of another builder.
The house is a simple split-level affair, built back into a hill, with the emphasis on blending with the surroundings. Finished in natural woods and more earthy colours and draped with vines, the house has an open aspect lounge area with a staircase leading to a galleried bedroom. Windows are entirely absent from the build, leaving it open to the wooded surroundings, which I hope – as with Ari’s design from which this is drawn, gives an entirely natural feel – albeit one with more “traditional” living than her own outstanding build, which draws nature directly into the house itself.
The Sri Lankan influence is present in that many hotels and houses there have similar areas that are both open to the surrounding environs, while maintaining a high level of comfort for those using them – and I was hard-pushed not to include a “traditional” Sri Lankan-style open shower area that I’ve enjoyed in places such as the Deer Park and Saman Villas.
A more obvious Sri Lankan influence – or more correctly, a small homage to Geoffrey Bowa – is in the “infinity”-style swimming pool I added to the west edge of the land. I first encountered such a pool at the magnificent Kandalama Hotel, near Dambulla in February 2000; and quickly learned that such pools – whether for swimming or as ornamental focal points – are a trademark feature of Bowa designs across the island. It’s always something I’ve wanted to re-create in-world, if only on a personal level, and I’ve rather pleased with the way this particular pool turned out…
Alongside the pool, set back into the treeline, is something else I’ve missed from recent SL homes: a modest dance area. Comprising a flat rock, with lanterns hanging from overhead branches, and spacing hopefully suited to camming, this is a part of the new home that I very much hope will see a lot of use in the future; a place for friends to come and socialise, dance and / or relax around the pool.
While it didn’t turn out entirely as I’d planned, the new place is very much “home” now – the balance of openness an, natural appearance and privacy seems to be about right. I’m certainly very happy with how things have (eventually) turned out, and I very much hope that those who had to endure four days of me bashing my head on the desk and being “too busy” for much else will equally enjoy the results of my growling….
The last month and a bit have seen considerable changes in my Second Life; the end of a 3-three year relationship / friendship; much fiddle-farting around with i-Squared, partly due to the upcoming release of the SL Marketplace (which I’m actually beginning to like, despite the dearth of certain key functionality…); and a general amount of to-ing and fro-ing.
Most of all, though, it has (again) seen me swapping houses and living style. Three times!
The first change came about as a result of feeling that the Caprican house I’d put up to replace “Fallingwater” was a just a little bit on the large side for beach front living, so I set about trying to put together something a little more modest and which had a better “fit” for my beach location.
The result was the start of what I call the “Lion’s Gate” range: a 2-room single-floor house in something of a Colonial style. After the roominess of the Caprican, however, this was just a tad too far in the other direction, so the single-floor house became something of grand-fronted 2-floor affair.
I have to admit, I’m rather proud of this design, and it brought together several ideas I’ve been playing with of late: a revision of the old (and boring) “window tinting” that allows for “working” blinds on the windows without pushing up prim counts; the use of indirect scripted lighting to achieve an atmospheric (and hopefully life-like) look to the place at night, and so on.
Lion’s Gate quickly matured into a mini-range of four houses which are now available via i-Squared, hopefully at prices to suit all pockets.
Sadly, no sooner had things settled down in the new house, which was also intended as a merging of tastes between two people; personal matters in SL changed for me, with the result that as much as I liked the house, I knew I needed another change. I just wasn’t sure quite what, although returning to sky living was a strong consideration – but so did living more “on the water”.
Flicking through various WordPress blogs, I finally came across a source of inspiration. This spurred me to design the Water Margin, my first attempt at a “floating house”.
Like the original Lion’s Gate, the Water Margin is a 2-room, single level house, with the two rooms linked by a 10m hallway. Like the house that inspired it, it includes a large open deck area where I can entertain and enjoy my sunsets, and it again incorporates window and lighting ideas refined in the Lion’s Gate range.
I have to admit, living on water is a little odd, but at least in SL I don’t have to worry about rough seas. And as it started out as something specifically for *me*, I’ve already grown very fond of the new place.
I’ve no plans to make any further changes; so long as I have a lot of water around me, the new house will remain undisturbed – and I’m blessed in having a sunken parcel to the south of me that is likely to remain undeveloped as it hosts various bits way up in the sky. Who knows. Maybe I’ll get a little sail boat and try my hand messing about on the water…
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 