Bring me a Power Mat

An increasingly important consideration I have to take when I'm putting together a design for somebody's kitchen is where to put the chargers? I dislike cluttering up my designs with an assortment of wall warts, so usually I bury a cluster of outlets inside of a wall cabinets. That way, people can plug in their chargers and then just shut the door. This works when I have enough room to make one of these impromptu charging stations. A lot of times though, storage space is a premium and I can't spare the room for a buried charging station.

Enter the Powermat. Check it out.

The iPhone will lie down with the Blackberry... Cool! That Powermat can charge three devices at one time and it has a single, streamlined plug. Brilliant. It looks good too. I wouldn't mind something like this sitting on a counter in the least. Here's a video tour of the new must-have in every kitchen I design from now on. At $99, who can argue?.




It really does make that sound when it engages. I know what I'm buying myself this Christmas.

Quick! Buy a brand new indoor air polluter for just $68!

Someone sent me this yesterday along with a gushing note, "OMG! Did you see Jonathan Adler has reed diffusers now?" No, I didn't know and I suspect that I was happier not knowing than I am now.

Good Lord, in what kind of a world to people gush over a $68 bottle of stink? And no, $68 is not a typo. Further, why would anyone pay someone $68 for a bottle of stink who's previously recommended this for a girl's bedroom?

How is that even remotely attractive? I get it, he's being campy. But please, does an eight-year-old girl need to live with a middle-aged man's idea of what's clever? Does anyone really want their kids to sleep in a room that purposely ugly? If I haven't mentioned this in a while, the emperor has no clothes.

If I want a reed diffuser, why should I not buy this one from Target for $9? At $9, it's still a waste of money but it's a little more palatable than it is when it costs seven-and-a-half times as much.

This same, thoughtful soul who sent me the alert about the Adler reed diffusers takes absurd delight and sending me all sorts of helpful reminders. Most of them have to do with the hidden dangers posed to me by the mysterious "toxins" that surround me and why I need to "live green" and "detoxify" myself regularly. So lady who will remain anonymous, this one's for you.

The conventional wisdom holds that one of the "toxins" that threaten me with every breath are VOCs. Well, conventional wisdom likes to latch onto a scientific concept and then run with it to as many silly ends as are available. VOC is an acronym and it stands for volatile organic compound. Volatile means that something evaporates at room temperature. Organic means that something's carbon-based (not the meaningless label people use to charge more for groceries), and a compound is a blend of two or more chemical elements.

VOC is a generic term and it can describe anything from the scent of a rose to paint fumes. However, the US EPA has identified a subset of VOCs as health threats. A small subset of VOCs are reason for concern,  and one of those VOCs is called dipropylene glycol methyl ether or DPGME. If you ran a business and you allowed you employees to be exposed to high levels of DPGME, you would be shut down and fined so fast you wouldn't know what hit you.

Now, reed diffusers are an odd bird. How they work is that a scented oil concoction is allowed to evaporate slowly through a wicking action. A scented oil (which is a VOC) by itself is too thick to wick efficiently so it's mixed with a chemical like ethyl alcohol (another VOC) to thin it out. Once it's thinned though, it wicks too efficiently and it needs a third chemical, another VOC, to slow it down. That VOC is more often than not our old pal dipropylene glycol methyl ether, or DPGME.

So when you buy a reed diffuser, whether it's an absurdly priced one from Jonathan Adler or a cheaper one from Target, you are filling your bathroom with DPGME and it very rapidly exceeds levels deemed to be safe for occupational exposure by the EPA and OSHA. Here's OSHA's fact sheet on DPGME. Isn't it hilarious that a lot of the same people who claim to get sick from paint fumes can fill their homes with reed diffusers and scented candles and thrive?

Chemistry's your friend folks. Really.

Updated Eichler kitchens

Last week, a woman named Johnna left a series of comments here and she mentioned that she was having difficulty making decisions about how to renovate her Eichler home. She wanted to update the kitchen particularly, but in a way that honored the architecture of her home while still allowing the business of life in 2009 to proceed efficiently.

Well, the terrific website Styleture ran a story yesterday about that very thing, updated kitchens in Eichler homes. So with all attribution to and great admiration for Styleture, I'm going to talk about the same thing. But first a little background. Johnna, if you're reading this, you can skip this part.

