New, Italian bath design

Excuse me while I pretend that I'm European and make a bunch of sweeping generalizations about national character. 

Nobody does bath design like an Italian company. It would be interesting to figure out where the Italian fascination with running water comes from. Is it some residual, Roman need for clean water or is it the fact that their tap water tastes so good? Whatever's underneath it doesn't matter because what's visible is so stunning.

These are some new bathroom designs from the Idea Group. The Idea Group is in Treviso, in the Veneto Region of northern Italy. Treviso is also the headquarters of DeLonghi appliances. 

Disegnato in Italia --designed in Italy, means a lot to Italians and Northern Italians in particular. Again, to make some more sweeping generalizations, there's a celebration of the every day in Italian culture. Details matter in Italy, and there seems to be some kind of an Italian genetic predisposition to make everything as beautifully functional as possible. It doesn't matter if it's an Alessi salt shaker or a pair of Prada shoes, a lot of thought goes into otherwise mundane objects.

Anyhow this is about Italian bathrooms. I get Idea's e-newsletter and here's some of the highlights from their current collection. I never get to do work like this but if I were given carte blanche to do whatever I wanted with a bathroom, it would end up looking something like these gorgeous photos.

Ahhh, pared down and clean --everything a bathroom should be, in Italy or anywhere else.

More from Christophe Niemann

Christophe Niemann, whose fantastic tile mosaics I featured earlier, is also an author of children's books. His latest is a children's book, The Pet Dragon is available on Amazon. Check it out below.

The rest of Christophe's work is available on Amazon as well. He's as clever an author as he is a tile designer. Got kids? Christmas is coming you know...

A whole new take on bathroom mosaics

Christoph Niemann is a former New Yorker and now Berlin-based artist who writes a blog for the New York Times. Niemann's Abstract City is always an interesting read. He talks a lot about his family and their transition to living in Germany. In a post he wrote in August, he talked about his bathroom renovation project.

According to Niemann, he'd always had a dream of doing abstract pixel drawings of masterworks using nothing but colored 4x4 ceramic tile. 4x4 is the default size for bath tile and it's something I chase people away from under normal circumstances. After having seen Niemann's handiwork, I doubt I'll be so quick to dismiss the stuff anymore.

Check this out. Here are two David Hockneys. And next to each is how Niemann interpreted them in 4x4s.

In some kind of a play for my sympathies, he took on a Rothko and it has me swooning.

Now, he's using layout software to draw a grid and then he's assigning each square a color from a palette. I'm really floored by what he did here. I mean, who could imagine taking boring old 4x4s and turning them into this? Certainly not I.

So after playing around for a while, he settled on a Warhol.

Using Andy Warhol, who was himself doing an homage, in a bathroom makes prefect sense and here's the shower stall he ended up with.

I have never seen anything like this. I'm used to looking forward at new stuff that's coming down the pike, I never think to stop and re-evaluate what's already here. These tiles are everywhere and he probably paid a dime apiece for them. I go through my normal working life thinking that wall tile that costs $35 a square foot is cheap. 4x4 ceramic is so far below my radar that I can't even see it. Pardon me, my paradigm just shifted.

So with the master bath done, Niemann turned his attention to the bathroom shared by his three sons. He relates that his sons are obsessed with the New York subway system, so he turned his interpreting skills to an MTA map.

His plan was to tile the entire bathroom, so he imported his layouts into a 3-D renderer.

So with his layout rendered, all that was left to do was install the tile. Check this out:

Mr. Niemann, I owe you a thank you. Several thank yous actually. I read the New York Times every day because I like to stay informed and I believe that the Times keeps my horizons expanded. Sometimes, and this is one of those times, they get expanded so far I don't recognize them anymore. Wow.

Check out U Gallery

Since I've been on an art kick lately, check out this painting.

That's Three Guys in the Trees by Will Halstead from the University of Arizona. It reminds me of a memory of my brothers. It's pretty funny actually. Three men sharing the same space yet all three looking in different directions.

Here's another one:

That's The Red House by Rachel Miller from the University of the Arts. It takes me back to the small town I called home when I was a kid. And how about this?

That's a collage called Caught by the University of Georgia's Cosumina Hardman. It's a snapshot of why I live near the beach.

Great stuff, all of it. And it's available through a unique website called U Gallery. U Gallery sells student art from around the country and it grants a huge audience to artists who would otherwise toil in anonymity. Student work has a raw energy to it that I always loved when I was a student myself, and it's something I appreciate still. Think about it, student artists are in the process of finding their voices and the same time they're cocooned  in an environment that encourages and challenges them to take risks. The galleries on U Gallery's site speak to this eloquently.

This site's a great way to fill your home and your life with art. What a great thing to do too, buying student work. Starting out as a painter or a sculptor or a photographer has to be the toughest lot of all, yet some people still do it. As a culture, we're better for it immeasurably. To get a sense of what I mean, go over to U Gallery and see for yourself.

And then I got "friended" by an artist whose work I admire

After hanging out with my nieces and nephews a couple of weekends ago, I went out and joined Facebook. At the time, I thought it was a grasping for my lost youth, but once I got my profile up and running I got the bum's rush from all kinds of people from my past. People my age even. Amazing. It's really neat to touch base with people from my newspaper days in Pittsburgh, my wild days as a vagabond or even people I knew in High School. And while all of these people are climbing out of my past, all of my nieces and nephews and current are in there too. I've moved around a bit in my day and it's an amazing thing to see all of these people who have known me at various stages of my life all arrayed in one place. Check it out.

Well on or about day two I ran into Portland, OR-based artist Matte Stephens, whose work I profiled in a blog entry on 11 July, Great rooms deserve great art. Matte's work is gaining more attention in the art and design world and he still sells prints of his work through Etsy. His Etsy shop is called Braniac: the Art of Matte Stephens. I love this guy's stuff as much now as I did when I first became aware of him last spring.

There's a playfulness to his work that really appeals to me, but it's working on an adult level. There's a studied whimsy and a sense of adventurous joy to his paintings, and he takes his simple shapes and spins a narrative that just draws me in. Really, I could look at this stuff for hours.

So pop on over to Matte's shop on Etsy and see the rest of his work there. It's a great way to spend some time and to spend some money. The man's going places, believe me.