Trend watch: new faucet shapes

KBIS (http://www.kbis.com/), the national Kitchen and Bath Industry Show is right around the corner. Manufacturers and suppliers use the yearly KBIS to roll out new products and in the weeks leading up to it, those same companies offer previews to the industry. My preview from Kohler (http://www.kohler.com/) arrived yesterday, and they have some pretty cool new stuff. Kohler's march toward the higher end of the market continues in their new products, that's for sure.

KWC (http://www.kwcamerica.com/) , a high end plumbing fixture company from Switzerland, makes a faucet they call the 1922. The 1922 is pictured above. I've always thought the 1922 was a beautiful, elegant sink fixture. Kohler's new HiRise suite of faucets seems to have taken KWC's idea of the 1922 and expanded it into a whole suite of fixtures.

The HiRise series has a deck mount faucet, a wall mount faucet, a single pole faucet, a pot filler and a sprayer. The tall, arcing shape of the faucet is continuing the trend of the last couple of years for kitchen faucets to get taller and taller. What's different though is that it has no integrated sprayer. I think it's an interesting direction and the HiRise is really gorgeous. As I mentioned earlier, this is definitely another step in the direction of the higher end of the market. The retail price on these things starts at a thousand dollars. That makes it a more expensive fixture than KWC's 1922, and I always think of KWC as an unabashedly high end brand. From the looks of Kohler's preview, I guess I need to readjust my thinking about Kohler as a company in the middle.

How to buy a granite counter top

I spent the better part of Monday at a new stone wholesaler in Tampa. It was my first visit to their facility and I was there to approve some slabs for a client. The wholesaler is the Stone Warehouse of Tampa (http://www.stonewarehouseoftampa.com/) and their slab room was a feast for the eyes. the Stone Warehouse keeps its inventory on their website --check it out and you'll see what I'm talking about.

My client's counters will be fabricated and installed the the great folks at Cutting Edge Granite (http://www.cuttingedgegranite.com/) in Largo. Like all fabricators, Cutting Edge has a large collection of slabs on hand at any given time. Most times when I take people over to Cutting Edge, they fall in love with something they find there. But sometimes, we need to dig a little deeper into the supply chain.

Granite is quarried from deposits located all over the world. At the quarry, the granite is cut into large cubes. The cubes are cut into slices, similarly to the way one would slice a loaf of bread. Those slices are referred to as slabs. The slabs are numbered sequentially and those numbers stay with the individual slabs until they end up as counters in some one's home. This sequential numbering system allows granite fabricators to match up a stone's patterns when a counter requires multiple slabs to complete.

Granite is quarried by Mom and Pop operations the world over and its final price is a function of a particular stone's availability. The less common the stone, the more expensive it is. The granite industry uses four primary price levels that reflect this. In addition to the four primary levels, there are special categories for very rare granites and they tend to be priced on a case by case basis.

Because granite is a natural product, no two slabs can be identical. Additionally, granite changes from slab to slab, sometimes profoundly. It is important that you not settle on a granite until you see actual slabs. Small samples cannot show you the large, swirling patterns present in many granites nor can they show you the tremendous range of colors possible on a single slab. Never buy a granite counter from a sample. Never.

Granite as a material is relatively inexpensive. It costs what it does from the labor involved in transporting it, cutting it, polishing it, installing it, etc. Granite from a reputable granite fabricator should start at around $55 a square foot. Beware low prices. A granite counter is only as good as its installation. Somebody who tells you he's only going to charge you $35 a square foot is going to make money somehow and the only place he has available to squeeze is labor.

There are smart ways to save money and foolish ways to do so. Going with obviously low-ball bids is a pretty foolish way to make a project cost less.

So my how-to hint about buying granite counters is pretty simple --call Cutting Edge.

Here's an interesting finish for a fridge

Amana (http://www.amana.com/catalog/product.jsp?parentCategoryId=588&categoryId=638&productId=1761&scr=category) just came out with a new refrigerator they call the "Jot" and I think it's an interesting idea. A lot of times I get caught up in specifying expensive appliances that don't necessarily reflect the way everybody lives. That was a point made abundantly clear to me when I was at my sister's house on Saturday.

