Revisiting the sink revolution

Last week, I wrote a quick piece about about the Affluence seamless sink. Within hours of that post's going live, I received a very thoughtful e-mail from Dan Sullivan. Dan Sullivan is the inventor of the seamless sink and he's also the CEO of Affluence, the company who brought the seamless sink to market.

Dan gave me his phone number and asked me to call him, so I did. What followed was an hour-long conversation with a man whose passion for his invention is contagious, let me tell you. What an inspiring story and what a great human being. Dan walked me through Affluence's website and we reviewed everything, sink by sink.

When I wrote about the Affluence originally, all I saw was the streamlined look of a seamless sink. Granted, it's an impressive feature, but it's only a third of the story.

All disposers have a clunky black stopper. In a double bowl sink, which is what most people have, there's a strainer basket on the sink side and stopper on the disposer side. Because that's the way thing just are, no one thinks that they don't coordinate. At least I never did. But in an Affluence sink, the strainer and the stopper are identical. They're identical because the drain opening and the disposer opening are the same size. Brilliant! It makes the already improved appearance look even better.

See what I mean? Now go look at your sink. If you have a double bowl set-up, take a look at how bad your stopper looks. Awful, isn't it? As I'm showing here, there's help available.

The final third of the story is how the Affluence seamless sink re-thought the act of disposer installation. Plumbers hate installing disposers. It's a labor-intensive exercise that invariably ends in bleeding knuckles. But watch this video as Dan himself installs a disposer on an Affluence sink.

All of the parts for this installation come with the sink too, so there's nothing extra to buy. Again, brilliant!

I understand completely why the Affluence Seamless Sink won the Best of Competition Award at KBIS this year. And Dan, you made a believer out of me.

A clarification for Brenda et al

I've been talking about mosaics a lot this week and last night, the great and powerful Jamie Goldberg (of Gold Notes fame) asked me a question about ending a sheeted mosaic neatly. I tried to describe my preferred way to deal with that, the Schluter Edge. I think my explanation lost a couple of people. I mentioned to Jamie too that I like seeing offset, brick patterns set vertically rather than horizontally. This seems to have thrown people for a bit of a loop as well. Here are some photos from my archives that will illustrate what I'm talking about.

Here's what I mean by a Schluter Edge.

Schluter is a brand name and Schluter makes some really great metal trims for bridging the gap left when abutting materials are of differing depths.

Here it is from a little closer.

Now, A Schluter Edge isn't the only way to end a tile backsplash. In the trade, mosaic tile manufacturers makes something that's usually called pencil, or pencil edging. Here's some pencil edging at work.

The back splash material here is a blend of travertine and marble and the pencil edge is travertine.

Make sense? Cool.

Now, most sheeted, offset mosaics come looking like this:

The ragged edges interlock and hide the seams between sheets. This works great until you want to either finish an edge cleanly or change the orientation of the pattern to a vertical one. Setting a sheet like this vertically entails cutting off its ragged edges and automatically wasting a lot of the material. I say that's a small price to pay for an effect like this:

Or this:

Here's a closer shot of that same backsplash tile.

It's a personal preference that makes tile setters hate me, but little things like this are what make a kitchen looked designed and not just installed.

The Natalie Blake collection from Ann Sacks

A little more than a week ago I reported on the tile mosaics of a ceramics artist named Natalie Blake. The offerings of Natalie Blake Studios are beautiful and original and I'm not the only one who noticed, believe me.

No less than Ann Sacks has picked up three of Natalie's designs and they are now available from Ann Sacks showrooms and authorized dealers nationwide. The series Dahlia and Nautilus can be used individually or as a vertical or horizontal mural. The third series, Botanical, is available in 20 colors and can be used individually or as a group.

Natalie's utilizes an old art form called S'graffato, that's Italian for scratched. She doesn't use molds or dies, rather each tile is sculpted and then the design is hand-impressed in the surface. Her offerings are beautiful and unique, almost like a three-dimensional wood cut.

Here's the Dahlia as a vertical mural.

Here are some details from the Dahlia.

And here's the Nautilus, also set as a vertical mural.

Here are some Naurilus detail photos.

Here are some of the individual tiles from the Botanical series.

Adobe

Yellow

Apricot

Honey

Ivy

Here's a great new series from Hakatai

My great pals at Hakatai are rolling out a new glass mosaic series called Bohemia. Bohemia features a semi-transparent glass tile mini brick set in a traditional offset pattern. The individual mosaic pieces are a half-inch thick and due to their near transparency, these mosaics will have a depth and sparkle that won't quit once they're installed.

In looking over these new patterns, they remind me of an old art class technique. Under the tutelage of the great man who taught me most of what I know about art, we used to mix oil- and water-based paints together on a heavy sheet of paper and let them interact. The result was a randomness that bordered on the impressionist and it was a terrific lesson in standing back and letting art happen.

Hakatai has captured that inadvertent, random impressionism and preserved it forever in glass. Beautiful!

Nutmeg

Chanterelle

Mallard

Mirage

Azul

Sargasso Sea

Loam

Repost: Friends, Romans, Countrymen; lend me a hand!

I notice that I'm getting a fair number of Italian readers and I'd like to extend a heartfelt benvenuto. I'd also like to ask a favor. I ran this piece in January and still haven't found any takers. If you find yourself in Rome, please consider my request. Molti grazie in anticipo!

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I bought a beautiful cashmere and silk men's pashmina in Rome last year and when I went to grab it the other morning I couldn't find it. I'm pretty sure that I left it somewhere the last time I had it on and I'm pretty sick about it.

Granted, it's just a thing so it shouldn't be a big deal. But sometimes, the loss of a thing can be a real kick to the gut. My beloved niece Sarah lived in Rome while she was in school and she gave me a great lead on a little shop that sold great scarves inexpensively.

I found the shop one day while I was walking around and it's run by an older woman and her daughter. It's a tiny storefront jammed to the rafters with nothing but scarves. The shop keepers were a delight. My Italian vocabulary increased tenfold that afternoon and between my survival Italian and their survival English we had a blast. In addition to all of that, they were selling men's pashminas for five euros a pop.

Now I love meeting new people but what I really like is meeting new people who sell one of the greatest bargains I've ever encountered. These scarves were an incredible cashmere and silk blend and I bought a bunch of them to give away as gifts. Five euros! No lie!

I saved but one for myself and now it's gone. So I'm throwing this out there: if anybody's heading to Rome let me know and I'll pay you for the trouble of buying me a replacement scarf. The store is on the Via Tomacelli, just a stone's throw from the River and the Tomb of Augustus. It's easy to miss but such a reward when you find it. Anybody?