And speaking of vacations

Check it out. The kids at Google Maps have been busy, and I mean busy, expanding their Street View function to more and more of the world. I got clued in to this latest expansion by Scintilla at Bell'Avventura who mentioned that Positano had made it onto the list of places with Street Views.

Huge swaths of Europe are included now but I homed right in on Italy. I'm amazed by this technology. Do yourself a favor and head over to Google Maps and then drop the little yellow guy anywhere you'd like to get a pedestrian's view. Once it's activated, you can pan up and down and turn a whole 360 degrees. Try it!

Here's how the Villa Terrazza looks from the road down to the Marina Picola in Sorrento. My friends and I rented a floor of that villa less than a year ago. Astounding! I cannot get over how clear these screen captures are.

Here's the view of the Villa Terrazza from the Marina Piccola itself. Wow. I feel like I'm back there.

The "Farmashop" on the left side of this screen capture was where I had to go explain to a Pharmacist that I had developed athlete's foot from traipsing around southern Italy in wet hiking boots. It was the ultimate test of my conversational Italian skills, not to mention my ability to use my iron will where my language skills fall short. Yet there it is on my laptop. It's like I'm there again. "I funghi sono in pedi!" I'm shouting that at my laptop as I write this. That's not a very grammatical Italian sentence, but it made the necessary point --I have fungus on my feet.

This is the coastal road between Sorrento and Positano. You and work your way over to the wall and look down into the abyss. What's a safety rail anyway?

It's a virtual vacation. Google Maps can take you all through Naples, most of the way down the Amalfi Coast, up to Rome, Florence, Perugia, Livorno, Bologna, Milan, Genoa, etc. If you're not in the mood for an Italian get away, You can stroll the streets of Marseille or Paris. How about Madrid or Amsterdam? London's in there now as are most of the cities in Japan. Mapping the world like this is an ambitious project and leave it up to Google to undertake it in the first place. Leave it up to Google too to make is so smart and accessible.

Lisa's Pysanka kitchen

So by popular request, here's a walk though the presentation Lisa from Massachusetts entered to win our much ballyhoo-d contest. As I mentioned on Friday, she chose for her theme the Pysanka school of decorative arts. And specifically a Pysanka Easter egg. I keep forgetting that we're a week from Easter, but her basing a kitchen design on a Ukrainian Easter egg is timely in addition to being brilliant.

I mentioned earlier that I'm a push over for ethnicity of any stripe, but in addition to that aspect of her entry, Lisa took two disparate things --an Easter egg and a kitchen-- and merged them into something fantastic. I'm really struck by her instinct here, it's design in every sense of the word. My idea behind this contest was togive people an excuse to dream up something for the sheer joy of using imagination. I was hoping that someone would run with it the way Lisa did. I wasn't expecting anyone to, but as soon as her entry arrived on Thursday I was thrilled to see someone had. You can click on these images and they'll expand to a size large enough where you can read her notes.

This is not a kitchen that's going to end up in Lisa's home any time soon, but the point of pushing into the realm of what's possible is to discover buried passions and ideas that will make it into her actual kitchen and home.

She's not a designer by the way. She referred to herself as a regular Jane in her entry. Well, I do this for a living and I have a lot to learn from this entry. All too often, it's easier to think of my limitations than it is my possibilities. I find her entry an inspiration and in showing the bulk of it here, I hope you can see how I made the decision I did. Many thanks to everyone who sent me an entry. I hope that in sitting down to write down your thoughts you were able to see something you wouldn't have otherwise.

Ow! My eyes!

The delightful Adrienne Palmer, she's the voice of the great blog Susan Palmer Designs Blog, is trying to give me a stroke. She sent me a note the other night and included these images. She found them on a Croatian interior design forum. In Croatia's defense, everything I saw there was really sharp and interesting. That was, until I came to this hotel bar.

