Many are mad for the men

Well it looks as if Mad Men's turning into a cultural touchstone. Maybe it's a society-wide pining for more stable times and maybe it's just a well-written show. Everything about it is perfect, from the sets and costumes to the attitudes and rampant unhappiness. I cannot get enough of it. Clearly, I'm not alone.

At some point in the last week or so, I stumbled upon a brief mention on Apartment Therapy of an artist who goes by the name of Dyna Moe. Dyna Moe is a New York-based illustrator who creates a new piece every week based on that weeks' episode of Mad Men. She then sells them through Zazzle. They're great illustrations and a pretty cool way to capture some of that Mad Men allure. You can also check out her whole collection of Mad Men and other work at her Flickr Photostream. Go ahead, send some traffic Dyna Moe's way. She deserves it. Check it out.

Mad for the men

Are you watching Mad Men on AMC? If not why not? Seriously, Mad Men is the best thing I've seen on TV since... well, ever.

A faux re-education, or What I learned on my summer vacation

I had a conversation about faux painting with a client the other day. She wanted me to refer her to a painter who could paint some columns in her entry way so that they looked like they were made from marble.

Now a year ago I would have done everything in my power to dissuade her from this faux marble idea. There was a time when I couldn't separate the idea of faux painting with its most obvious and bad expressions. All too often, people take a page from HGTV and attempt to faux paint (poorly) things that have no business being faux painted. Stuff like this:

I mean really, what are the odds of a contemporary house having walls made from entire slabs of identical marble? The first test these kinds of techniques have to pass is a logical one. Ask yourself, does this application make sense? In the case above, the answer is a resounding no.

But in the hands of a professional artist, a faux marble or trompe l'oeil effect can be cool as well as a compliment to the structure of a room. That said, well-done work of this kind is the exception rather than the rule. Unless you have a fine arts background, do not attempt this on your own or you'll end up with something that looks like this:

Man! That burns my eyes.

The idea of faux marble and trompe l'oeil painting got its start in Ancient Rome believe it or not. I had to see it first hand to believe it and here are some photos of what I saw. Some friends and I were treated to a walk through the excavation of the Villa San Marco in Castellmare di Stabia a couple of months ago. The Villa San Marco was a 28,000 square foot (that's not a typo!) Roman villa on the shores of the Bay of Naples. The Villa San Marco was the home of wealthy Roman family and it was buried by ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. The villa is an amazement and to walk through it today is to get a real feel for the people who lived in it.

The Roman empire had a leisure class, probably the first such leisure class in human history. This leisure class had enough time and enough money to develop the idea of decorative art for their homes. It makes my heart beat faster to think about people two thousand years ago living lives that had an awful lot in common with mine. Now, I don't live in 28,000 square feet of house but I do like a nice paint job. Besides, so much of our cultural stuff --from birthday parties to wedding rings, from exchanging presents in late December to the Superbowl --we got from them.

This is a detail of a trompe l'oeil fresco on a wall in a bedroom in the Villa San Marco. It wasn't until I saw this with my own eyes that I realized that the Romans had mastered perspective. Perspective disappeared from western art for over a thousand years after the collapse of Rome.

Here's a detail from a similar fresco.

This is another fresco from the same room. Now bear in mind that this fresco is around 2000 years old and survived the explosion of a nearby volcano. My mind reels when I think about how this must have looked when it was new.

I thought my head was going to explode when I stood in front of this wall. My photo doesn't begin to do it justice. The room itself was small, probably twelve feet wide by ten feet deep. But even after all those years, this fresco made the walls disappear. If you ever find yourself anywhere near Naples in southern Italy, you owe it to yourself to track down a guide who will get you into the Villa San Marco.

Just inside the main entry and in the peristyle courtyard of the Villa San Marco the the shrine to the household gods of the family who owned the villa. It's made from cast concrete and I was amazed that so much of its original paint job had survived the years.

When I looked closer though I realized that the whole thing had been faux painted. The marble that this faux marble is imitating is all over Italy on ancient as well as in contemporary structures.

Here's an even tighter close up. Un-be-liev-a-ble.

So seeing those Roman paint effects was really something. I learned that the faux marble I'd always mocked had a real history and I started warming up to the idea of it. Ditto trompe l'oeil painting. So I decided to get over my biases and just accept it as another decorative art. So long as it's done well that is. Done well by a master like what I saw at the Villa San Marco.

Well about a week later I was in Rome and I was walking down the Corso d'Italia at 7:30 on a rainy Sunday morning. As I now know, rainy Sunday mornings are about the only time when Rome's streets are quiet. I heard a church bell and decided to go to mass. I mean, when in Rome, right? So I ducked into the first church I came to, the San Carlo di Corso. It's also one of the largest churches in Rome. It was built in the early 1600s and it is massive. The entire interior seemed to have been made from marble and granite with a whole lot of gilt for good measure.

