29 March 2008

Fisher Paykel preview

It took me two days to get through the million square feet of KBIS last year at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Two days of new products at a trade show is exhausting let me tell you. Toward the end of my second day I came across the very large tradeshow booth of the New Zealand-based appliance manufacturer Fisher Paykel.

Referring to a major manufacturer's KBIS display as a booth only illustrates how limited our language can be some times. The big players and companies who want to be perceived as big players invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in their displays at theses events. Kohler, Wolf/ Sub-Zero, DalTile, etc. build displays larger than most homes. Then they staff them with HGTV show hosts and everyone marvels at the sheer excess of the whole production. For an event that closed to the public, it is a monumental event every year.

Anyhow, I'd always known Fisher Paykel for its drawer dishwasher and thought that it was the only thing they made. That was until I came across the 10,000 square feet of Fisher Paykel's full court press into the American appliance market. To call these guys innovative is an understatement. These guys are out to start a revolution.

The first of these photos shows their Luna gas cook top which they debuted last year. I see and deal with appliances every day and it takes a lot to impress me. The Luna about threw me over the edge. It is a glass cook top for starters and when it's not turned on it looks for all the world like any other glass cook top. However, when it's turned on the burner and posts that serve as the rack rise up from the glass surface. It's like magic. A lit gas burner rising up from a black glass surface stopped me in my tracks. Damn the expense, that thing is COOL! If you expand the photo to the left, you can see both lit and unlit burners on that cook top. Notice that not only to the burners rise up from the surface, so does the control knob. Astounding!

They haven't stopped at gas cook tops either. They are now making a French door refrigerator. But then again, so is just about everyone in the refrigerator business now. As expected, the Fisher Paykel version ratchets up the competition a couple of notches. Notice that the in-door ice dispenser is on one of the refrigerator doors but the ice maker itself would have to be in the freezer in order to work efficiently. So they've found a way to transport the ice up about 18 inches to the dispenser. Wow. The mechanics of the ice maker are actually housed in the space between the refrigeration compartment and the freezer compartment. The result is zero loss of cubic feet inside of either space. In a counter-depth refrigerator ever cubic inch counts.

Most French door models that have an on board ice maker dispense the ice into a tray inside of the freezer, thus taking up room better utilized by cartons of peas and pints of Haagen Dazs. At a retail price of around $2500, the rest of the industry will be watching this one.

Fisher Paykel is now making pro ranges for the American market as well. When it comes to professional, dual-fuel ranges, my heart will always belong to Wolf. A Wolf is a feat of engineering and it is a purchase you make once. Nothing works like one, nothing lasts as long and no other pro range on the market has the same value as a Wolf. At least not in its price point. That price point is pretty steep though. A 48-inch dual-fuel Wolf will set you back $10,000. Like I said, it's a purchase you'll make once.

But a Wolf looks like a Wolf. A big dual fuel range won't always go well in designs that call for something a little more modern-looking. Not so in the hands of Fisher Paykel. Their 48" pro range has the innovations I'd expect from them and they're at half the price of a Wolf. Still, $5000 is a lot of money to spend on a range but the next time I'm trying to put together a big-budget contemporary kitchen, you can bet that I'm specifying this beauty from Fisher Paykel.

28 March 2008

Trend watch: new faucet shapes

KBIS (http://www.kbis.com/), the national Kitchen and Bath Industry Show is right around the corner. Manufacturers and suppliers use the yearly KBIS to roll out new products and in the weeks leading up to it, those same companies offer previews to the industry. My preview from Kohler (http://www.kohler.com/) arrived yesterday, and they have some pretty cool new stuff. Kohler's march toward the higher end of the market continues in their new products, that's for sure.

KWC (http://www.kwcamerica.com/) , a high end plumbing fixture company from Switzerland, makes a faucet they call the 1922. The 1922 is pictured above. I've always thought the 1922 was a beautiful, elegant sink fixture. Kohler's new HiRise suite of faucets seems to have taken KWC's idea of the 1922 and expanded it into a whole suite of fixtures.

The HiRise series has a deck mount faucet, a wall mount faucet, a single pole faucet, a pot filler and a sprayer. The tall, arcing shape of the faucet is continuing the trend of the last couple of years for kitchen faucets to get taller and taller. What's different though is that it has no integrated sprayer. I think it's an interesting direction and the HiRise is really gorgeous. As I mentioned earlier, this is definitely another step in the direction of the higher end of the market. The retail price on these things starts at a thousand dollars. That makes it a more expensive fixture than KWC's 1922, and I always think of KWC as an unabashedly high end brand. From the looks of Kohler's preview, I guess I need to readjust my thinking about Kohler as a company in the middle.

27 March 2008

How to buy a granite counter top

I spent the better part of Monday at a new stone wholesaler in Tampa. It was my first visit to their facility and I was there to approve some slabs for a client. The wholesaler is the Stone Warehouse of Tampa (http://www.stonewarehouseoftampa.com/) and their slab room was a feast for the eyes. the Stone Warehouse keeps its inventory on their website --check it out and you'll see what I'm talking about.

