Kris

..so do you think that his lack of financing has given birth to such creativity? It’s a wonderful symphony of discord and is bursting with fantasy and delight. How often do self-builders go horribly wrong in the West. I remember seeing the house of successful local builder once…a truly hideous thing that was obviously designed in plan and packed full of incongruous and ill-time features..it had no sense of story, no sense of future, no sense of place.

..I take my hat off to Nikolai, its like a great Jugend castle …but so much more than that…and it sits in a decaying landscape of modern Russia..where communities are destroyed unemployment and vodka and where the future is so very uncertain. Nikolai has built a fantasy, a celebration of his existence, with rooms to suit the things in his life that he has left to look forward to. His comments don’t speak of being better than his neighbors, he talks about how he wants to live in his house, where he wants be, morning and night.

I just wish that self-builders who have the privilege of choice would look as deep as Nikolai and take as long as he did before they build; one less factory produced gabled log-house with tiny windows facing south is one more step in the right direction