04 April 2009

Ow! My eyes!

The delightful Adrienne Palmer, she's the voice of the great blog Susan Palmer Designs Blog, is trying to give me a stroke. She sent me a note the other night and included these images. She found them on a Croatian interior design forum. In Croatia's defense, everything I saw there was really sharp and interesting. That was, until I came to this hotel bar.

Adrienne called it "Staron meets polished Emperador marble," and that's exactly what this thing is made from. Someone spent a huge amount of money on this room and now it's being mocked by strangers. I feel like Mr. Blackwell or something. 

Seriously, can you imagine trying to navigate these vertigo-inducing steps to get out of this bar after an evening's revelry? 

And then just to poke me with a stick, Adrienne pondered, "What would Jonathan Adler think?" Jonathan Adler would add a couple of large stuffed animals, orange giraffes most likely. He'd then be praised by shelter mags across the land for his "vision." Ugh. 

I love it when somebody sends me something because they know I'll have a fit. Thanks Adrienne!

6 comments:

  1. :0

    Is that the location of the next Lady Gaga video shoot?

    ... I kinda like it, but it would look 10 times better without all the polished marble.

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  2. I's have to see it before I made my final decision. I've always wanted to go to Croatia anyhow. But even in life, all of those intersecting white planes are too much, too distracting. It has to be difficult to navigate those stairs.

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  3. Croatie is one of those hip and happening places here in Europe right now.
    I realy think that if they went for all white it would look fantastic. The white elements and the marble clash somehow.
    But hotel bars are always the part of a hotel where designers go crazy.
    http://www.hotelbloom.com/ if your ever in Brussels stay in that hotel it's like staying in a museum of modern arts.

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  4. Beautiful hotel! Thanks for the tip. Eighty Euros a night? It's a beautiful hotel AND it's reasonable. I suddenly want to go to Brussels.

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  5. Your comment about Jonathan Adler made me laugh :-)Top Design aired on HGTV Canada recently, and I was totally perplexed by most of what I saw. I just didn't get all the gushing over odd & bizarre designs. Maybe I'm out of touch with design reality, but since when is a bunch of nails shoved into a glass jar a "bouquet"??

    The bar in the pictures isn't too horrible, but I can see those stairs being a real PITA to navigate, even sober!!

    Go to Brussels. And then go to Bruges. And then go to Esch-sur-Sure in Luxembourg. And then go to Luxembourg City :-)

    Kelly

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  6. Top Design stupefies and mystifies me. For the life of me I will never understand this whole idea that my job as a designer is to express myself through other people's homes. This whole bit about "signature" looks is a real perversion of what it is to be a designer if you ask me. I don't think interior design is supposed to be provocative to begin with but Adler and the rest of them go so far overboard with it that it borders on outright aggression. I suppose this makes for compelling TV, but that garbage bleeds over into the real world. It shows up as some really strange ideas and expectations in the clients I meet a lot of times. They expect me to impose my vision on their homes, but when I start asking questions about who they are and how they live so that we can distill that into a design that's specific to them, they look at me like I'm not doing design right. Grrr. I jokingly tell people that they're not allowed to watch HGTV for the duration of their job with me. Hah!

    That's right, you've been to Brussels and Luxemburg. I've never been to that part of Europe. I keep reading M's blog about life in the Netherlands. He just finished his own kitchen and it's gorgeous. I'm starting to feel the pull in that direction.

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