SieMatic introduces the latest from Beaux Arts and FloatingSpaces

EuroCucina takes place in Milan every other year as part of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile. EuroCucina is Europe's largest kitchen trade show and it's attended by hundreds of thousands of people from all over the globe who descend on Milan to see the latest in kitchen design and innovation.

SieMatic Möbelwerke took the opportunity provided by EuroCucina to debut the latest iterations of its BeauxArts.02 and FloatingSpaces collections.

BeauxArts.02 is the result of a collaboration between US designer Mick De Giulio and I saw its first series at IMM in Cologne last year. I was blown away by it and the latest additions to the collection are even more impressive. What follow are some highlights from BeauxArts.02.

The first BeauxArts.02 kitchen shows SieMatic's Lotus Gloss Lacquer finish.

The second BeauxArts.02 kitchen shows SieMatic's Sterling Gray Lacquer with stainless accents.

The third BeauxArts.02 kitchen shows a custom Lacquer color with stainless base cabinets.

In addition to the newest additions to the BeauxArts.02 Collection, SieMatic dedicated a fair amount of its booth space to FloatingSpaces. FloatingSpaces is a variable panel system that speaks directly to the growing trend of an open kitchen. Here's an example of FloatingSpaces in Graphite Oak Matte Veneer.

The European version of an open kitchen is far more open than the North American idea of open kitchen. I think a better description would be to call it and integrated kitchen. The idea is to dispense with the idea of a kitchen as a separate, utilitarian space and instead, integrate it into the rest of the house.

The next FloatingSpaces example demonstrates that idea even better. This is FloatingSpaces in Lotus White Gloss Lacquer and Stone Beech Veneer. Where does the kitchen stop and the rest of the house start? Exactly.

Since its beginnings in the early 1930s, SieMatic has remained at the forefront of design innovation as a privately-held, family-owned company. Their products are now available 62 countries across five continents and you can learn more about these collections as well as the rest of their offerings on SieMatic's website.

Meet my new living room carpet

I just ordered this carpet the other day. I've been in the market for a handmade carpet for years and finally, I chanced upon an opportunity to take care of the glaring hole in my living room decor.

I've been coveting handmade carpets for years but I've always been concerned about the conditions under which they're made. Enter Novica, a world marketplace that operates in association with National Geographic. Novica gave me a $200 credit that I used toward my carpet.

Novica is sort of like a developing world Etsy in that that site connects artisans from all over the world and allows them the opportunity to sell their wares directly to end users. In my case, my carpet was woven by a man in India named Khalil Ahmed. Here's his statement from Novica's website:

I come from a long lineage of carpet weavers. My ancestors have been in this field for more than centuries now. We are five brothers and two sisters, and we grew up as witnesses to the craft of weaving at home. I remember how enthralled we would be every time we saw varied colors merging into different weaves.

I was just in school when I began to learn this art. I was taught by my father and older brothers, and at the time it was like a game that offered moments of great fun. As I grew up I took the loom and began to weave my own pieces. It felt so amazing when I finished my first piece!

It took me almost three years to learn the fine art of weaving. At first my designs were simple and now, as I've gained mastery, they are more intricate. It also has to do with what people want. Before they wanted simple and elegant designs, but nowadays they are more demanding, not only in design, but also in terms of quality and price. It is therefore my responsibility to update my designs and work with quality materials to fulfill people's expectations and requirements.

As a family, we have seen some hard times. I remember a period during my childhood when the situation was so bad I had to work at a tobacco company all day for only a couple of Rupees. I still to cringe to remember those days, but I do not blame my parents. I know they were extremely difficult times, and that was the only option.

I have seen really bad days in my time, but they have given me the strength and determination to do well in life. For example, I had always dreamt of going abroad, so I worked hard and I realize my dreams. In 1992, I went to London for an exhibition. I also got the opportunity to go to Turkistan and Brazil. They were all wonderful experiences.

Before there were only a few families who designed and wove rugs, and people would have to come to our homes to buy them. Nowadays there are more opportunities for us weavers to sell our rugs and carpets with exhibitions happening every now and then. They offer us to show our products to more people rather than relying only with visitors coming to our homes.

