Alessi stainless steel at 20% off!

The household design gods at Alessi are having a sale on select stainless steel kitchenware. Starting today and running through 30 June, Alessi is launching a one-time stainless steel promotion. They are offering a 20% discount on many of their stainless steel classics and if you buy a second, discounted item, you'll receive a bookmark from their Girotondo collection.

Go ahead, add some Italian panache to your kitchen!

Cameron Frye's house is on the market

Who's Cameron Frye? Here's a clue, he's on the left in this photo.

Remember? Cameron Frye was Ferris Bueller's best friend in 1986's still-funny Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I was 21 when I saw that movie for the first time and I can't help but watch it again every time I stumble on it when I'm channel surfing.

Anyhow, Ferris' best friend Cameron is a sad sack, a hypochondriac and constant worrier. As the movie progresses, we learn that he's a mess because he's ignored at home. To illustrate that point, toward the end of the movie, the action progresses to Cameron's house. Cameron lives with his father in a mid-century marvel. It's an ode to minimalism this house and the director wants to play on his audience's prejudices against minimalism. Conventional wisdom holds that minimalism is cold and unfeeling and so the filmmaker, John Hughes, puts Cameron in a minimalist setting to describe and explain Cameron's inner life.

I called foul then and I call a foul now every time I see this movie. I remember being positively smitten with Cameron's house when I saw the movie wa-a-a-a-y back when. I lacked the vocabulary to describe what I liked about it then, but I sure don't lack it any more. Minimalism is not cold. I repeat, minimalism is not cold. Minimalism leaves nowhere to hide and provides no distractions and I say that's the real reason it makes some people uncomfortable. Minimalist settings require that the people who live in them lead intentioned, orderly lives. "Where's the warmth?" I hear people say all the time. To which I reply, "The warmth comes from the people who live in the space."

Anyhow, the house where Cameron Frye lived is on the market for a cool 2.3 million bucks. Christies has the listing and they've put together a really great website for the house. The house is being sold as-is and it needs new bathrooms and a new kitchen. Other than that though, it's move-in ready. Here are some of the photos of the house from the listing agent.

Copyright © 2009 Sotheby's International Realty Affiliates LLC

Copyright © 2009 Sotheby's International Realty Affiliates LLC

 © 2009 Sotheby's International Realty Affiliates LLC

 © 2009 Sotheby's International Realty Affiliates LLC

© 2009 Sotheby's International Realty Affiliates LLC

The house was designed by A. James Speyer, who was a well-known mid-century architect. His achievements on the house's design were hailed far and near. He built the home for Ben and Frances Rose. Ben Rose was a well-known textile artist whose work still hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. Ben Rose's art is difficult to find these days, but here are two of his textiles from the AIC.

Girafters, 1949

Anterlopers, 1965

He had a sense of humor, that for sure.

So if you're interested in mid-century design or minimalism, this home is a textbook study in both. If you hate mid-century design or minimalism, this home is a perfect example of those two movements at their most pure. Looking over the images on Christie's website just might be your water at the well moment. Hah!

New Ravenna Mosaics defines the word mosaic

A week ago, I was reading an article written by Adrienne Palmer on Susan Palmer's Design Blog and I came across this image. It's a mosaic back splash from New Ravenna Mosaics and Stone.

Beautiful kitchen yes, but what caught my eye was the mosaic on the wall behind the sink. Here's the detail shot Adrienne ran as part of her story.

My God, that mosaic's made with natural stone. I was hooked immediately. I left a comment to that effect after Adrienne's article and within an hour I had an e-mail in my in-bin from Sara Baldwin. Sara Baldwin is the artistic and entrepreneurial driving force behind New Ravenna Mosaic and Stone. She's also one very cool woman.

New Ravenna bills itself as the country's premier designer and manufacturer of stone and glass mosaic tile and I don't doubt that claim for a second. These mosaics are easily the most beautiful I've ever seen. There's a quality and thoughtfulness here that's something I'd expect to see in commissioned art. At first, that's what I thought New Ravanna was --the work of a single artist. 

I spoke with Sara Baldwin in a wide-ranging conversation last week and it turns out that New Ravenna is a 100-person strong organization in rural Virginia. So instead of a single artist working on a custom piece, New Ravenna employs a hundred of them.

Most of New Ravenna's work is done as fully custom design projects. However, they have an extensive collection of production patterns that can be ordered from any of their 200 distributors nationwide.

In looking over these patterns, it's pretty clear that these designs are the product of someone who knows how to work with the materials at hand. But they go a couple steps beyond that. If you look through New Ravenna's collections, you can see that for every design that's brand new and modern, there's also a design that's a modern take on on a classic pattern.

The classically-inspired designs are what appeal to me most about New Ravenna's offerings. I love classical designs and motifs but it doesn't take any real artistic ability to copy a Roman or Moorish pattern. On the other hand, to take inspiration from a classical form and to re-interpret it with modern eye takes something akin to genius. New Ravenna's revisitations of these classics are what make a believer out of me.

