Dragging an old bathroom into the 21st Century

I've been working with a client on a very small bathroom. The bath in question is in a 1500 square foot ranch house in a valuable neighborhood and it suffered an unfortunate brush with a flipper around eight years ago. Any original character that was in bath when he started ended up in a dumpster. What's left is an out of character attempt at some kind of Shabby Chic as seen through the lens of somebody with $1000 and a long weekend.

Awful stuff.

Enter me. The client wants something modern and he wants me to maximize the storage while eliminating clutter. As you can see below, this bathroom measures a hair over nine feet by seven feet and maximizing storage is going to be a challenge.

Because this room's so small, I want to make it appear to be as large as possible. So instead of a shower stall, I'm calling for a single sheet of clear glass to define the shower area. All of the cabinetry will be raised a foot off the floor and every square inch of this room is going to be tiled in white marble.

If I remove the wall behind the shower you can see the sink elevation.

Here's the vanity and mirror from a little closer in.

All of this cabinetry's being made by a local cabinet maker and all of it will be natural walnut. That vanity cabinet is based on the idea of a Luce vanity sink from LaCava acting as both a sink and a counter.

In the interest of maximizing space, There's a pull out rack behind the right door of the vanity and the mirror slides to the left on hidden guides. Once the mirror's slid out of the way it reveals a counter sunk medicine cabinet in the wall.

On the other side of the bath, there's a tall cabinet. It too is sitting a foot off the ground.

The center compartment has a fold out dressing table, for lack of a better term, that slides in and out of the center compartment.

There's general storage in the compartments above and below the fold out table.

I'm still hunting for the right wall-mounted toilet and I welcome any and all suggestions.

The wall-mounted faucet will be the Virage from Brizo of course, as will the shower.

Although I have to admit I was lured by the siren's song of Hansgrohe, mostly for this photo.

Wow. Now I need to take a cold shower.

So by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, this bathroom will have been dragged into this century and by using decent finishes and fixtures, this client won't ever have to renovate this bath again.

A beautiful new faucet series from Gessi

From deep in the heart of Italy's Piedmont Region, comes the Goccia series from Gessi. Goccia means "droplet" in Italian and designer Prospero Rasulo found a new shape and in doing so, he found a way to bring faucets out of the kitchen and bathroom and into the rest of the house.

See what I mean? It reminds me of Achille Castiglioni's Arco lamp from 1962 but the similarities stop pretty quickly after that first flash of recognition.

I tell clients all the time to pick bar and prep sinks with intention but this exceeds even my definition of intention.

As dramatic as the large size of this faucet it, I can see integrating one of its smaller cousins into the end of a dining table or a buffet.

And of course, Goccia comes in sizes, shapes and configurations that work well in bathrooms as well. I'm really taken with this shape.

Goccia is a wide-ranging suite of fixtures, it extends far beyond what I'm showing here. And Goccia is but one of the hundreds of products offered by Gessi. Spend some time on their website and you'll see what I mean. There will be more to come from this company, believe me.

In the meantime though, what do you guys think of having a sink and faucet in the dining or living room? is it an idea whose time has come?

Late summer re-run: This is whack!

This post ran originally on 15 August 2008. In keeping with my "weekends are for old posts" experiment, I'm running it again.

I had a conversation with a client yesterday and I was trying to explain to her that the images of glamorous kitchens she sees in catalogs and magazines aren't real places. For the most part, those images are sets in a studio or on a sound stage. As fully-designed sets, their reason for existence is to sell you something, not to act as a template for what your life should look like. I hear that same sort of thing a lot; "make my house look like the one in As Good As It Gets" or "I want this to look like a Pottery Barn catalog." It's a strange, internalized kind of consumerism. One where it's not enough to want the goods for sale, rather the goal seems to be the acquisition of the advertiser's whole imaginary universe. It shows up for me in requests from people who think they want to live in a magazine spread or in a model home. Newsflash: no one actually lives in a model home and that magazine spread is peddling a fantasy.

Real life is messy but it's also a lot of fun. My goal as I set out design a space for someone is to minimize the messy part of life and accentuate the fun parts. Clean up should be simple. Everything should have a place that's easy to get to. Rooms should be furnished and accessorized with things that reflect the lives of their owners. I want the art on the walls to be art you like and that you pick out. I want the photos on the book case to be your photos. I want the stuff that's lying around to tell a story about your life. It's your house, not Arthur Rutenberg's and not Pottery Barn's and not mine.

Anyhow, as I was ruminating about that I came across something on Consumerist that may be the root of why I approach residential design the way that I do.

Buried on their page two was a brief mention of something they were calling Wacky Packages. Well, I remember them as Wacky Packs and for better or for worse, my design sensibilities were deeply affected by them when I was nine or so.

Wacky Packages were a collectible sticker series that were put out by Topps (the baseball card people) in the '70s. They were graphic, sophomoric, brilliant spoofs of consumer products and my brothers and I couldn't get enough of them. The mention in Consumerist alluded to their value as collectibles now and there's actually a website dedicated to buying and selling them. What does that have to do with making a house reflect the people who live in it? Hold that thought.

This is a photo of my mother in the kitchen of my childhood home in about 1973. Looming behind her is a cabinet door covered with, you guessed it, Wacky Packs.

