Broken tile on purpose

Massimiliano Adami is a highly regarded Italian designer who's been working with Ceramiche Refin, a tile manufacturer located outside of Modena. His latest project is called Terraviva and it involves purposely cracking large-format floor tile and then setting it.

The idea being that it's imperfections that make life interesting, so why not set a few right into the floor?

This is not a graphic that's been printed onto this tile, the tile's actually broken and the cracks are grouted in.

You can see it a little more clearly in this close-up.

It's an interesting idea, and I like the idea of embracing imperfections. However, The idea of setting out with a goal of making imperfections kind of bothers me. I could get used to it with a little effort though.

What do you guys think? Embrace imperfections as they crop up or set out with the goal of making imperfections? Would you ever install something like this in your home? Are Ceramiche Refin and Massimiliano Adami onto something?

Black stripes are always right

I get hundreds of press releases and product announcements every week, it comes with the territory. That's not a complaint. Not at all. I welcome those things and I find they are the easiest way for me to keep up with what's going on in my field.

I received one yesterday from Flambeau Lighting and the release featured this photo.

I love it. I love the pendants, I love the room. I love how the stripes from the shade continue up the rods to the ceiling. Here's a close up of the pendant itself.

It's the stripes, the back stripes, that get me every time. Flambeau has all kind of other great lighting designs, and I encourage you to check out their catalog.

I've always loved black and white color schemes because they remind me of Tim Burton's work. In 1985 I saw a short film by an unknown filmmaker. The film was called Frankenweenie and it was Tim Burton's first movie. It was a Disney production, as hard as that is to believe. You can find it on YouTube these days. Anyhow, I was struck by the visual style of that movie, I'd never seen anything like it. Burton ended up getting fired from Disney over the film and the world owes Disney a debt of gratitude for their wise decision. Though I'm sure it was traumatic for Burton at the time, that firing unleashed a breathtaking talent on the world.

photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art

Burton did a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art last year and it was cool to see how his style had evolved over the years and it was even more cool to see how much he'd held onto. Here's the ad MoMA put together while Burton's retrospective was running at the museum.





The pendant lights I started with have a Burton-esque feel to them and I like them all the more for it.

As the offerings in Flambeau Lighting's catalog show, black stripes are always right. They've certainly served Tim Burton well.

Sometimes, product shots benefit from some styling

So my post yesterday about photo stylists gone wild was actually a wild sweep away from what I intended to write when I sat down. The point was to highlight a different vanity made by the same company, Ypsilon. Here's the vanity.

Believe it. That's the cameo vanity in pink. It's available too in black.

Here it is in cream.

That's real tufted leather upholstery on the drawer fronts and that cameo's a depiction of Elizabeth Windsor, the Queen of England,  in an earlier, gentler time.

That's an Italian product aimed squarely at the US market. Again, I understand being provocative and I understand someone creating a buzzworthy object in order to sell the rest of his wares. But if this is the buzzworthy object and the rest of the wares are all but invisible, who at the helm of this ship?

I'm confused. Is Queen Elizabeth really a popular motif with American consumers? Is tufted leather remotely practical on the front of a vanity?

Does any of this matter? After all, I've spent two days writing about Ypsilon. Am I just a marionette in their well-conceived ploy to take over the world?

Would you put a pink, leather vanity with a Queen Elizabeth motif in your bathroom? If you were a manufacturer and this were in your product mix, would this be the thing you turned the stylists loose on to better disguise it in your catalog? I could think about all of this for days. I promise not to but I could.

If an ad guy and a photo stylist played rock, paper, scissors; who'd win?

If I were selling a product and I wanted to show it to the world I'd hire an ad agency to help me come up with a message and an overall feel for my product. Then I'd get a photographer and a stylist to work with my agency and me to help me sell more of my products by making my product look good. That's the way things work, right?

So if these are my product photos, what do you suppose I'm selling?

Am I selling moody young women in uncomfortable shoes? Am I selling army surplus blankets? Men's suits? Apathetic young men? The answer is none of the above. I'm selling this vanity and integrated mirror. I think.

