Archives for the month of: September, 2009

I got home from work to be handed the telephone by Richard without explanation. After my tentative hello I got the response “Holy crap! It’s a Bill Morgan! You’ve gotta get it!” It was our friend Diane. I didn’t know earlier that day Richard had taken her husband Jorge by the house. After they broke in a loose door to have a look around, Jorge had gone home, pulled his William Morgan book off the shelf, flipped it open in front of Diane and said “I was in that house today.” Hence the call.

What I didn’t know until then is that William Morgan is famous in the Jacksonville area for his modern design; what I did know is that Diane and Jorge run Brunet-Garcia Advertising, are creative, and are plugged in. We had rummaged around in the ho hum housing market and found a treasure.

There was no magic to finding it. It found us. We had been house hunting for months finding nothing even remotely interesting, all bungalows or poorly designed ranch houses with no personality. I first saw the house on a realtor web site, this one lonely photo of an unusual cube-shaped house in poor light. I saw it and shrugged to myself, huh, must be a foreclosure since there is only one photo. Interesting looking but not in the area we want. When I finally mentioned it to Richard he said he’d seen it as well, and also thought it looked interesting…but knew I’d protest because of the location. But it can’t hurt to look, right?

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My first impression at the showing: Nice shaded lot, the house looked sad and droopy (later realizing the sagging cantilevered beams were the cause), but WOW the view of the water, the open shallow stairwell moving us through all four levels, the peaceful and intimate living spaces. And the quirky unexpected things – an odd little door under the stairs, a safe, a speaker the size of a closet. I left the place chuckling. Richard left the place with the wheels spinning in his head. One of us brought it up later that day and my response was NO WAY. Too much space. Too much house. Too much work. Wrong location. But Richard was smart and bided his time.

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