Here it is in close up.

My mother, bless her heart, allowed her six sons to cover a cabinet door in her kitchen with Wacky Packs. It's an extreme example, but there can be no doubt that the house I grew up in reflected the fact that nine people lived in it. Seven kids are hard to miss to begin with; but just in case you did, check out this cabinet door! Thank you Mom for putting up with us, thank you Tom for getting us started with Wacky Packs, thank you Steve for scanning all of these old family photos and thank you Consumerist for the walk down memory lane.

Here are a bunch of original issue Wacky Packs, many of which were on that cabinet door. They mock the Cold War, they mock hippies, they are decidedly irreverent and gloriously offensive. They are aimed squarely at nine-year-old boys, yet they include some heavy allusions to cigarettes and liquor. I cannot get over how many of these things I remember, yet I haven't given them a thought in at least 30 years.





Now I doubt that I'll be encouraging someone cover a kitchen cabinet door with stickers any time soon, but if somebody really wants to; what's it going to hurt?

Late-summer rerun: A chat about sofas

It's the second weekend in September already and I'm going to try something new. It's still summer where I live and in keeping with the summery weather and in a vain attempt to reclaim something resembling my life, I'm going to start running archive posts on weekends for the next couple of week. I just want to see how it goes.

I've been blogging daily for more than two years now and I have the feeling that somehow the sun won't come up if I don't have a blog post written every day. I know that's BS and I need to prove it to myself. So bear with me.

I have some pretty deep archives and a lot of those old posts never see the light of day anymore. The following post ran under the headline "Sofas, Sofas Everywhere and not a Place to Sit" on 20 February 2008. Wa-a-a-a-y back then I didn't have an audience and I didn't know what I was doing so it's just as well that a lot of that old stuff never gets read these days. But some of it wasn't so bad. My buyers' guide to sofas is a post that still has something to say.

I have been on a quest for the right sofa for my living room for the last couple of years, and I'm proving myself to be my own worst client. I can't pick furnishings for myself to save my life. In the course of all of that back and forth I've learned a lot about sofas and even though it hasn't helped me decide between a Mitchell Gold and a Barbara Barry it helps me find better stuff for my clients. So if it's sofa time for you, pay close heed to some tips about what makes a good sofa good in the first place and why good sofas are so bloody expensive.

A sofa starts with a frame. In better furniture, that frame is made from kiln-dried hardwood. These hardwoods are kiln-dried to remove any residual moisture and to prevent later warping or cracking. In less-expensive furniture, that hardwood frame is replaced with furniture-grade plywood. A hardwood or furniture-grade plywood frame is the first thing to look at if this is a piece of furniture that will get a lot of use and that you expect to hold onto for a long time. A good sofa is screwed and glued at its joints and its corners are reinforced with blocks. These are things you cannot see, so ask your salesperson about a sofa's frame construction and you should hear something like what I just wrote. If he stares at you blankly, leave the store immediately and go somewhere else.

If you're looking for something that won't get used a lot, or that you expect to get rid of in a couple of years; a frame made of particle board is for you. The particle board frame won't keep its shape over time and its joints will eventually break. The $7,000 Henredon sofa and the $900 knock off of it at Ikea may look similar on the outside, but it's the insides that count here.

If you spend any time in furniture showrooms, you hear the term "hand tied" bandied about but no one really gets into what it means. What the term refers to is the sofa's suspension system. The suspension is the second element that separates better furniture from cheaper furniture. "Hand Tied" is shorthand for eight-way hand-tied steel-coil system --called this because each steel coil is attached at eight different points to other coils and then the whole system is attached to the frame. This allows for the coils to operate independently, but not too much. The result is called the sofa's "ride," or how it feels when you sit on it. The hand tied method of using coils is regarded by the industry as the best marker of quality and you can be sure that the $7,000 Henredon has hand-tied coils. Down from that is a drop-in coil system where the individual coils are clipped to one another and then clipped to the frame. This system won't last as long and will give a more uneven ride. Finally, our $900 example will likely have what's known as sinuous construction and it will be the shortest-lived of the three methods here. Sinuous, or zig zag, construction uses S-shaped steel wires that run from side to side of the frame. Sinuous suspensions are stiffer and are omnipresent to the point that most people expect a sofa to feel the way it does with one of these suspension systems.

But more than the other two categories, the largest driver of a sofa's price is the fabric it's upholstered in. There is a staggering range of fabric qualities out there. And as is the case with a lot of things, if you don't know what quality is, don't learn or you'll spend fortunes chasing it. An upholstery fabric should be attractive, obviously; but it needs to be resilient and easy to clean as well. The tag on a sofa will tell you how it can be spot cleaned through a series of codes. Guard your sanity and avoid anything labeled "Brush Clean" only.

Always ask how long the lead time is for the delivery if it's a custom piece. Typical turn arounds range anywhere from one month to nine months. Know going in that the minute you customize a piece of furniture is the same minute that it stops being returnable. Think about this for a while and look at the fabric swatch in your own home before you buy anything. Do your homework, pick something and get on with it.

Daily nerd laugh

Thanks to Design Milk for pointing me to Like Cool. Hilarious.