Patricia Urquiola's Mandarin Oriental deserves every accolade it gets

The Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group’s first Spanish hotel, The Madarin Oriental Barcelona, just won Interior Design Magazine’s Best Hotel Project for 2010. The Mandarin Oriental Barcelona is an astounding hotel, but its interiors by Spanish-born architect Patricia Urquiola place it into a class all its own. 

Patricia Urquiola is one of Axor's design partners and her award (and this hotel) add to the cachet surrounding the Axor brand of faucets and fixtures.

The hotel is located in the cultural and commercial heart of Barcelona and the building is a converted, former bank headquarters. The city of Barcelona is an architectural feast and wonders linger behind every corner. It’s a city where it’s wise to expect the unexpected. The Mandarin Oriental Barcelona fits the city where it’s located perfectly. Behind the linear, mid-century lines of the facade lives a world of Patricia Urquiola’s imagination. Colors, textures, sight lines and finishes combine to make up something whimsically modern and unique.

Barcelona is a lively, dynamic city and the Mandarin Oriental Barcelona is a perfect fit. Its 144 rooms are some of the largest in the city and their luxurious appointments make this hotel an ideal getaway.

You can read more about Patricia Urquiola's collaboration with Axor on Axor's website.

Borano makes mahogany doors and then some

Recently, I've become acquainted with a company with an intriguing business model and some of the most beautiful, handmade, mahogany doors, windows, floors and moldings I've ever seen. The company is called Borano and here's some of their handiwork.

These aren't just any mahogany building products, there's a story behind them that's worth telling. Borano is is a company with a sales and fulfillment presence online and it's through their website that they can sell their exquisite products at the price points they do. Custom doors start at $3000, windows start at $2250, floors start at $7 a square foot and moldings start at $7 a linear foot. Those prices are spectacular for the level of craftsmanship at work here.

Since 2002, a team of carpenters and woodworkers in San Pedro Sula, Honduras has been making these custom pieces by hand from native Honduran mahogany. The mahogany used in Borano products is sustainably harvested and certified as such by the Forest Stewardship Council. For every tree harvested for a Borano door, window, molding or floor another mahogany tree is planted and tended in its place.

Someone who's interested in a Borano door starts on the Borano website. It's on the website that Borano explains their process and the business of custom door production begins. Though the process starts on their website, follow ups from a Borano staffer follow almost immediately. Once designs are finalized and the order's complete, the project then moves to Honduras for production. The order ships directly from the factory to the jobsite once its complete.

The doors particularly need to be seen to be believed. They are made from solid, 2-1/4" thick mahogany and the jambs are 1-3/4" thick. That's a solid construction that's downright rare anymore. The hinges required to support that kind of weight are a work of art in and of themselves. Each hinge is a 4-1/2" x 4-1/2" solid brass piece of functional art. I've held one and they are a marvel.

Borano will be at the International Builders Show in Orlando next week. They're at booth number W5691. If you're heading to Orlando and IBS, be sure to stop by Borano's booth and see their mahogany products in person. People who claim that craftsmanship is dead have never met Borano.

Ceramic Tiles of Italy is calling "Show us your tile!"

The Italian Trade Commission and Confindustria Ceramica, the Association of Italian Ceramics, are proud to announce the 2011 Ceramic Tiles of Italy Design Competition Call for Entries. The competition, now in its 18th year, recognizes the exceptional work of North American architects and designers who feature Italian ceramic tiles in their institutional, residential or commercial/hospitality spaces.

2010 / Residential Winner

Pentagram Architects New York, New York

Montauk Residence

Tiles: Ceramica Bardelli

Contractor: Men At Work

Distributor: Hastings Tile and Bath

Credits: Peter Mauss © Peter Mauss/Esto 

The deadline for entries is 17 January 2011 and at stake is a $4,000 cash prize for one winner in each category plus a trip to Coverings 2011 in Las Vegas plus a five-day trip to Italy to attend Cersaie 2011 in Bologna.

2010 / Residential Honorable Mention

Baldinger Architectural Studio, Inc. Tempe, Arizona

Tempe Urban Living

Tiles: Cooperativa Ceramica D'Imola

Contractor: Giaconi Di Roma, LLC

Distributor: Imperial Tile Imports

Credits: Raul Garcia

The competition is open to all North American architects and interior designers. Domestic and international new construction and renovation projects completed between January 2006 and January 2011 are eligible for entry.