It fills me with great pride to tell you that in 2002, I won National Award for one of my hand-woven dhurrie rugs.

It's a great feeling to be in this field, carrying on such a precious family legacy. I only wish that my children will take forward this art.

I'll write more about my purchase and Novica in the coming weeks after my carpet arrives. It shipped from Khalil's studio this morning and I ought to have it in two weeks. In the meantime, take a look through Novica's offerings. They're providing a forum where the developing world and the West can interact directly. This allows anybody to impact developing world lives personally.

It's precisely these kinds of direct interactions that make the world a smaller and better place. Thank you Novica.

It's island time again, kitchen island that is

Tomorrow morning at 9:30 EST, CBS Sunday Morning will dedicate its 90-minute broadcast to an exploration of kitchen islands. Sunday Morning reporter Nancy Giles will travel the world over and two of her stops on this trip to find the exotic, the unusual, the beautiful and the functional will be in kitchens designed by world-renowned kitchen designer Johnny Grey.

The first of the two Johnny Grey designs Sunday Morning will profile are The Threshing Barn in Arlesford, England. Notice how he took the traditional form of a threshing barn and created a space that's perfectly suited to life in the 21st Century. The forced perspective at work in this kitchen is remarkable.

©Johnny Grey Studios

©Johnny Grey Studios

©Johnny Grey Studios

©Johnny Grey Studios

©Johnny Grey Studios

Talk about a lesson in how to define a room within an open floor plan. Wow.

The second Johnny Grey design Sunday Morning will feature is on the other side of the Atlantic in New York. In this room, Johnny introduced an element of hand crafted, nearly whimsical flair to an older home. As a side note, the following kitchen was one of my inspirations when I was starting out as a designer and it's really great that the editors at Sunday Morning see in it what I do.

©Johnny Grey Studios

©Johnny Grey Studios

©Johnny Grey Studios

©Johnny Grey Studios

©Johnny Grey Studios

Of all the flourishes in kitchen design I've ever seen, the leg on the island in the final photo has to be my all-time favorite.

So remember to tune into CBS Sunday Morning tomorrow, May 20th at 9am EST to see Nancy Giles tour of the islands and to hear Johnny as well as his clients as they talk about what it's like to live in the spaces they call home. If you miss the broadcast or if you're somewhere where you can't see it, go to CBS Sunday Morning's website and you can see the broadcast there.

Johnny Grey Studios works in the UK, Europe, North America and anywhere else where someone is calling out for an original, thoughtful design. You can contact the studio and see more of Johnny's work through the Johnny Grey Studios website. Johnny's blog, Grey Matters has more information and thoughts on kitchen islands, so head over there and join the conversation!

What's that color?

I get at least three e-mails every week from readers of this blog and other things I've written around the internet. This is immensely gratifying and most of these e-mails are questions about a photo or a request for advice about flooring, appliances, counter materials or cabinet brands.

via

I'm glad to answer these questions and I love that strangers look to me as a source of solid information. However one question I'll never answer definitively is "What's that color?"

This happens most often in response to the things I've written for Houzz.com. It's a legitimate question and every time someone asks it I launch into what's by now a rote speech.

The short answer is that it doesn't matter because you're not seeing the actual color. What human eyes see as color is reflected light and how a color reads in a photo is completely dependent on how a subject is lit at the time the photo was taken. So the act of photographing something distorts its color, sometimes pretty radically. So that's one degree of distortion.

Add to it that you're seeing that photo on an uncalibrated computer monitor and that's at least two more degrees of distortion.

After all those distortions, the nuance of the original color is lost for good.

Photos on the internet are good for general families of color. You can look at a photo of a room and know that you want a yellow kitchen or a taupe living room. But the actual colors used in the photo won't look in your home the way they do in the photo you're admiring.

Here's a detail of a kitchen I designed. The wall color is Sherwin-Williams 7037 and I picked that color because it played well with the off-white cabinetry paint color and it was as similar hue to the brown veins running through the Calacatta marble on the counters and back splash.

If I were to go to Sherwin-Williams' website and look at the swatch, here's what I'd get.

