A shower fit for a king

In about three hours I'm going to sign a contract on a house renovation. It's a nice job, we're transforming a waterfront ranch house that's currently a rabbit warren of small rooms into an open floor plan with a water view from nearly every room in the house. The centerpiece of the new floor plan is a large, efficient kitchen of course. There's also a reconstructed master suite. The current master bath is a thirty-year-old afterthought. It's what a bathroom looked like in its day, and mercifully that day has passed.

Make that, it's about to pass.

The new bath has an open shower in it and more than any other aspect of this project, I cannot wait to see this shower once it's built. I've put together similar showers before but the shower in this job will feature a Sensori shower by Brizo. I've specified Brizo faucets before, but this is my first Sensori shower .

Ordinary shower systems are complicated, unnecessarily so. Cobbling one together using another brand's components was always a crap shoot. Manufacturers tend not to make whole suites of shower fixtures and it can be frustrating to try to put together a multiple component shower that has some cohesion. Is it too much to ask that the body sprays, handhelds, ceiling-mounted showerheads, mixer valves, etc., all look the same and have the same finish? Unfortunately, it is too much to ask of most brands.

However, like so much of what Brizo does, Brizo threw away the business as usual and started over when they developed the Sensori shower system. Each collection is a complete collection of coordinated parts available in all of Brizo's finishes. Specifying shower parts is now an à la carte process. I pick the parts from a list, specify the finish and I'm done.

The technical part's relatively easy too. Brizo's website has a custom planning guide that takes the guesswork out of the plumbing side of these showers. I'm impressed with the thought that went into these showers, add to that that these components are exceptionally well made and we have a winner all around. My clients know that I'm pretty jazzed by this shower, but they have no clue the wonders that await them when this project's complete. I cannot wait to hear what they think when it's all finished.

Go for it Melody!

The image above was taken in downtown Lancaster, PA. Lancaster's my home town. Actually, I grew up in a one-horse town just north of Lancaster, but Lancaster's a good reference point. Besides, it's a lovely town. Another good friend of mine hails from Lancaster too.

Melody McFarland grew up in different one-horse town a couple of miles away from the one where I did. Our paths probably crossed hundreds of times, though we never met. When we did meet, it was many years after we left our quiet home town. She lived in Japan then and I lived in Florida. Melody's one of my favorite people. She has a perspective I admire and more talent than should be allowed by law.

After a nearly 20 year absence, Melody and her husband moved back to Lancaster last summer. The reports of profound culture shock I was expecting never materialized. Instead, Melody's found her way into the burgeoning art scene in once-sleepy Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Melody's a biologist by training and an artist at heart. She's a photographer's photographer and I have long admired her work. This weekend, she's mounting her first public exhibition of her photography. Yokosuka in Lancaster opens at Circa, in downtown Lancaster tomorrow evening. If you find yourself anywhere near South-Central Pennsylvania this weekend, head over to Circa and see some of Melody's work.

Melody's exhibition consists of images she captured while she lived in Yokosuka, a city at the mouth of Tokyo Bay. Her goal in this collection of photographs is to show images of Japan that get beyond the expected. You won't find any sumo wrestlers or cherry blossoms, but you will find long-horned beetles and the close up of a crow's eye.

I love her ability to find beauty in unexpected places and settings. Through her camera's lens, anyone can see the wonder she sees when she comes upon a stinkbug or a stand of azaleas on a misty morning. Hers is an appealing and inviting perspective and I can't get enough of it.

I've included some of her images in this post, and she has the rest of them (along with a price list) on her blog, I Like Pigeons Because Nobody Else Does. Break a leg Mel, you're going to do great!

More lighting fun with Kichler's Design Pro LEDs

Last January, I wrote two posts introducing Kichler's Design Pro LED lighting. You can read them here and here. Back then, the Pro series had to two models of under cabinet lighting. What's really interesting about Kichler's Design Pro LED lighting series is that the warm, white light they produce is similar to the light produced by an incandescent bulb. The similarities stop there though. The LEDs used in Kichler's Design Pro lights uses 75% less electricity and each bulb is rated with a 40,000 hour lifespan. That's 20 years. The energy and replacement light bulb savings over the course of 20 years makes the initial cost of LED lights a bargain.

Kichler just added onto the Design Pro series in the form of these rail lights.

The first is a modern, urban four-light rail. It's available in a brushed nickel finish with a white glass shade. Each light along the rail swivels independently.

And the second is a more transitional four-light rail. It's available in the brushed nickel finish with white glass as well as in an Olde Bronze finish with a light umber glass shade. As with its more modern cousin, each light swivels independently on this fixture.