My client's counters will be fabricated and installed the the great folks at Cutting Edge Granite (http://www.cuttingedgegranite.com/) in Largo. Like all fabricators, Cutting Edge has a large collection of slabs on hand at any given time. Most times when I take people over to Cutting Edge, they fall in love with something they find there. But sometimes, we need to dig a little deeper into the supply chain.

Granite is quarried from deposits located all over the world. At the quarry, the granite is cut into large cubes. The cubes are cut into slices, similarly to the way one would slice a loaf of bread. Those slices are referred to as slabs. The slabs are numbered sequentially and those numbers stay with the individual slabs until they end up as counters in some one's home. This sequential numbering system allows granite fabricators to match up a stone's patterns when a counter requires multiple slabs to complete.

Granite is quarried by Mom and Pop operations the world over and its final price is a function of a particular stone's availability. The less common the stone, the more expensive it is. The granite industry uses four primary price levels that reflect this. In addition to the four primary levels, there are special categories for very rare granites and they tend to be priced on a case by case basis.

Because granite is a natural product, no two slabs can be identical. Additionally, granite changes from slab to slab, sometimes profoundly. It is important that you not settle on a granite until you see actual slabs. Small samples cannot show you the large, swirling patterns present in many granites nor can they show you the tremendous range of colors possible on a single slab. Never buy a granite counter from a sample. Never.

Granite as a material is relatively inexpensive. It costs what it does from the labor involved in transporting it, cutting it, polishing it, installing it, etc. Granite from a reputable granite fabricator should start at around $55 a square foot. Beware low prices. A granite counter is only as good as its installation. Somebody who tells you he's only going to charge you $35 a square foot is going to make money somehow and the only place he has available to squeeze is labor.

There are smart ways to save money and foolish ways to do so. Going with obviously low-ball bids is a pretty foolish way to make a project cost less.

So my how-to hint about buying granite counters is pretty simple --call Cutting Edge.

25 March 2008

Here's an interesting finish for a fridge

Amana (http://www.amana.com/catalog/product.jsp?parentCategoryId=588&categoryId=638&productId=1761&scr=category) just came out with a new refrigerator they call the "Jot" and I think it's an interesting idea. A lot of times I get caught up in specifying expensive appliances that don't necessarily reflect the way everybody lives. That was a point made abundantly clear to me when I was at my sister's house on Saturday.

My sister and her husband are the proud parents of seven really great kids. I noticed when I was over there last weekend that they'd bought a new fridge in a stainless steel look-alike material called Satina. Satina is a laminate that has the vague appearance of stainless steel. Satina, unlike stainless, is a magnetic metal. For someone like my sister and for a family like hers, the refrigerator sides and doors are where important papers, photos and drawings go so that they won't be misplaced in the crush and rush of humanity.

It's easy for someone like me, forty-something no kids, to dismiss needs like this because they aren't my needs. It's easy too for someone like me to lose sight of the fact that real people end up living in my projects and "where will we hang the kids' artwork and report cards" are the real needs of some of those same real people.

Anyhow, Amana has a new fridge called the Jot. The Jot's claim to fame is that its doors and sides are made from dry erase board. It's only available in their top-mount 30" size, but it's a start. What a cool idea though. Thanks Amana.

20 March 2008

You light up my life (and projects)

I have a meeting this morning at the home of two new clients. I am meeting up with a lighting supplier and we're going to figure out the feasibility of the lighting plan I worked out for a kitchen and great room.

The house in question is an early-'90s open floor plan on two floors and the first floor has cathedral ceilings. The house is on the water out at the beach and my task in this case is to bring all of that fifteen-year-old "glamour" into the 21st century. As it stands now, the place looks like a set from "Miami Vice." But I'm planning to make pretty short work of it. Even though the first floor has ceilings that peak at 18 feet above the floor, the builder used ceiling-mounted lighting exclusively. Achieving a sense of scale and intimacy in this warehouse-like first floor is impossible without addressing the lighting. Enter my friends at Tech Lighting (http://www.techlighting.com/).

When I proposed using track lighting throughout the rooms of the first floor, my clients weren't exactly responsive to the idea. Like a lot of people, the image conjured up by the phrase "track lighting" sent them back to about 1978 and a space filled with spider plants in macrame plant hangers.

The new generation of track lights were pioneered by Tech Lighting and the market is flooded with knock-offs in price points across the spectrum. Tech remains the gold standard of the category. Their products come at a premium, but none of the knock-offs look as good or work as well. Tech calls their track systems "Monorail Lighting" in an attempt to dispel the image of the cover art from Carol King's classic, Tapestry.

Monorail tracks are suspended from the ceiling and the tracks themselves are scaled down to the point where they nearly disappear. In suspending the lights (and in the case of a cathedral ceiling, the tracks hang from wires ten feet off the floor) it's possible to imply a ceiling and bring the scale of a room down to something more intimate and human. The other great thing about Tech's Monorail system is the nearly overwhelming number of fixtures that attach to the tracks. In using a Tech Monorail system, I can combine ambient, task and accent lighting in one fell swoop. The effect is terrific and needn't be coldly modern. Tech just introduced a series of drum-shaded pendants that brings a little tradition along for the ride. I love you Tech Lighting!