Postmodern Colonial Rococo Baroque

October 9, 2016 9:03 AM

Unique one of a kind finishing completed by a professional!
posted by bonefish (72 comments total)

what
posted by grouse at 9:06 AM on October 9, 2016 [7 favorites]

The kitchen needs more coffee cups.
posted by NoMich at 9:08 AM on October 9, 2016

I also, what
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:09 AM on October 9, 2016 [9 favorites]

The many photos reveal an artist's vision on walls, cabinets and moldings.
posted by Brian B. at 9:10 AM on October 9, 2016

Who gave that madman a scroll saw?
posted by BlueHorse at 9:20 AM on October 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

I wavered between thinking it might be partially cultural and resisting the mocking of bad taste, and mocking the bad taste.
posted by Miko at 9:27 AM on October 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is incredible. It looks like much of the decorating was done with copper-colored caulk.
posted by jonathanhughes at 9:27 AM on October 9, 2016 [9 favorites]

"Finished" by a professional what?!?! Certainly not a carpenter or any kind of interior designer....

(And are those some kind of drying racks for boxer shorts in the dining room?!?)
posted by easily confused at 9:28 AM on October 9, 2016 [5 favorites]

Wow
posted by SyraCarol at 9:35 AM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Well... that is a thing.
posted by Splunge at 9:43 AM on October 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

> The many photos reveal an artist's vision on walls, cabinets and moldings.

I expected to see the artist's signature REDRUM but I guess the photographer didn't get to all the rooms.
posted by ardgedee at 9:47 AM on October 9, 2016 [10 favorites]

What a waste of wood paneling. I dream of the day I could own a place with nice, warm, wood panels, and they've somehow wasted all that nice warm wood.
posted by Canageek at 9:49 AM on October 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

After seeing all the photos and then reading the house's listing history (flitting through a series of real estate companies, rapidly changing the sales price from the $400K to $1.4M price range), I feel bad about joking because this is several steps past being merely eccentric. Somebody has personal problems and it's not funny.
posted by ardgedee at 9:59 AM on October 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

The chintz-wrapped banister spindles are what's selling it.

Five-bedroom house, 3/4 of an acre lot, an enviable Connecticut school district, sold for $243,000 for in 2001 and asking $339,900 now... but the exorcism's gonna run you.

(Easily confused, I think that dining room dryer rack is actually freestanding storage, with the cloths covering the shelves.)

On preview: 1.4?!? Why even show the interior, at all?
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:01 AM on October 9, 2016

I mean, why not describe this place as a cosmetic fixer/possible tear-down, in a great location, use only exterior pictures in the listing, and then prospective buyers could be relieved when the house itself is sound?
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:04 AM on October 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

It looks like some of the painting was done by rolling rabid wolverines on LSD in a can of red paint and letting them loose.
posted by ITravelMontana at 10:13 AM on October 9, 2016 [6 favorites]

and they've somehow wasted all that nice warm wood.

I would guess that they reused mostly waste. It's a style I've been exposed to for decades, mostly from old-school hippies or slackers who have an eye for found art, and free wood. Not ashamed to say that I also value such wood, because it burns so well in my fire pit.
posted by Brian B. at 10:13 AM on October 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

Project Run Away
posted by mosk at 10:16 AM on October 9, 2016 [11 favorites]

Somebody has personal problems and it's not funny.

I'm not so sure. A lot of it looks like someone who's really into crafty stuff. I can see what they were going for - something they saw on Design on a Dime that looks easy to replicate - but their skills aren't as good. And they might have really liked it. I haven't seen anything on this scale, but I certainly know personally of crafty people who make things that are pretty awful to me but that they enjoy. I think it's in the range of normal, and that the person cared about this project and maybe thought it looked good.
posted by Miko at 10:25 AM on October 9, 2016 [6 favorites]

Oh god that deck/porch in slides 36 and 44. The corrugated steel roof. The angled stairs. The randomness of it all.

This person does not respect wood.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:31 AM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

"A lot of it looks like someone who's really into crafty stuff. I can see what they were going for - something they saw on Design on a Dime that looks easy to replicate - but their skills aren't as good."

This. In a previous house I owned a former owner had covered all the walls in one bedroom with swirls of plaster that were up to inch deep, then painted the walls creamsicle orange. There was no way to remove it and the best way to paint it would have been to drop a 1/4 stick of dynamite in a five gallon bucket of paint and run.
posted by ITravelMontana at 10:33 AM on October 9, 2016 [5 favorites]

I'm guessing they don't shop at IKEA. As a European living in North America, I have seen some scary home decor, but this one is truly sui generis. They certainly had a vision...
posted by aeshnid at 10:34 AM on October 9, 2016

The house (or is it a church?) is apparently a work of art, constructed by these guys and conceived by the FERMATA arts foundation. Each room has a different theme and poem associated with it, for example, the family room is quite appropriately called "Life after the Last Judgement".
posted by steveminutillo at 10:34 AM on October 9, 2016 [36 favorites]