2010 / Commercial Winner

KARIM RASHID Inc. New York, New York

Prizeotel

Tiles: Ceramiche Refin

Contractor: Weser-Wohnbau GmbH & Co. KG

Distributor: Werner Doellmann

Credits: Prizehotel Management Group

A panel of design experts will judge the projects based on their creativity, functionality and aesthetic appeal. The official criterion for the jury includes: overall design of the project, innovative use of tile, tile design, quality of installation, degree that tile enhances the setting and the project’s sustainable attributes.

So North American designers and architects, what are you waiting for? The submission form is on the Ceramic Tiles of Italy Design Competition web page.

If you can't live on the Las Vegas Strip, bring the Las Vegas Strip to you

Anne Samowitz is a regular, dedicated reader of this blog and the other day she mailed me an MLS listing for a property on the market in long Island, New York. The house is a nightmare of ostentation and bad taste and it can be yours for a very reasonable $17.5 million.

The listing agent calls it the antithisis of fine living in the listing. Hmmmm. Antithesis means opposite and let me get Dictionary.com's official definition before we go a step further.

an·tith·e·sis   [an-tith-uh-sis]
–noun, plural -ses  [-seez]

1. opposition; contrast: the antithesis of right and wrong.
2. the direct opposite (usually fol. by of  or to ): Her behavior was the very antithesis of cowardly.
3. Rhetoric

• the placing of a sentence or one of its parts against another to which it is opposed to form a balanced contrast of ideas, as in “Give me liberty or give me death.”
• the second sentence or part thus set in opposition, as “or give me death.”

So either the listing agent is being clever or she needs a vocabulary refresher. There's a life lesson here though kids, don't use words you don't understand.

OK, onward. Let's take a stroll through the wonders that await the rapper/ professional athlete/ lottery winner/ Celine Dion in this once in a lifetime listing. The Celine Dion crack was Anne's and it's perfect.

Don't you love the human scale of this room? It just invites you to curl up on the sofa and read a book.

This kitchen's listed as a Custom Peacock Kitchen and I'll bet Mr. Peacock would be surprised to receive credit for that room up there. Wasn't it clever of them to make the ceiling so unrelated to anything going on in the room under it. That seems to be a recurring theme in this house. Context? We don't need no stinkin' context!

Nothing says "You've made it" like his 'n hers Skee Ball.

Again, why just admire The Bellagio when you can live in it full time?

The photo above seems to be the "lobby" of the home theater.

This is the box office. Note the two movie posters. To the left we have 1996's Striptease starring Demi Moore. Striptease made Showgirls look like Gone with the Wind. If you don't remember it you're not missing much. To the right hangs a poster for 1997's Titanic. I will never understand the appeal of that awful movie. Never. But it seems were just in time for a screening of 1991's What About Bob? Based on the movie mentions, I'd say the current owner had a career that peaked at some point in the '90s. Jean-Claude Van Damme? No, then the posters would be for Cyborg and Kickboxer. Hmmm. I wonder wonder wonder.

Here's the inside of the theater. If this home doesn't come with a resident company of Phantom or Riverdance, it needs one.

It has boxes. Two of them. For visiting royalty.

I don't have $17.5 million laying around to spend on a house. If I did however, I think I could do better than to recreate the Las Vegas Strip. What do you guys think?

St. Petersburg's Signature is a signature building

A year ago a building down the street from me got its certificate of occupancy after a nearly two year build. I can see over downtown from my living room windows and watching this building rise from ground was two year long thrill. The building is called the Signature and it's a waterfront condominium tower and street-level work/ live space. The building's a stunner and made all the more so when its compared to the usual dreck that gets built on waterfronts in the fair state I call home.

The Signature was designed by architect Ralph Johnson from Chicago's Perkins + Will. I cannot think of a more thoughtful and interesting building on Florida's entire west coast.

The complex is actually a complex of lofts and storefronts that ring the tower and all told the project takes up a whole block of downtown St. Pete.

I see the building from its northern elevation and when viewed from the north or the south it appears to be a monolith ringed with balconies and topped with a true roof.

Seen from the east, the building all but disappears. The leading edge of the tower comes to a perfect, 372-foot tall leading edge that faces the water. The architect designed the building to be an homage to the boat sails in the marinas downtown and his homage works. This is a 36-story building that's 372 feet tall and it appears to be as graceful and airy as any sail could ever hope to be.

