18 March 2011

Italian manufacturer Sicis at Coverings

I make no secret of the fact that I love fine-art mosiacs. Even though they're a different category all together, I have a great fondness for mosaics produced in a more production-oriented environment too. A longtime favorite among these mosaic factories is Ravenna-based Sicis.

Sicis' work provocative and it's wonderful to see an Italian company doing business all over the world with a consistent, in-your-face marketing message and the goods to back it up. Nobody does production mosaics in glass anywhere near what Sicis does and it was a great thrill to see them at Coverings this week in Las Vegas.

Sicis rolled out six new color stories at the show this week and were kind enough to provide me with clear photographs of each. Sicis works in very large formats. Here's one of my photos of their booth in Las Vegas. It's Easier to appreciate the work in isolation though.


There were six new color stories as I mentioned earlier and the vignette above is showing how they presented Tango.  Here are a couple of their official shots that show off the thinking behind Tango.




Next up was Gypsy.


Followed closely by neutral but still interesting Mink.




Here's one of my close ups from the Mink display.


The chiaroscuro in the Skyline color story lends itself to the old world as well as it does the new.



Savile has me rethinking everything I think I think about grey.



And if Sicis can't poke you in the eye with an image, they're do it with a name. This is Nude.



Great job Sicis. What do you guys think? Could you imagine using some of the room-sized installations these patterns and color stories are intended for?

15 March 2011

The best advice I've ever received: A Let's Blog Off post

Every two weeks, the blogosphere comes alive with something called a Blog Off. A Blog Off is an event where bloggers of every stripe weigh in on the same topic on the same day. The topic for this round of the Blog Off is "What's the best advice you've ever received?"

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The best advice I've ever received came from Stephen Sondheim. Actually, Sondheim didn't deliver it personally. Rather, someone suggested that I pick up a copy of Sondheim's 1984 triumph, Sunday in the Park with George.

Sunday in the Park with George, like all of Sondheim's work, is deep and complicated. If you're looking for something light and uplifting, a Sondheim musical probably isn't for you. Sunday in the Park tells a fictionalized story of Georges Seurat, the French pointillist. Specifically, it tells a fictionalized story of his life as he set out to paint Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Portions of the play take place within the painting itself.


Act two moves the action ahead 100 years to the year 1984. Georges Seurat's great-grandson, George, is also an artist who shares the tortured soul of his famous ancestor. In act two comes the song "Move on." Here's a recording from a London Concert last year. The singers are Daniel Evans and Jenna Russel who starred in a revival of the play in London in 2005 and then again on Broadway in 2008.






The best advice I've ever been given is in that song. Stop worrying where you're going, move on. Let me repeat that. Stop worrying where you're going, move on.

When I first heard that song, I was a neurotic 31-year-old who spent more time second guessing himself than he did being productive or carving out some kind of happiness. I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out why. The first time I heard that lyric it hit me like a Mack truck that I wasn't happy because I wasn't letting myself be.

I was so afraid to make the wrong move that I ended up not going anywhere. So I sat and wrote down all of the "bad" things in my life. I used to blame that stuff for my unease, but as I wrote I started to see that the common thread in all of those situations was me. Once I had that aha moment there was no going back.

I'm hardly perfect and I backslide all the time, just like everybody else. But thanks to a song in a play most people have never heard of, I see my life differently than I did when I was that neurotic 31-year-old. I am a happy man and I got that way because I decided to be a happy man.

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As the day goes on, the rest of the participants in today's Blog Off will appear miraculously at the end of this post. Keep checking back and check out everybody's postss. You can follow along in Twitter as well, just look for the hashtag #LetsBlogOff. If you'd like more information about about the Blog Off or if you'd like to see the results of previous Blog Offs, you can find the main website here.









14 March 2011

I'm at Coverings in Las Vegas


By the time you read this, I'll be on my way to Las Vegas to attend Coverings, the tile and stone show. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm being flown out there by the show itself and they've booked me a room in The Venetian. While I'm out there, I'll be getting an insider's look at all of the new stuff heading your way from the world of tile and stone. Count on many posts about the things I'll see at the show.

My posting schedule around here is going to be pretty sporadic until I get home to Florida on Thursday. They're running me into the ground the whole time I'll be in Las Vegas so I don't think I'll get a whole lot of blogging done. I will however, be posting a pretty constant stream of updates to Twitter if you're a Twitter-er-er. Follow me at @Paul_Anater and I'll see you around the end of the week.

13 March 2011

I apologize to the world for my design crimes

Over the course of my career as an active kitchen and bath designer, I designed more master baths that looked like this than I care to admit. I always hated these cookie-cutter exercises in more is more, but clients wanted them and they were happy with the finished projects. No harm done, right?


Wrong. A little part of me died every time I set out to design one of these things. Look at it. It's utterly devoid of character or personality. It's as if it were designed for a future listing agent instead being designed for the person who paid for it and uses it every day. In fact, it was designed for a resale might happen in some time in the future. How is that any way to live or to make your house a home?

It's beyond ironic that as the sun was setting on my career as a retail designer, I ended up at two major trade shows in Europe that showed me another way to look at bath design. Another show over there I'd love to see  starts this week in Frankfurt. That show is ISH and it's the holy of holies of the bath world.

In advance of ISH, German manufacturer Duravit released the Onto series by designer Matteo Thun. Onto is everything the bath above is not.




Duravit's Onto is beautifully designed and unique. It's made to last and it thumbs its nose at that future listing agent. It has a few other things going for it that aren't so apparent. It uses fewer resources, look great in a smaller room and it provides adequate storage. I'm calling it adequate storage for a reason.

I used to think that the world's ills could be solved by providing people with more storage. But the more I think about it the more that I see that providing more storage only encourages people to fill that storage with more stuff. Now I think the answer isn't to find more storage, it's to accumulate less crap. Adequate storage means enough space to put away a reasonable amount of stuff. Keep it coming Duravit.

12 March 2011

The Last Breakfast

Freelance sculptor and and illustrator Brian Stuckey is brilliant.


Nothing short of brilliant. Here's his website.

Details: