Historic District - Tumblr Posts
Bathroom Master Bath in Las Vegas An illustration of a sizable modern master bathroom with a black floor, two sinks, and a concrete floor. Its white walls, an undermount sink, solid surface countertops, a hinged shower door, white countertops, flat-panel cabinets, gray cabinets, and a floating vanity are also featured.
Master Bath - Bathroom An illustration of a sizable modern master bathroom with a black floor, two sinks, and a concrete floor. Its white walls, an undermount sink, solid surface countertops, a hinged shower door, white countertops, flat-panel cabinets, gray cabinets, and a floating vanity are also featured.
Kitchen - Enclosed
A mid-sized arts and crafts-inspired kitchen design example with a gray floor, a l-shaped ceramic tile backsplash, an undermount sink, white cabinets with flat panels, quartz countertops, and a multicolored backsplash, as well as stainless steel appliances, an island, and black countertops.
Druid Heights: Northern California Legacy
Go north of San Francisco, through the woods of Marin, up the southern side of Mount Tam, and you may find what remains of Druid Heights. This is the name of the bohemian community that settled there in 1954, led by poet Elsa Gidlow. Gidlow was best known for On a Grey Thread, thought to be the first book of openly lesbian love poetry published in North America. Initially envisioned as a secluded retreat, Druid Heights quickly attracted other trailblazers: Beats like Allen Ginsburg, queer radicals, women’s liberation activists who came to socialize or get away from socializing. For many, it was a place to party and listen to music: The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and the Eagles all played there. A few made it their home, like philosopher Alan Watts who moved there in 1971, had a library built, and died soon after. The countercultural figures who visited this fabled five acres remain in popular memory. The buildings they stayed in have had a more precarious history.
These were designed by Roger Somers, a carpenter-turned-architect who with his white beard and maharishi clothing looked somewhat like a druid himself. A Somers house is wooden and seemingly inspired by Indonesian batak houses, Japanese stone gardens, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian fancies, and The Hobbit. They made perfect sense, but probably only if you were on any number of drugs at any number of parties that made the retreat infamous.
The party lasted long after Druid Heights’ heyday—lasted probably until 2001, when Somers died in his hot tub on site. It was definitely over by 2006 after the National Parks Service, which had used eminent domain to seize the land in 1977, evicted all residents who did not have permanent leases. Since then, the forest has slowly reclaimed its territory, and only the occupied buildings are in sound condition.
The Parks Service has shown little interest in maintaining what is left. In 2017, a campaign was launched to save the Heights, to little effect; and the few remaining residents are in their 80s. Is this a fitting end? Watts once wrote: "What makes this world a beautiful experience is the impermanence and mutability of all things.“ Druid Heights was based on spontaneity, anarchism, improvisation—a preservation society is the opposite of this. In a culture of constant growth and productivity, one in which we expect all things to remain available at all times, to let the Heights decay into the past is perhaps the most countercultural action to take. But the Heights also represents an authenticity rare in a radically changed Bay Area that has allowed its cultural heritage to vanish or corporatize; perhaps then the most subversive act is to save it, and to save it for the same reasons we want to save the redwoods that surround it: because it is unique, because it is there, because places like it can’t grow just anywhere and might never come again.
Elsa Gidlow in her shoji room.
Gidlow and Watts in the gardens of Druid Heights.
Gidlow in her bedroom surrounded by her books.
Street scene in the historic district of Bremen, Germany
Kids in Detroit
DC Metro Lap Example of a trendy backyard stone and rectangular lap hot tub design