My best guess is that this was a skilled carpenter who has dementia or a stroke or something. I don't feel comfortable mocking this.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 10:36 AM on October 9, 2016

Ya gotta feel sorry for the poor real estate agents: this is probably as cleared-out/cleaned-up as they could make it, and it still looks purely awful --- how in the world do you stage a place like this to make it appealing to more normal prospective residents? I imagine the various agents begged the owners to at least get rid stuff like of those chintz wrappings on the stair bannisters.
posted by easily confused at 10:40 AM on October 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

And here I was thinking the kitten riding a rainbow laying donut was a strange thing...
posted by bigZLiLk at 10:42 AM on October 9, 2016

This is what the Lumberjocks projects gallery looks like some days.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:46 AM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Really one of the only reasons I'd love to own vs renting is that you would have years just to slowly go bonkers (decoratively speaking) and do whatever you want to your house.

Also I'm impressed with the "photos from a previous listing." That was clearly a more skilled photographer. They made the back porch look delightfully wacky instead of terrifyingly ramshackle.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 10:51 AM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

I bought a house once that had been inhabited for the previous year by the owners meth-addicted daughter and her boyfriend. Not totally dissimilar.
posted by fshgrl at 11:02 AM on October 9, 2016

If you're trying to sell this thing, pick up the carpet samples first.
posted by Splunge at 11:02 AM on October 9, 2016

Hate to say it, Splunge, but I suspect those are glued to the floor.
posted by easily confused at 11:08 AM on October 9, 2016 [7 favorites]

I'd say it walks the line between mockable bad taste and not-funny mental illness, and I can't really tell which side it comes down on. My thought was that it looked like a movie set for a Gothic horror tale of a craftsman who murdered his wife and then went insane ...
posted by Quietgal at 11:22 AM on October 9, 2016

I bet the poor new owner tries to pull up the carpet samples and finds that they're load-bearing.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:24 AM on October 9, 2016 [28 favorites]

Three things: First, which room is the hut of Baba Yaga?
Second, the vibe I was getting was Grey Gardens.
Third, the whole thing looks like an unfinished/in the midst of rehab house that people are trying to live in (cf. GG). Trust me, I know that look. I've lived in enough of them.
posted by miss patrish at 11:26 AM on October 9, 2016 [4 favorites]

I find it almost destabilizingly (maybe not a word?) ugly. I agree it's almost not funny. The mismatched cacophony is just FUCKED UP. Ugh.
posted by asavage at 11:29 AM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Ew.
posted by bz at 11:29 AM on October 9, 2016

The links posted by steveminutillo above are super interesting and this is a weird thing that gets even more weird the more you click on stuff. This isn't some eccentric home hobbyist, this was a whole team of people who put this together as a high art project. There's a whole presentation about it here which goes into a lot detail about the art & design theory employed. It's very weird and I don't usually like to call things weird.
posted by bleep at 11:34 AM on October 9, 2016 [16 favorites]

It's as if the people behind the Madonna Inn had a shut-in cousin who did too much LSD
posted by not_the_water at 12:17 PM on October 9, 2016

This was done on purpose by people for art reasons.


OK.



Wow.


OK.
posted by louche mustachio at 12:17 PM on October 9, 2016 [6 favorites]

This house is based on the ideas of Wassily Kandinsky. It reflects that
peace is more honorable than the tragedy of war.
posted by louche mustachio at 12:22 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

A split-level dog's breakfast...
posted by jim in austin at 12:46 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is either outsider finishing, outsider faux finishing, faux outsider finishing, or faux outsider faux finishing. I'll let dealers decide.
posted by coolxcool=rad at 12:50 PM on October 9, 2016

So this is where Alan Moore was staying the past 10 years while writing his 1200+ page epic novel Jerusalem.
posted by Fizz at 12:55 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Each room has a different theme and poem associated with it, for example, the family room is quite appropriately called "Life after the Last Judgement".

Noted.
posted by rhizome at 1:03 PM on October 9, 2016

There's a whole presentation about it here which goes into a lot detail about the art & design theory employed. It's very weird and I don't usually like to call things weird.

Hell yeah. This looks like Deep Weird. Seven people worked on this thing? The whole Russian angle? The unreadable low-resolution cut-and-pastes into that presentation? This seems almost cult-like. It's incredibly unusual (maybe unprecedented?) to have outsider artists working in large teams.
posted by mr_roboto at 1:05 PM on October 9, 2016 [9 favorites]

This is brilliant, and I feel a little disappointed that so many people see their options for reacting to this as a choice between mockery and pity.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 1:35 PM on October 9, 2016 [6 favorites]

The many photos reveal an artist's vision on walls, cabinets and moldings.