Spend some time combing though the New Ravenna Mosaic and Stone website and you'll see what I mean. I have a long-lived admiration for the art of mosaic and I've seen a lot of them. I can honestly say though, that it gets no better than this. I have never seen natural stone, and now glass look as good as this. Bravo!

Induction cooking just got easier

Fagor, the Spanish appliance manufacturer, has just rolled out a new, portable induction cook top and it is slick. Fagor has been around since the early '50s and they are the largest manufacturer of induction cook tops in Europe. They have been a growing presence in the US market since the early '90s, and this is a company that's earned its chops.

The Fagor portable is lightweight and powerful. It weighs seven pounds and has a temperature range of 160 to 430 degrees. As with all induction cook tops, the appliance itself doesn't get that hot, it's the pot that does. I wrote an explanation of induction cookery here.

This portable has a lot of the features I'd expect to find in a much more expensive built in model. Features such as a built in countdown timer, a digital touch control panel, six power levels, and auto pan detector, a child lock, auto shut down and and a self-diagnosis and error reporting system.

This single, portable burner has all of those features; the legendary speed and hyper efficiency of all induction cookers at the easy to take price of $200. These cook tops make a fantastic supplement to an existing cooking arrangement and they are also a great way to give induction cooking a trial run. Bravo Fagor!

Beware sketchy, industry-sponsored "research"

I read a blog every day called Barf Blog. Barf Blog is a project of University of Kansas associate professor of Food Safety Doug Powell. Powell has an extensive background in microbiology as well as a biting, entertaining wit. Barf Blog may be an academic exercise, but it sure doesn't read like one. Several times a day, Powell and a bunch of his food safety pals publish posts about how food safety and microbiology effect every day life. They do this with a tremendous sense of humor and a complete disavowal of scare tactics. Barf Blog is living proof that reason and rational thought will save the day every time.

OK with that said, last week, Ben Chapman wrote a great post debunking the results of a bogus study commissioned by the Canadian Plastic Industry Association that purported to prove that reusable grocery bags are a health hazard. They proved no such thing, but the story made it into the pages of my local paper anyhow.

Swab-testing of a scientifically-meaningful sample of both single-use and reusable grocery bags found unacceptably high levels of bacterial, yeast, mold and coliform counts in the reusable bags. The swab testing was conducted March 7-April 10th by two independent laboratories. The study found that 64% of the reusable bags were contaminated with some level of bacteria and close to 30% had elevated bacterial counts higher than the 500 CFU/mL considered safe for drinking water.

Coliform bacteria, yeast and mold are everywhere and trying to eliminate them is the ultimate fool's errand. Their presence on the surface of a grocery bag, an apple or your hands means nothing. Coliform bacteria in your drinking water is an all together different situation, but a grocery bag isn't a glass of tap water. There is coliform bacteria anywhere where there are life forms that poop nearby. Finding generic coliform bacteria in water is a test to see if a water source has been exposed to poop or not. Poop, human and otherwise, can carry all manner of dangerous pathogens and coliform counts in water samples are an an important and easily detectable warning sign. On its own, most coliform bateria is harmless. However, a very specific form of it is bad news and that form has a name, E. coli 0157:H7. The study found zero traces of 0157:H7 and states that finding clearly:

No E. coli or Salmonella was detected in any of the bags.

However, it follows up immediately with the conjecture that they might find some if they look harder. Spare me. That finding is buried in the Specific Results section of this paper:

The unacceptable presence of coliforms, that is, intestinal bacteria, in some of the bags tested, suggests that forms of E. coli associated with severe disease could be present in small but a significant portion of the bags if sufficient numbers were tested.

The finding of 500 CFU/mL makes me wonder too, because that's a measure for liquids. It means Colony Forming Unit per milliliter. The authors of this "study" found 500 colony forming units of coliform bacteria in a milliliter of grocery bag. Huh?

Clearly, this study was the handiwork of an industry feeling the pinch of people switching to reusable grocery bags and that's it. Releasing unscientific findings in the form of press release preys on most peoples' scientific illiteracy and fears. It's ridiculous, but what's really ridiculous is the outright fear mongering and the illogical leap to the idea that reusable grocery bags are responsible for food-born illness. 

But I suppose it's no more illogical and ridiculous than the claim that I need to use reusable grocery bags so that I can save the earth, what ever that means.

So why not this? The simple and rational reason to switch to reusable grocery bags is that they are a more efficient use of resources and they cost less money over time. You're not going to get impetigo from them any more than you're going to save the rain forest. What you will do though is reduce the amount of solid waste you generate, help to reduce the US's dependence on imported oil and you'll help to cut down on the amount of garbage that ends up being washed into waterways.

Their use is a smart way to lead a more efficient life, so go be more efficient and ignore industry-sponsored findings.