Reimagining Elma: A Dream Town Built on Heritage

 

Hello everyone!

I hope you haven’t missed me too much. Today, I took a little mental vacation and created some AI-generated images imagining how I would love to redesign my hometown—Elma. Of course, I know this is a dream project far beyond my budget, but sometimes dreaming is half the fun! If you are new to this blog, this is just a place that I regurgitate the strange, creative lurking in the recesses of my brain. And - I have made other AI images of Elma in this blog. I even designed images of food for restaurants that could be served in my imaginary dream land of turning Elma from a meth lab to a place people might want to hang out 

To start, I thought about the common family names that have shaped Elma’s history. Some of the names that immediately came to mind were Beerbower, Arnold, Olsen, and Huttula, along with others like:

• Byles — one of Elma’s earliest pioneer families

• Waldrip — another founding family name

• McDonald / MacDonald — Scottish roots common in the region

• O’Brien — Irish families recorded in census data

• Murphy, Campbell, Kelly, Brown, Smith

For the Finnish community, names like:

• Koskinen, Heikkinen, Korhonen, Lahtinen, Salonen, Virtanen, Nieminen

And among the Scandinavian settlers (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish):

• Anderson, Larson, Hansen, Olsen, Johansson, Peterson

With these ethnicities in mind, I imagined what downtown Elma might look like if its buildings reflected the heritage of these settlers. Of course, the only local tribe in the area is the Chehalis, so I made sure to honor that as well. All the AI-generated images of my “rebuilt” downtown are inspired by the cultures and architecture of the people who lived here.

Pretty cool, right? I’d love to hear what you think!

 As the images and style evolved, I realized that an architectural style that combines Finland and Scotland needs its own name. So we are calling this Nordstone Style. 

 Of course, Nordstone style also needs it's own furniture for these homes....