Madison Square

Two married architects living in an 1870's brick rowhouse on a garden block in Center City Philadelphia. We work, we work on our house, we take pictures with our iphones and try to write a little something that makes sense.  What you see is what we did… it’s just how we roll.

Weekend Window Charette: Color / Texture

Authors: madisonsquare

We didn’t stop at design, we also spent quite a bit of time developing a color palette with the boxes of glass samples Megan brought:

As you can see, the bay windows were great for examining lots of textures and colors, and setting samples against.

We also developed color with prismacolor, on photocopies of the design:

Here...

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Weekend Window Charette: Design

Authors: madisonsquare

Megan of McElf Studio, the lovely glass artist we are working with on our stained glass living room window, was in town this weekend with a trunk-full of glass samples and an incredible wealth of knowledge. We spent the last 24 hours in our makeshift studio (aka orange bedroom with dining room table in it), working on the...

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Elephants Donkeys Oh My

Authors: madisonsquare

A few weeks ago I saw some Eadweard Muybridge Animal Locomotion limited edition prints on an art site I prowl, 20×200… They sell out fast but I was able to get one each of the donkey / elephant studies:

Muybridge did a ton of photographic studies of how animals and people move in the 1870′s-90′s.

Check...

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Hanging Art

Authors: madisonsquare

Were you wondering if there was any functional benefit to the high railing in the small bedroom?

Like hanging pictures so you don’t have to put holes in the plaster walls…

So for our picture rail here are the custom made picture rail hangers we built tonight!

So we can now actually hang art in our house.

In other...

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Continued Spring Cleaning

Authors: madisonsquare

I spent the night cleaning up the shop before we start our next project.

I am not even going to show you a before picture but lets just say everything was covered in sawdust and there was 3 times as much wood piled in there : /


Tagged: cleaning, dining room, Shop...

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First Day Of Spring Cleaning

Authors: madisonsquare

If you were paying attention the last three months, you probably noticed Rob’s winter beard… Well today’s post is all about the spring cleaning!


No comment:

This is the guy who installs our door hardware…

Done and done. Our office has an eastern shore traditional sock burning tomorrow and the guys...

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Privacy Lock…

Authors: madisonsquare

Well we now have locksets on all the upstairs doors! Even the bathroom.

Here is the bathroom at the beginning of the evening:

Once I prepped the door and chiseled out the strike plate, I typically paint the inside of the strike hole black to clean it up.

And all done:

Unlike all the rest of the door hardware on this floor, we...

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Coloring!

Authors: madisonsquare

It is always fun to color on a Friday night! …After a very long work week we were finally able to sit down and continue to work on the design of the stained glass window for the living room.

I think we have narrowed it down to 3 concepts:

And of course once we decide on a design it will be time to think about the colors...

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Curtain Call

Authors: madisonsquare

Our front door has been wearing the same floral blue sheer curtain since we moved in. We happened to have a perfect size scrap of sheer from hemming our curtains in the guest bedroom:

I ironed a sizable amount on the top (I am an estimator not an exactor):

Then I used the mini sewing machine I bought almost 10 years ago for...

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Spring Time!

Authors: madisonsquare

It sure feels like Spring in the garden.

Kelly repotting our bulbs.

Hyacinths in bloom!

Daffodils are up

Sun is out,

And our ‘onion grass’ is up and will soon be covered in white flowers....

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