Cassilhaus

BUZZ

It has been 3 weeks since the Times article appeared and it has created quite a buzz.

• Ellen and I have each received hundreds of emails. Several of Ellen's grad school buddies from around the globe whom she hasn't seen in 20 years contacted her to congratulate her and catch up.  The Times has an amazing reach.
• My blog had 749 visitors in one week after the article! This is about 8 times normal traffic.
• Ellen's website had over 500 new visitors
• We have been picked up by no less than 10 other blogs including Apartment Therapy, Nasher Museum Blog, piedmont plots, swipelife, and bull city rising.

Some of my favorite comments:

• YEEEEEEEEEEEE -firgging-ha y'all!!   Wenny
• Fan-F#@*ing-Tastic!                        Scott
• Wowza! So Darn cool! Even though it’s my homepage I will have to go get a paper copy today!                                            Sioux
• It looks as though you were in some sort of Buddhist hyper state of awareness the entire time you were thinking, designing, and building this masterpiece.       Katharine
• ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!   Heather
• This is HUGE!                                                         Nancy and Chuck

 

The folks at the Herald Sun in Durham saw the Times article and sent Monica Chen to write a really nice FRONT PAGE article about Ellen's work and the house.

 

Chapel HIll Magazine also caught wind of our artist in residence program from the Times and will feature Cassilhaus and our current artist Beverly McIver as part of a story on interesting artist studios in their next issue. And of course every artist from here to San Francisco wants to be an artist in residence! Sorry folks but we are booked up.

NEW YORK TIMES!!!!

  

We are ecstatic that the New York Times featured Cassilhaus in today's editon with full page coverage, multiple photographs and online extras. It is a great honor to be recognized by what is arguably the world's greatest newspaper.  We are grateful to Tom DeKay,Trish Hall, Sara Barrett, and Samantha Storey of the New York Times, writer Michael Welton ([email protected]), and photographer John Hall for such a great piece.  Mike was like a pit bull getting this story in the Times.  He REALLY wanted to tell this story and we are so grateful for his persistence.  Also a tip of the hat to Andrew Rook of Clearscapes Architecture for putting us on Mike's radar screen and to Frank Harmon for giving us the courage to approach the Times.

There are so many people to thank for this amazing project.  Anna Wirth helped with the design throughout the project and made a beautiful plan set. We are particularly thankful to our wonderful builders and true craftsmen Leon Meyers and Myron Weiler with LE Meyers Builders who built an incredibly complicated house with a lot of compound angles and made our dream home a reality.  Elsewhere in this blog I talk about all the other artists and craftsman that made it all come together.

I can't even begin to express how grateful I am to the love of my life Ellen for making all of this a reality.  Her creativity, incredible design sense, patience and love got me through all this and realized our dream.

Check out the Ellen Cassilly Architect site for lots of photos of all of her projects . Raise a glass of champagne with us tonight!!!

 

H. ART CHAOS

One of the true treasures of living in the Durham/Chapel Hill area is having the American Dance Festival here every summer. The ADF is the premiere modern dance festival in the world but with 30+ years here you sometimes forget the greatness in your own back yard.  Ellen and I were asked this year to host a post performance party at Cassilhaus for an amazing Japanese dance company called H. Art Chaos. We got to see their unbelievable performance the night before the party. It is difficult to describe but it was an evening of brilliant dance theater with extensive aerial moves with minimal but magically exploited simple props and elaborate costumes.

The company, their technical crew and ADF staff including director Charles Reinhart arrived around 11 pm this past Tuesday. We had some trepidation about the language issue because no one in the company spoke English and they had only 1 translator with them.  It was not an issue at all.  Art, architecture, and good food proved a good common language and everyone seemed to have a genuinely great time. Having been confined to rehearsals and their hotel with restaurant food for a week they were delighted to get out and about and see a little slice of North Carolina.

H. Art Chaos with Ellen in the "girl power" room.

 

 

 

Dancers discover the Bongo Board

 

Ellen and director/choreographer Sakiko Oshima chill on the hammock.

 

Everyone loved the house and it seems to thrive on parties. We are trying to convince Sakiko to come back and choreograph a piece for the gallery......................

All genius is a conquering of chaos and mystery. 
    ---Otto Weininger

 

New Arrivals

We noticed the other night that our motion detector exterior downlights that are under the bridge and the cantelivered section of both pods were not going off at night.  After fiddling with the breaker and consulting the directions I was at a loss.  A brief look at the motion dectector under the bridge solved the mystery.

 

 

Mom has been a busy gal at night.