Happy Eat Too Much And Take A Nap On The Sofa Day

Be grateful. What a cool thing, a whole day set aside specifically for thinking about how good life is rather than how rotten things can be. For all the loose talk about Christmas spirit that goes around at this time of year, I'll take Thanksgiving Day spirit any time. Now I think I'll go bake some pies.

Psst. Need a quickie appetizer recipe for tomorrow?

Here's another great and clever recipe from my pals at the New York Times.

Parsley Salad
2 ounces (about 1/2 cup) soft, fleshy oil-cured black olives, pitted and halved
2 ounces (about 1 cup) flat-leaf parsley, coarsely chopped
2 ounces (about 1/3 cup) red onion, coarsely chopped
1 ounce (about 3 tablespoons) capers, rinsed of salt or brine
1 large garlic clove, finely chopped
10 large anchovy fillets, chopped, or additional 1/4 cup black olives
Freshly grated zest of 1 lemon
1/4 cup olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper
Lemon juice, to taste
Salt, to taste
Thin slivers of Parmesan cheese
Buttery crackers, small biscuits or toasted slices of baguette brushed with olive oil, for serving.

Just before serving, combine olives, parsley, onion, capers, garlic, anchovies, if using, and lemon zest in a bowl, and toss well to combine. Add olive oil and black pepper, and mix well. Add lemon juice and salt to taste (ingredients are very salty, so you may need only a small amount). Spoon onto a serving plate, scatter with Parmesan, and serve with crackers, biscuits or toast.

Yield: 10 to 12 servings; can be doubled.

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.