In a fit of thoughtfulness, the building's orientation minimizes the blocked water views in the neighboring towers and it leaves a surprisingly small footprint on St. Pete's rightfully bally-hooed, accessible waterfront.

I walked around it the other afternoon and caught some of it's more pleasing angles. Things being what they are in the real estate market here, there are still units available in the Signature and at this stage of the game, the prices start at $185K. That's about a third of the entry-level asking price made available pre-construction. By local standards, that's an unheard of asking price. The building's extremely well-built and the level of finishes the builder built into the units is surprisingly good.

In every way imaginable, the Signature is a signature building for my beloved St. Pete and its place along waterfront marks a real departure from what's expected out of St. Pete. This was after all, once a city referred to as "God's Waiting Room." My how times have changed.

Modern history can be yours for a cool two million

Philip Johnson's Booth House is in Westchester County, New York and it's been on the market since April. The Booth House was Philip Johnson's first private commission and the house was completed in 1946, three years before his iconic Glass House in New Canaan, CT. Johnson lived in the Glass House until his death at age 98 in 2005. He was survived by his longtime partner David Whitney. Upon Whitney's death a few months later, the Glass House was left to the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is now open to the public.

Philip Johnson's Glass House

Philip Johnson was the face of 20th Century American architecture. I'm sure some of my architect pals would love to argue that point but in my mind he was. His list of friends, foes and collaborators reads like a who's who of the last century. He collaborated with Mies van der Rohe, offended Frank Lloyd Wright (I think everybody did), and introduced such notables as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier to the American public. In 1930, he founded the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art and it was at that museum in 1932 he mounted an exhibition called  "The International Style: Architecture since 1922."

International Style and Modernism were American architecture for the next four decades. Like Modernism, International Style believed in simplified form and a rejection of ornament. Johnson's Seagram Building from 1956 is a brilliant example of the International Style.

It's easy to dismiss International Style today but it was very much a product of its time. The Internationalists rejected everything that symbolized pre-war Europe. Ornament and artifice represented the tribal conflicts that plunged the world into first one and then a second World War. The level of disruption of those two events cannot be overstated. In its way, Johnson's Seagram Building is a repudiation of that conflict and an attempt to usher in a new era of cooperation and peace. What happened to Beaux Arts? It rode off on death's pale horse, that's what happened.

Johnson and his contemporaries began to see the Internationalist Style as a dead end and the Post-Modernism that followed began to embrace stylized ornamentation and symmetry. Johnson's AT&T Building from the early '80s with its Chippendale pediment shows his his take on Post-Modernism well.

Johnson was a cultural force in ways beyond his buildings, through his position at MOMA he promoted such artists as Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and many more. Philip Johnson brought world culture to the US and in just as many ways brought US culture to the world.

And just think, for a mere two million dollars you could own a piece of modern history.

Put me in a box on the plains

There is no shape so basic or so elegant as a right angle. There I said it. Compound angles give me vertigo and arcs make me break out in hives.

When I dream about dream houses, the dream houses always come back to basic shapes and of course that most basic of all, the right angle. I love minimalism. Real minimalism. I am up to my elbows in contemporary this and retro that all day every day and that's fine. I channel other peoples' sensibilities for a living. When it comes to mine however, I am most definitely in the school that says less is more. A lot less.

I came across this house on Trendir's Modern House Design site a couple of weeks ago and I keep going back to look at it.

All photography by Kai-Uwe Schulte-Brunert

I did a little sleuthing and the house is a private residence called Sulla Morella in Casina, in the Emilia-Romana Region of northern Italy. It was designed by Andrea Oliva and his studio Cittàarchitettura and I swear he designed it with me in mind.

Minimalism tells me a story of an uncluttered life where I can think clearly and concentrate fully on what ever it is I'm doing. Minimalism sets a tone for intellectual honesty and true relatedness to people and place. There's nowhere to hide in a minimal space and I mean that figuratively and literally. I think that's why some people react to it so negatively. I know that's haughty and inaccurate, I'm just being provocative.

What is it about this kind of real minimalism that just rubs some people raw? Some people can look at this box on a plain and swoon and some people can see the same box on the same plain and be repulsed. Why is that?