How about this one. What am I selling in this photo?

No, I'm not selling dissatisfaction, I'm selling these pieces of furniture.

This photo from the same series, shows the product at least. Well, part of it anyway.

Honestly, I don't understand spending this kind of money on a photo shoot after spending years developing a product line. Why go to the trouble of a photo shoot when you you don't photograph the product you're selling?

Really, I understand art. I understand commerce too and the two can coexist. I don't know, maybe it's just me being cranky and pragmatic. But do product shots where the product is out of frame and out of focus do the basic job of a product photo? Namely, sell more products. Would you buy a vanity you couldn't see?

Early autumn re-runs: Paint that ceiling porch Haint Blue

This post appeared originally on 1 June 2009. It remains one of my all-time biggest traffic draw to date. Who knew there was so much interest in Haint Blue.

I spend a fair amount of time specifying paint colors for people and last week I was working on a color scheme for the exterior of an older home. The clients warned me that they didn't want anything wild. I took that as a good sign because clearly, they'd seen some of my more adventurous work and they still called me.

So I came up with a scheme that involved three shades of taupe, white trim and a black front door. Ho-hum, but it was pretty refined and as instructed, "not wild." However, this house has wrap-around porches on the first and second floors, after all it's an old, traditional Florida house. I specified Sherwin Williams 7608, Adrift, for the porch ceilings. Adrift is a light, neutral blue. In an effort to sell the idea I referred to the ceiling color as Haint Blue and they were smitten and signed off immediately.

Painting a porch ceiling blue is a very traditional effect, even though it doesn't show up very often anymore. It's a southern thing, but I'm a Yankee's Yankee and I grew up in a house with a blue porch ceiling in Pennsylvania. Ours were blue because that was the color they were painted when my parents bought that house in the '60s and we never changed it. I think that there was some vague story about the color keeping spiders away. Like I said, they were vague stories and really, we never really talked about it very much. But every time we painted the house, those porch ceilings stayed blue.

Well, about a year-and-a-half ago, a great friend of mine moved to New Orleans. Within days of his landing there, he turned into a combination of Marie Laveau and Tennessee Williams. In a matter of hours, he'd absorbed all of the lore of that fable-filled city and was spouting it back like a lifetime resident. I have never seen someone make a geographic transition with that kind of ease and thoroughness. I envy him his sense of place sometimes. Anyhow, when he was telling me about his house on about day two, he mentioned that its front porch had a Haint Blue ceiling.

I'd never heard the term before, but I knew exactly what he meant. Apparently Haint Blue still figures prominently into New Orleans homes. I asked him where it got its name and he said that New Orleanians use that paint color to keep away haints, or or spirits of the dead with bad intentions.

Well, I did a little digging around, and the practice of painting a porch ceiling blue did start in the American south. The expression Haint Blue comes from the Gullah people of the South Carolina and Georgia  low country. They painted the entries to their homes light blue to keep the bad spirits away. The blue color represented water, and as everybody knows, haints can't cross water.

If you were an impoverished descendant of slaves in the coastal south in the 1800s, you got paint the same way you built your house --from scratch. Powdered pigments were mixed with lime, white lead and milk. The lime and lead content of those early paints probably had the added benefit of poisoning insects that landed on it. So even though the pigment got all the credit, the credit was actually due to the toxic soup the pigments were suspended in. Any color of those old, home-brewed paints would have poisoned insects, but the Haint Blue got all the glory. This is interesting, because a blue ceiling is credited with repelling insects even now. Paint doesn't have lime or lead in it anymore, so it's not surprising that modern Haint Blue (and all house paint) is completely ineffective as a bug repellent.

All of the woo-woo nonsense not withstanding, painting a porch ceiling blue is an interesting, and depending on where you live, unexpected touch. So even if I don't buy the myth, I appreciate the connection to the past. If you're in the mood for an exterior color change , think about adding some Haint Blue.