Somewhat in anticipation of being able to take up residence we’ve bought a great new bed for the barn. King sized, so an extra six inches for the baby to spread out in during the middle of the night whilst his mother and I teeter at opposite edges of the bed.

Ours is a Snowdon organic mattress handmade in Wales and 100% organic (organic cotton and sheeps wool). We also invested in a hardwood bed frame which complements both the mattress and the room that the bed is in perfectly.

There were two factors that influenced this purchase, firstly the bed has been manufactured locally, only a handful of miles from the barn and secondly the materials from which it is made are in line with the healthy house ethos of which I am an advocate.

But most importantly, this is one of the most comfortable beds I’ve ever been in.

A couple more useful sites that I’ve used recently and can recommend.

So if you want something antique but don’t know where to start looking then get on to Scavengers and they may be able to find something to fit the bill for you. I bought a chandelier from Scavengers which despite having a bit of a battering in transit should work well in the barn. I would never have found myself rummaging through antique shops or trawling ebay.

I spend a far amount of time sourcing goods for the barn on the internet so here’s a summary of some of my favourite sites with great features, products or service.

As should be pretty obvious to any regular reader of this site, I’m pretty keen on the use of design patterns to ensure the goodness-of-fit between building plans and specifications and the requirements of the eventual end-users of a building. Patterns help inspire, guide and polish building design at all levels.

So, when I stumbled across the architypes site my interest was piqued.

architypes.net is a library of architectural design issues, solutions and ideas.

At the heart of architypes.net are two simple but powerful ideas:

Patterns: The principles and ideas are organized into “patterns”. Each pattern describes a solution for a specific problem or design goal. [...]
Open Collaboration: architypes.net is a continuously evolving peer-reviewed project that you are invited to participate in.

In use I find the site and its patterns to be informative & inspirational, but perhaps a little light-weight. For example, the intriguing ‘Places of Quiet Refuge‘ pattern consists merely of the text:

The Japanese are often admired for their techniques used in creating private and quiet spaces. They are masters of separating the public spaces from the private spaces, and their techniques are rather simple.

…and a photo of an interesting mezzanine. Thanks, I’d like more… but it does start you thinking.

Worth a visit if you’re seeking inspiration. I’m off to develop some of my own meaty patterns…

One of the (admittedly very dull) things that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about and experimenting with is the presentation of information. One of the newish developments that is overused on the web, but can be very effective is the word cloud. A word cloud is made up of the key words found with the domain of a certain topic or article with the size of each word in relation to the others determined by the frequency of use of that word.

The site wordle provides a great on-line word cloud generator. I used it to generate a word cloud from my article on Passive Solar Design:

(Click on the image to get a larger version)

Please take a look at the image then read the article on Passive Solar Design

Although some of the colouring of words could be better and certain words such as direct & indirect loose their relationship, I think that the word cloud conveys much of the content of the article – what do you think?