Even though they're same color, they look nothing like each other. What's more, the color as it appeared on the walls was off from the swatch in my Sherwin-Williams chip library.

The difference between a paint swatch and actual paint is typical, and a good designer knows how to accommodate it. The difference, by the way, is due to the fact that a paint swatch is a printed approximation of a paint color as it will appear with an eggshell sheen. Paint swatches are never the actual paint. Different sheens make even the same paint colors look completely different.

So the answer to "What's that color?" isn't an answer. Rather it's an explanation, and a long-winded one at that. It's impossible to specify precise colors with photos and even more impossible to do so with an image on the internet. The only way to gauge true color is to paint a wall, let it cure for a day and then decide whether it works or not.

I know that's not the advice most people are looking for; but it's the cold, hard truth. Use photography, be it on the internet, in a magazine or in the marketing collateral from a paint brand as a general guideline to help you identify a direction. But until a paint color hits the wall, you'll never know how it will actually look.

So go ahead, ask me anything. Just don't ask me what color something is.

Cotto d'Este rethinks what tile can do

One need look no further than newspaper headlines to see that utility deregulation has been a bust. As public utilities have been allowed to consolidate and behave more like private concerns, their dividends to shareholders may have increased but their rates have have gone up significantly at the same time. Similarly, a near obsession with reducing labor costs has left them with a power grid that's as prone to breakdown as any business that cuts itself off at the knees in order to maximize its quarterly earnings. With increased earnings, utilities are better able to lobby legislatures to advance their agendas. As so-called public utilities buy off legislators they're able to pass along more of their costs to their customers. The utility I deal with, Progress Energy (Soon to be Duke Energy), has managed to convince the Florida Legislature that it's a good idea to have their customers pay for a new nuclear plant before it's even built. My electrical rates will increase by nearly 50% over the next eight years to pay for this new plant. As Fukushima demonstrated so perfectly, is nuclear power capable of living up to its promise?

Clearly, a central supplier of electricity is a losing proposition. But how to get out from under unresponsive and increasingly expensive "public" utilities? This isn't a failure of government as it is a failure for government to behave like a profit-making business.

So what there is to do is to start to take responsibility for electrical power away from the utilities and to make it more local and more personal.

My travels to Europe in the last year have shown me that there are a lot of ways the US can improve on our business as usual. The technologies evident over there during trade shows do point to a way out.

The rage these days in Europe in architecture is to install ventilated facades. These facades are a way to remake a building and insulate it at the same time. But the Sassuolo-based Cotto d'Este takes the idea of a ventilated facade and turns it on its ear.

Cotto d'Este's ventilated facades make electricity.

While solar power and photovoltaic cells can't obviate the need to electrical utilities, it's an enormous leap forward. Since utilities don't feel any pressing need to actually provide the services they're tasked to do, why not set about making our own electricity?

Cotto d'Este has a ceramic product that carries a 25-year warranty and that you can walk on. That's amazing. I live in a part of the world where the sun shines for an average of 360 days per year. I look at my roof and my neighbors roofs and wonder why we're not putting them to use. Between the incredible sunshine we enjoy and the sea breezes we experience ever day, why aren't we harnessing those forms of energy? Why do we rely on a power plant that burns coal, degrades our air and dumps mercury into The Bay?

Why does burning fossil fuels hold the appeal that it does?

How did oil- and coal-based energy generation become the standard for what constitutes a prosperous society? Isn't it time to look for another answer?

Scandinavian Made, a webshop

I think I'm in love with this bowl.

Ceramicist Simon Koefoed made only one and it's available through a new webshop called Scandinavian Made.

Scandinavian Made is the brainchild of my brilliant friend Susan Serra and her daughter Kelly Serra Donovan. The Serra women's roots run deep in Denmark and Susan's long made it a habit to bring back handmade items she found on her annual trips to Denmark for her design clients.

With the recent launch of Scandinavian Made, anybody can benefit from Susan's discerning eye and love of her ancestral homeland. Here are some highlights I just pulled from her site.

There's a definite eye at work here and the whole site is a testament to her good taste and willingness to share the one-of-kind, hand crafted vases, bowls, servicewear, wall hangings and more that she finds on her travels.

