Unusual Life

Kelly Lyles, a Seattle artist and art slut extraordinaire, is featured in the new HGTV show “What’s With That House?

George Gray, the show’s host, explains: “You’re driving down a neighborhood street and all of a sudden, you slam your brakes and you turn your head like a dog that’s just heard a whistle.” You mutter: What’s with that house?

Local Offbeat Homes on TV

Kelly’s Spot

Kelly’s house on Seattle Dream Homes

The Cob or “earth” house is made of dirt. Dirt is universally and easily available. It has been used a a building material throughout history and in most cultures around the world.

Cob building is a form of earth architecture and was for centuries a staple of British and Western European home architecture.

An interesting photo essay on an experimental Cob building that was built in Vancouver’s Stanley Park

Lisa Petrucci is a nationally known pop surrealist artist based in the Seattle area. Lisa is influenced by pop culture, cheesecake, old movies, dolls and old toys. Eventually these things made their way into her artwork and she found the perfect format to capture them – the souvenir wood plaque.

Each slab of wood is lovingly painted with the things she enjoys most and celebrate sexuality, femininity and all that is cute.

When not painting, Lisa works full-time as an art director and film historian for Something Weird Video, a nostalgic adult mail order video company and also has her own exploitation/exploitation paper collectibles business, Pussycat Catalog.

More Photos of the Fabulous Lisa continued….

Via BoingBoing, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Shipping Container.

“By dramatically lowering freight costs, the container transformed economic geography. Some of the world’s great ports saw their bustling waterfronts decay as the maritime industry decamped to new locations. Production moved much farther afield, which took advantage of cheap, reliable transportation to make goods that could not have been exported profitably before containerisation.”

There is a growing movement of innovators active in transforming the common shipping cargo containers into dwellings, studios, shops, and live/work spaces. A design/archetecture collective has sprung up in Seattle, made up of architects Robert Humble and Joel Egan. www.Cargotecture.com

Although, in raw form, containers are dark windowless boxes (which might place them at odds with some of the tenets of modernist design…) they can be highly customizable modular elements of a larger structure. www.FabPreFab.com

To read more about Cargotecture click here…..