Adrienne called it "Staron meets polished Emperador marble," and that's exactly what this thing is made from. Someone spent a huge amount of money on this room and now it's being mocked by strangers. I feel like Mr. Blackwell or something. 

Seriously, can you imagine trying to navigate these vertigo-inducing steps to get out of this bar after an evening's revelry? 

And then just to poke me with a stick, Adrienne pondered, "What would Jonathan Adler think?" Jonathan Adler would add a couple of large stuffed animals, orange giraffes most likely. He'd then be praised by shelter mags across the land for his "vision." Ugh. 

I love it when somebody sends me something because they know I'll have a fit. Thanks Adrienne!

And the winner is...

[This prize was awarded but never delivered. I was played the fool by a huckster. Please see my post Texts, lies and the final escape: when good contests go bad from 24 February 2010 for a thorough explanation. Do yourself a favor and read the comments that follow that post for an even more thorough explanation. Do not do business with anyone affiliated with Metallo Arts, past or present.]



After sorting through the contest entries for the last 18 hours or so I have come to a decision. I'll spare you the details of my agony, but know that I agonized over this.

The winner of a $3200 gift certificate from Metallo Arts and ten hours of my design time is a woman named Lisa and her Pysanka kitchen. Pysanka is the Ukrainian folk art of painting eggs and objects with meaningful and intricate geometric designs.

I am a sucker for ethnicity of any kind and Lisa pulled out the stops in her incredibly detailed vision of a kitchen based on a Pysanka egg. Here are some excerpts:

Congratulations Lisa!

Reader question: Can I paint tumbled marble?

Help! Is it possible to paint on tumbled marbled tiles with permanent pigment inks and seal it with a sealant? Can this then be used for a kitchen backsplash?  If yes, then what brand of permanent pigment inks are best to use and which sealant to use?

Hmmmmm. You aren't indicating to me whether or not these tumbled marble tiles are already on a wall or if they're in a box waiting to be placed on a wall. In either case, my advice remains the same. Sure you can paint tumbled marble tile, but just because you can doesn't mean you should. So stop right now and don't do it. Make some coasters out of that tile because that's about all it's good for.

Let me disclaim something here. I hate tumbled marble. I think it looks cheesy and cheap. There, I said it. Tumbled marble is made from marble and travertine that's not of sufficient quality to be used without the tumbled finish. In other words, it's made from the reject pile. It would be one thing if it were sold as a cheap material made from rejects, but it's not. People think of it as being some kind of classy addition to their homes but it's anything but. It's a spongy, soft material that sucks up whatever liquid gets near it. That's why it makes a good coaster but a really lousy back splash.

It's sort of like giving someone a fur coat only to admit later that it's a rabbit fur coat. It's a cheap imitation of luxury and it looks bad at the same time. Ugh. See these photos littering this post today? This is what bad kitchen renovations look like and what do all of them have in common? Cheesy, cheap tumbled marble, that's what. There are no shortcuts to character. Putting a rough finish on formerly rejected stone tile doesn't make it look interesting, it makes it look cheap.

So my advice to you is don't do it. Don't paint it, don't stain it and don't use it. If it's already on the wall, chip it off and start over. If you're itching to do something with your back splash and you don't have a whole lot of money to spend I can understand that. Frankly at this stage of the game I can relate to it too. 

A better idea if you're looking to tile a back splash is to just get plain, white 6" x 3" ceramic tiles and set them in a subway pattern. You can find those tiles for a quarter apiece if you're clever and setting tile is really easy. Install a white tile back splash and use white grout with it. It's a classic pattern and it's been around for more than 150 years. Don't get cute with it and it will look great forever. And by cute I mean by cutting in inserts and listellos. Just keep it basic and make your kitchen interesting with accessories, but just a few of them. Contrast the ceramic tile photo above with the festival 'o cheese above it. You know, the one with the red toaster. That kind of stuff makes my eyes bleed. Is that what you want? I hope not. Tumbled marble always ends up looking like that --cheesy. Don't do it.