"I frew up. I sorry."
posted by BlueHorse at 1:41 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

It looks like that scene from Carrie was re-staged using puff paints and meat.
posted by Hypatia at 2:17 PM on October 9, 2016

I wonder who they envisioned as the potential buyers for this house. Actual home buyers? Art collectors? I find this project rather unsettling just scrolling through the pictures and reading the poems. There is such a manic and disjointed energy to all of it and I do wonder about the mental state of the artist who conceived it. The most disturbing thing to me was the bathroom with the faces painted on the wall and the cryptic scratch marks in the wood behind the toilet (picture 23 of 51). I can't imagine actually living inside this house. I think I would slowly go insane.
posted by sevenofspades at 2:36 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

This one makes me wish my carpenter grandfather were still alive so he could tell me everything wrong with it that I can't see at first sight. Because it's all so skewed that I'm almost sure he'd come out with something along the lines of "did they use a router on the framing too????"
posted by fraula at 2:46 PM on October 9, 2016

There's something seeping out of the piano case. Generally that's never good.
posted by lagomorphius at 3:29 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

And this lovely colonial features a kitchen with fun cabinets made of raw bacon!
posted by 4ster at 3:49 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is fantastic. It's like a habitable The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:17 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Somebody has personal problems and it's not funny.

I think you deeply underestimate the limits of bad taste. (There are no limits to bad taste).
posted by adam hominem at 4:17 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Or like the House on the Rock built in suburbia.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 4:28 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Or like the House on the Rock built in suburbia.

Or not, actually.
posted by oheso at 8:29 PM on October 9, 2016

Yeah this is something out of a Tim Powers novel.
posted by The otter lady at 9:28 PM on October 9, 2016 [3 favorites]

I think this only seems disturbing because the first 40 or so photos are done with a point and shoot camera and cheap flash that makes it all seem ominous and drab. The most amazing to me are the last few photos where someone invested in lighting and really went all out with the staging. The attic and garage floors (especially the garage floor) highlight for me what is the only disappointing note here, in that the artist didn't address more of the floors the way that they did these two. I wish this person had also filled the walls with paintings or drawings as well.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 10:29 PM on October 9, 2016

Or like the House on the Rock built in suburbia.

Or not, actually.

Well, no Infinity Room or chambers filled with gew-gaws, but the sensibility that excess is good is certainly there.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:36 PM on October 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

There's something seeping out of the piano case. Generally that's never good.

It better be in the disclosure. Costs a ton to fix.

I think this only seems disturbing because the first 40 or so photos are done with a point and shoot camera and cheap flash that makes it all seem ominous and drab.

For me it's that a lot of it looks like sculpted lipstick.
posted by rhizome at 11:48 PM on October 9, 2016

Trump is leaking.
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:51 AM on October 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

I was laughing ("Hey, if it ain't-a Baroque, you don't-a fix it!") until I got to the deck, and then the non-Euclidian geometry stripped the last of my sanity.

The dining room with the quasi-tribal chairs was actually kinda cool in a "Maybe I dropped too much acid when I really should have been taking it..." sort of way. If they're really going to reboot Beetlejuice, then this is the room they need to do the Day-O! scene in. Remember Mrs Deetz's terrible artwork?? Yeah.

The tree house isn't bad, though. Is the netting to keep the birds out, or the kids in? You know, just don't answer that.
posted by ninazer0 at 1:51 AM on October 10, 2016

All it needs are two dogs or horses doin' it in the photos to complete this for me.
posted by Young Kullervo at 5:52 AM on October 10, 2016 [2 favorites]

That is the scariest thing I've seen. It looks like it's infested with the weird red vein stuff from "War of the Worlds". I would never sleep again if I walked inside that house.
posted by h00py at 6:46 AM on October 10, 2016

This house has related poetry. [PDF]
posted by chavenet at 6:49 AM on October 10, 2016

This feels like what happened right before it became the House of Eternal Return.
posted by nonasuch at 10:12 AM on October 10, 2016 [1 favorite]

That's some objectively terrible (and hilarious!) art.
posted by nikoniko at 11:41 AM on October 10, 2016

What a fuck palace!
posted by Catblack at 8:12 PM on October 10, 2016 [3 favorites]

This reminds me of the house my parents bought when I was in high school where the previous owner had upholstered the walls. It was professionally done, too, so she had found an interior designer somewhere that thought it was a good idea. The worst was the single room guest house that was done in a bold, large, striped fabric, including the ceiling. It felt like being inside a box gift wrapped by a clown.

My brother and I were tasked with using a screwdriver to pull out all the staples holding the cotton batting beneath the fabric to the walls. It took us days of solid work to do the entire house.
posted by MsMolly at 12:53 AM on October 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

It's an art project.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:32 AM on October 13, 2016

It got a write-up in this regional home magazine. They go into more detail about the house's history.
posted by codacorolla at 7:03 AM on October 17, 2016

In all seriousness, someone should buy it to rent out on AirBnB or VRBO.
posted by mama casserole at 7:10 AM on October 17, 2016