Second Build: Soph's Loft
Wow, it's been a while since I blogged!  Last week was *really* 10 pounds of week in a 5 pound sack!  Every week's had a theme, and last week's was "friends and lovers," as nox and I reached a new level of of seriousness and steadiness, I spent happy playtime with my Sylphic friendskateamdahl and erisfallon, and "collided" like whoa with the mysterious Third Sylph, Andr3 Spear, and painted the town with my best bud Zada Zenovka.

(isn't that icon an awesome pic?! That's Andr3, Eris, Kate and me, from left to right, in the Beachfront Teahouse on my land)

But what I want to document is the build of my second house, the Loft. For everything I'm building I'm giving myself a design challenge around something in particular. For the Loft, I had two elements I wanted to integrate into a house design: one was a monumental painting by Diox Kohime, of a Japanese woman against a red wall. The other was my Chinese furniture set, in red, with lots of circular elements in the designs.

So what I thought of was one broad horizontal wall, 10X20, and slender Roman arches in Chinese red, supporting a glass-block barrel vault. I thought how much trouble I'd had with seams between 10x10 prims in the the Housemod, and decided to turn that bug into a feature, by putting columns supporting arches between each wall element.  The result is a sort of Chinese butterfly house, with my bed on a free-floating loft platform, and lots and lots of glass.

I like the result, and it's proven an attractive and comfortable place for my friends to come and spend time, which is a success beyond my dreams. Where it falls short, though, is in a major design goal of mine overall - integration into the environment. My land at Koh Terutao isn' the usual flat nothing, but thanks to developer/terraformer TertiumQuid Becloud, is a unique Thai-influenced environment. The Loft sticks out from it like whoa.

So, once I finish the main design elements on my property - the dance floor, which has been a design nightmare, and the shrine to the goddess of mercy, Kuan Yin, I'm going to start on another house design. The challenges for this one will be a technical one of figuring out how to build traditional Thai architectural elements, and to design something integrated into the landscape. I want to build some guest suites for friends, so this build will be a good way to do that.

I'm also going to do an Aerie - my private retreat and adult play space :)

Yeah, I'm having fun!