Here's the more modern rail in a bathroom, and you can see the independent swiveling in action. That these lights can be positioned independently is the key feature here. This means that you can use the rail fixtures above an island with the shades positioned for reading the newspaper, or in the kitchen, trained toward a counter for food preparation. Each shade swivels 90 degrees and rotates up to 359 degrees. Each model has the same dimensions, 42-and-a-half inches in length, four-and-a-half inches in width and nine inches in height. These are substantial fixtures that when when placed properly, will provide years of proper lighting.

These are great features and that's a huge amount of light coming out of an LED. Kichler is really onto something with this Pro series. These lights are available at independent lighting showrooms and you can learn more about them on Kichler's website.

Rachele from The Conscious Kitchen installed Kichler's Design Pro LED under cabinet lights in her recent and beautiful kitchen renovation. I wonder what it would take to get her to weigh in with an opinion about them... Rachele?

More to love about New York and more art underground

I brought up New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority and their Arts for Transit program a couple of weeks ago. The MTA dedicates 1% of the money it brings in every year to fund permanent art installations throughout New York's entire transit system.

Over the course of the last 21 years, the MTA has assembled what's clearly New York's most expansive art collection. The works are all site-specific and feature media that range from mosaic to cast bronze and from faceted glass to enamel.

My smart friend Tom knows I love the Arts for Transit program and he sent me some images of some gorgeous mosaics located throughout the MTA's system and he sent me the link to the directory of these installations. I spent an hour poking around and jumping from station to station, just looking for works I already know and love and earmarking works to find the next time I'm in the City. I came across an old favorite and I hadn't thought about it in years.

This is Canal Street.

Canal Street offers what I say is the most intense example of urban life that there is to be found in the US. It's impossible to walk down Canal Street and not get caught up in the crush of humanity and traffic and noise and the thrill of being alive in the center of the universe.

Now if you duck down this hole in the sidewalk at the corner of Canal Street and 6th Avenue, you'll come face to face with Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz's The Gathering from 2001.

The Gathering is a collection of 181 life-sized, bronze blackbirds, grackles and crows and they're integrated perfectly into the grates and gates of the station and platforms.

Canal Street's about as far as one can be removed from anything resembling a non-human life form and it's a pretty jarring surprise to run into 181 black birds in a subway station underneath the bedlam unfolding in the streets above. I love birds, I love New York and I love art. It's a grand slam. Thank you MTA.

The Gathering is the work of Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz and I wrote about them last August. Martin and Muñoz created a series of provocative snow globes I am still crazy about. Snow globes? Yes, snow globes. Follow the link and check check them out.

Anyhow, if you find yourself in New York and want to take an unconventional museum tour, buy a $2 Metro Card and cruise from station to station. The MTA's website makes plotting out such a tour easy.

Art is important, I'll go so far as to say that it's vital to the health of a society. Seeing the amount of time, money and attention the Metropolitan Transit Authority spends on public art should serve as an example to cities across the rest of the US. In a time of contracting economies and squeezed budgets, Art's still important. Maybe it's even more important now than ever.

Follow up to a follow up to a post from two weeks ago: the wall tile that nearly did in my client

So by popular demand, here's an image of the kitchen that caused the ruckus I wrote about on 15 and 16 September. I think it's pretty mild, but to the eyes of my client, it was pushing so far into the realm of the avant-guard she could barely stand it.

The tile:

The cabinet color:.

The counters:

The lights are showing up really orange-y in this image. In life, they are an amber-y brown that plays against the wall tile nicely. Here they are:

The pendants are the Sasha II from Besa Lighting with an "Amber Cloud" shade.

This was by no means a bad kitchen or a bad job or anything I think is unattractive. It's a reasonably-priced job that I made look a lot more expensive through a couple of the tricks and tips I've learned over the years. Even so, it's not something that would make it into my brag file under ordinary circumstances.

Again, there's nothing wrong with it and I'm having an epiphany here. Hold on a minute. I see myself as a high-end designer and in a lot of ways I am. The work that ends up in the file I show prospects is from high five-figure (and more than a few six-figure) jobs. But now that I think about it, I haven't landed anything with a budget that high since the stock market crashed a year ago. The biggest job I have going right now has a budget of $60,000 that's going toward a major kitchen overhaul, a master bath and a significant reworking of the interior walls on the first floor of this house. Two years ago, that job would have had a budget twice what it is now and would have been a significantly more ambitious project.

But it's not two years ago and in this market at least, people are spending less money on home renovations. I'm thrilled for the work and the project I'm describing will most definitely make it into my brag file. But since the bulk of everything I've done for the last year has been more along the $28,000 renovation pictured at the beginning of this post, is my glamor job brag file spooking people? I wonder if I should show off my lower-budget jobs in these troubled times.

Seriously, what do you think? If you were a client interviewing designers, what would you want to see? Is an aspirational portfolio a turn off?