So about 20 Italian senior citizens, me and a handful of pilgrims from the world over sat through mass and despite the fact that it was in Italian, I surprised myself with how well I could participate in it. Even after all these years, a mass is a mass regardless of the language it's said in. So I followed along between major bouts of distraction by the incredible building I was sitting in that is. Then, after mass, I couldn't restrain myself any longer and I walked over to the side of the church to get a good look at the stone work.

Wouldn't you know it, every inch of marble and granite on those 400-year-old walls was faux painted.

Bring on the residential urinal

I haven't gone off on one my my wise use of resources tirades in a while and I feel like I'm due. Check out this bathroom. It's kind of a school house meets family home vibe going on there and I like it. Maybe it's from having grown up in a household where six boys regularly ran amok, but I think a set up such as this would be a Godsend to any male-heavy home.

You can buy a urinal through any plumbing supplier and Kohler has a host of them available on their website. A typical urinal uses a gallon of water per flush and that's enough of a difference in water use than that of a toilet that it would result in a noticeable savings in your water bill. A step beyond the flush urinal are the new waterless urinals that are starting to show up in commercial settings. What a brilliant idea they are, but I don't know how suited they are for household use. Something tells me that they require a lot of volume to work efficiently. If I'm wrong about that I know I'll hear about it. 

Because they're new, plumbing companies like Kohler have spent a lot of time designing them and it shows. They're gorgeous, if I can use that word to describe a urinal.

So far, I have yet to convince anyone to install a home urinal but that hasn't stopped me. If you're thinking about a bath renovation and there's a man anywhere in your life, give the idea some serious thought.

Get prepared to rip up your house

So you've decided to embark on a renovation. Congratulations to you. But like anything else in life, it seems you'll have to endure a bit of hassle before you can realize a benefit. Dealing with inconveniences is one thing but having your house ripped apart needn't involve outright suffering. And the key to suffering avoidance is two fold. Manage your expectations first and then make preparations to help you through the rough patches.

I deal with kitchen renovations more than any other category of re-do and living through a kitchen renovation is probably the most common experience of renovation most people have. I cannot promise that it will be an easy process, but as with anything else in life, your memory of an inconvenience will never be as bad as your experience of it. Remember that and take comfort in it. This is by no means an exhaustive list, it is however, a couple of things I've learned over the years.

1. Talk to your contractor and ask him for a realistic time frame of how long you can expect to be without the full use of your home. If it's a kitchen renovation, prepare yourself to be functioning kitchen-free for at least four weeks. Don't get too attached to that number though. Psych yourself up for a longer period of time and you'll get a happy surprise at the end rather than the opposite.
2. Ask your contractor to help you through the process by setting up a temporary kitchen somewhere. A lot of times, a 220 line can be set up in a garage so that you can move your range out of the kitchen and into the garage to use temporarily. Ask him or her too if its feasible to set up a temporary sink out there too. All you need are water supply lines, a waste line, some saw horses, a sheet of plywood and your old sink and faucet which are headed to the landfill anyway. Making yourself a temporary in the garage can be a life saver.
3. If setting up a range and a sink in the garage won't work, move the functions of a kitchen into the laundry room or a bathroom. Set up a coffee maker, a microwave oven and anything else you need to help you create a semblance of normalcy. If you can establish a routine and try to continue to live as you normally would, you'll be ahead of the game.
4. Don't minimize the amount of time you'll be camping in your own home. A couple of weeks doesn't sound like much as an idea, but in practice it's a long time. What you're about to live through will suck, BUT IT'S TEMPORARY.
5. Your house will be a mess for a while, deal with it. Seal off the area that's under construction and try to minimize the dust drift into the rest of the house. You can try to minimize it, but you cannot eliminate it. Declare your bedroom as a safe room. Keep your bedroom exactly the way it was before the renovation started. Don't pile stuff you've moved from around the house into your bedroom. Keep it so that when you close the bedroom door, everything will seem normal.
6. If you have sensitive electronics and valuable, fragile possessions; store them before work starts.
7. Your regular routines will be disrupted, so leave extra time and understanding to cope with the changes. Everyone in your household will be affected so be gentle with your housemates and ask them to be gentle with you.
8. Don't spend too much time looking over the work in progress. Set up regular meetings with your contractor and get a guided tour of the work in progress. Ask as many questions as you can think of, but remember that things look a lot worse before they can look better.
9. Take an oath to not fly off the handle when you're frustrated. If you feel yourself losing it, stop what you're doing. Take a moment to compose yourself and then ask whatever question is unasked and make whatever request is unmade. People respond in kind to how you approach them; jump on someone and he's going to jump right back on you. Ask calmly and she'll calmly explain what's going on. Try it! It works in regular life too.
10. When it's all over, hire a service to come in and do a GI clean. Your contractor's crew will clean up after themselves, but they won't scrub. Hire someone to come in and do the scrubbing.

Again, that's not an exhaustive list but it's a good start. Positive experiences start inside and work their way outward. Try it!