My sister and her husband are the proud parents of seven really great kids. I noticed when I was over there last weekend that they'd bought a new fridge in a stainless steel look-alike material called Satina. Satina is a laminate that has the vague appearance of stainless steel. Satina, unlike stainless, is a magnetic metal. For someone like my sister and for a family like hers, the refrigerator sides and doors are where important papers, photos and drawings go so that they won't be misplaced in the crush and rush of humanity.

It's easy for someone like me, forty-something no kids, to dismiss needs like this because they aren't my needs. It's easy too for someone like me to lose sight of the fact that real people end up living in my projects and "where will we hang the kids' artwork and report cards" are the real needs of some of those same real people.

Anyhow, Amana has a new fridge called the Jot. The Jot's claim to fame is that its doors and sides are made from dry erase board. It's only available in their top-mount 30" size, but it's a start. What a cool idea though. Thanks Amana.

You light up my life (and projects)

I have a meeting this morning at the home of two new clients. I am meeting up with a lighting supplier and we're going to figure out the feasibility of the lighting plan I worked out for a kitchen and great room.

The house in question is an early-'90s open floor plan on two floors and the first floor has cathedral ceilings. The house is on the water out at the beach and my task in this case is to bring all of that fifteen-year-old "glamour" into the 21st century. As it stands now, the place looks like a set from "Miami Vice." But I'm planning to make pretty short work of it. Even though the first floor has ceilings that peak at 18 feet above the floor, the builder used ceiling-mounted lighting exclusively. Achieving a sense of scale and intimacy in this warehouse-like first floor is impossible without addressing the lighting. Enter my friends at Tech Lighting (http://www.techlighting.com/).

When I proposed using track lighting throughout the rooms of the first floor, my clients weren't exactly responsive to the idea. Like a lot of people, the image conjured up by the phrase "track lighting" sent them back to about 1978 and a space filled with spider plants in macrame plant hangers.

The new generation of track lights were pioneered by Tech Lighting and the market is flooded with knock-offs in price points across the spectrum. Tech remains the gold standard of the category. Their products come at a premium, but none of the knock-offs look as good or work as well. Tech calls their track systems "Monorail Lighting" in an attempt to dispel the image of the cover art from Carol King's classic, Tapestry.

Monorail tracks are suspended from the ceiling and the tracks themselves are scaled down to the point where they nearly disappear. In suspending the lights (and in the case of a cathedral ceiling, the tracks hang from wires ten feet off the floor) it's possible to imply a ceiling and bring the scale of a room down to something more intimate and human. The other great thing about Tech's Monorail system is the nearly overwhelming number of fixtures that attach to the tracks. In using a Tech Monorail system, I can combine ambient, task and accent lighting in one fell swoop. The effect is terrific and needn't be coldly modern. Tech just introduced a series of drum-shaded pendants that brings a little tradition along for the ride. I love you Tech Lighting!

Check out a cool new water filter

My friends over at Treehugger.com mentioned something in an article about water yesterday, and here it is. This thing is my new favorite object. It's beautiful, really. It's a water filter that's perfectly designed, sure enough. Yet it's also constructed from inert materials like glass and porcelain.

Bottled water is bad news for a host of reasons. It's an expensive way to buy filtered tap water; millions of barrels of increasingly scarce oil get used to manufacture the bottles; once manufactured, polycarbonates are with us forever and their disposal is a growing problem; polycarbonates themselves aren't inert and their abilities to leach into the liquids they carry is of particular concern to me. If you'd like to read up on some of the research about just how dynamic supposedly stable polycarbonates are, check out this.

Anyhow, the point of this is to pimp this cool new THING that's the answer to filtering tap water while avoiding polycarbonate containers. Enter the Aquaovo. As fond as I am of my Brita pitcher and Da29-00020b fridge filter, it's not something I'd leave out to impress company. Considering that it's made from pseudo-estrogen-leaching polycarbonate I'm not so sure it impresses me anymore either.