Villa on the Bay

Jay Johnson - What an exciting Super Bowl! Congratulations, Saints, on your victory. Watching the Big Game, it's hard to imagine bustling Miami, the Super Bowl host city, as a backwater, swampy burg back in the early 1900s. But such was the case when International Harvester industrialist James Deering decided to put much of the town of Miami (population 10,000) and about a thousand European craftspeople to work building his winter retreat, Villa Vizcaya.

The villa and its current 28 acres (whittled down from the original 180) are now preserved as a museum and the contents are remarkably as they were during Deering's lifetime. I took a video of the outside and the home's views of Biscayne Bay, ending just before our cloudy day turned rainy.I also took a separate video of the gardens, which are world famous.

If you're ever in Miami, this is a must-see attraction. It's grand, whimsical, and fascinating. The collections of art, antiques, and furnishings are incredible and the handpainted walls, fabrics, and wallpapers are vibrant. The villa opens onto a courtyard with two levels, but in the early 1950s when the home was turned into a museum, the courtyard was classed over by a clever pavillion to provide more of a climate-controlled environment to preserve all the treasures you'll see (we weren't allowed to take videos inside, of course).

I Want a Sliding House, Too!

Jay Johnson -- I love our home in the country. We live in a renovated 1900s farmhouse that faithfully follows the rural Pennsylvania vernacular, all squared off with a wide-open front porch. It was once built for two or three families who worked on the nearby Delaware Canal and probably had a lean-to attached kitchen area shared by the families. The house was made from boards salvaged from decomissioned canal barges (hence its being called a "barge house").

I love our house, and most people would love to live here, but when I saw the following video from the folks at Wallpaper*, the stylish all-things-design magazine, I developed a serious case of house envy. It's amazing that modern architecture can take a homeowner's request to "be radical" and turn the concept of a house upside down. In this case, this modern house follows the vernacular for their rural region, much like ours, but with a twist -- the roof slides silently on motorized runners so that the house can either reveal its inner glass shell (almost like living in a greenhouse) or hunker down under its protective roof-and-wall casing during colder and darker weather. Totally cool.

It's good to see the envelope being pushed on what a home is, how it functions, and what technology can bring to the design party. Let's hope that architects, interior designers, and homeowners can continue innovating the concepts behind what we call "home." And in the meantime, I kinda, sorta wanna sliding house, too . . . .