Susan's one of the most generous and talented women I know and it's a pleasure to help introduce Scandinavian Made to the world. Give Scandinavian Made a look and tell Susan I sent you.

Save the dates for Coverings 2012

Coverings is a must-see show and conference for the tile and stone worlds and Coverings 2012 is coming to the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando from April 17 through April 20.

Whether you're looking for the next big idea or the bottom line, you'll find the inspiration you're after at this year's show. There are over 1000 exhibitors from 50 countries signed up so far, Coverings 2012 promises something for everybody in the architecture, builder, design and fabricator communities.

Coverings 2012 features a robust conference schedule including accredited seminars and live demonstrations led by some of the most reputable authorities in the industry. Oh, and it's all free.

So add it to your calendar and make it a point to be in Orlando on April 17th. I know I'll be there!

You can learn more and register to attend on Coverings website. See you in Orlando.

I love New York so much it hurts sometimes; the Delancy Street "Low Line"

This is the Williamsburg Bridge.

It connects the Lower East Side of Manhattan with Mid Brooklyn and on its Brooklyn side, it marks the start of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. On the Manhattan side, The Williamsburg  crosses over Roosevelt Drive and what appear to be endless housing blocks.

The approach to the Williamsburg is Delancey Street, a pretty non-descript patch of well-traveled road that looks like the rest of the Lower East Side.

 However, underneath Delancey is an abandoned rail yard.

It's but one of countless abandoned rail yards in Manhattan and it always amazes me that the city with the most expensive real estate values in the US has so many under utilized nooks and crannies.

A couple of years ago, an abandoned, elevated railway was turned into New York's now-legendary High Line. However, a couple of forward thinkers have an similar idea for the Delancey Street only instead of a High Line, they've come up with the idea that's come to be known as the Low Line.

The Delancy Underground is its official name and at this point it's in the process of raising money to make the dream a reality. I remember when the High Line was in a similar situation and just look at it now. I have no doubt that the Delancey Underground will happen and based on the speed of the High Line's development and conversion, it will happen pretty quickly.

However, the Delancey Underground is very different from the High Line, primarily because it's underground. However, the plan for the Delancey calls for a host of sky lights, solar collectors and fiber optics to bring the light of day underground. The light levels underneath Delancey Street will be intense enough for trees, shrubs, flowers and grasses to grow. check out these renderings.

It's going to be amazing and if any city in the world can pull this off, New York's definitely the one. No where else in the world can mount projects on the scale New York can and nowhere else on earth can channel ambition and vision the way New York does so regularly.

Man I love that town and the Delancey Underground is one more reason to hold it in as high a regard as I do.

New Yorkers aside, what public space initiatives has your city undertaken? Are publicly-funded, public spaces important and worthwhile? Talk to me about this stuff.

Starck towers over Warendorf

German kitchen manufacturer Warendorf just rolled out a new collection called Tower. Tower is the result of a collaboration between Warendorf and the design world's enfant terrible, Philippe Starck.

Tower consists of three components, two tall cabinets and an island.

Starck's forever deconstructing things and looking at every day objects and setting in a new light, hence his enduring popularity as a collaborator.

The towers are function-specific. One tower is for dish and pantry storage, the other holds a refrigerator/ freezer, a dishwasher, an oven and a steam oven. Each tower takes up a single square meter of floor space and they rotate to allow easy access to their contents. The appliance tower has electric, waste and water lines that run up into it through the floor.

The island holds a stainless steel sink and an integrated induction cooktop. Power and water run into the island from the floor and are hidden by the chrome leg under the sink.

Open kitchens are all the rage in Europe these days and this open kitchen takes that concept into the stratosphere. A set up like this could be installed in any open space. When it's not in use, it becomes just a few pieces of furniture but come meal time, it's a full kitchen.

It's a pretty wild idea and even though it's not for everyone, I'm curious to see how this idea trickles down into the rest of the industry and how it affects aesthetics on both sides of the Atlantic. What do you think? Is there any appeal to the idea of a kitchen not being in a dedicated room but instead being another furniture vignette in an open space?

Endless thanks to my brilliant cousin Tim for bringing this to my attention.