Joseph Eichler was a post-war, California real estate developer who built homes in a Modernist style. He worked with some of the most notable architects of the time and together the style of their buildings came to be known as California Modern. California Modern was a middle class homage to Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. The homes featured exposed beams, vaulted ceilings, open floor plans and they pioneered the idea of indoor/outdoor living through the use of enormous windows and sliding patio doors. California Modern is what gave the rest of the world the very idea of a great room.

Most of the remaining Eichlers are clustered in the suburbs of of San Francisco and there are pockets of them outside of LA and into Orange County. Nothing screams California to me like an Eichler and about the only thing that could get me to pack up and head to suburban San Francisco would be the chance to live in one.

Eichler homes were were revolutionary for a host of reasons that transcend architecture. Eichler built affordable homes for everyone. In 1950, Eichler Homes instituted a policy that stated that they would sell to anyone without regard to race or religion. He had a vision of an integrated, modern suburbia at a time when such views were considered to be beyond the fringe. The National Association of Home Builders refused to endorse his non-discriminatory policies and in 1958, he resigned from the group in protest. All hail Joseph Eichler.

Eichler homes never really took off while they were being built and Eichler eventually went bankrupt in the mid-sixties. He left behind an architectural and cultural legacy and today his homes enjoy a fanatical popularity he could never have imagined.

So, this brings me to the terrific piece in Styleture yesterday and Johna's comments from last week. The photo above is what a vintage Eichler kitchen looked like:

Now I want to stress that this is not Johnna's kitchen, but here are two before photos of a a kitchen in an Eichler in Palo Alto.

Here it is post-renovation and ADA-compliant.

Oh my oh my is that gorgeous or what? It does everything it needs to do while honoring the home in which it sits. I'm getting goosebumps.

And Johnna, here are a couple more inspiration photos.

If you have never spent any time poking around on Styleture, please add that site to your reading list.

***Update, noon 10/15
Styleture has an expanded look a the Palo Alto, ADA-compliant renovation and you can find it here. All of the cabinetry in the Palo Alto house is by Alno USA. 

Dyson reimagined the fan

Well take a look at this.

That is what a table fan as reimagined by Sir James Dyson and his team of crack engineers looks like. And look Ma, No blades! Amid a fair amount of hoopla, Dyson announced the launch of its new Air Multiplier yesterday. They threw away everything they knew about fans and started over.

Here's how a conventional table fan works.

Now in this conventional fan, air gets chopped up by blades and then gets shot across the room in an uneven, oscillating stream.

The Air Multiplier is different. It has no blades and air gets shot out of the loop at high speed in a single stream. It uses electrical energy more efficiently from the get go, and the circular shape of the air diffuser pulls in air from the back (called inducement) and from the sides (called entrainment). The effect of the entrainment increases the speed of the moving air by fifteen times. Remarkable! Watch this video:




And here's Sir James himself, explaining how this technological marvel works:




Amazing.

The Air Multiplier is available now through Dyson's website and Dyson's website only. Get 'em while you can!

Sears' Blue Crew; a follow up from Saturday

I wrote a post on Saturday that detailed the trouble I ran into when I was looking for detailed specifications for a Kenmore built-in microwave oven. That post set off a firestorm of commiseration in my comments section and on Twitter that lasted throughout the weekend. When I first wrote that post I thought that I was the only one who had these frustrations. To say I'm not alone in this is an understatement.

On Twitter there were numerous reTweets of my post and some loud calls for Sears to pay attention to what I was saying about their lack of clear dimensions. I hoped genuinely that someone at their HQ would respond. Despite how it may sound, I don't like to bash for the sake of bashing. I'd rather find solutions. Really.

Well, on Monday morning I received an e-mail from Michael Léger, a member of Sears' management team. He'd been forwarded my blog post and he wanted to talk to me about my experience with Kenmore. He was very clear in his e-mail that he wasn't out to make a Kenmore convert out of me. Rather, what he wanted to gain from a conversation with me was a better understanding of the sort of information design professionals need from them. I called him almost immediately.

I'd written some unflattering things about Sears and I expected the conversation to be a bit awkward, but it wasn't at all. This wasn't a matter of a big company trying to schmooze me so that I would take back the mean things I said about them. Rather, he was genuinely interested in what a kitchen designer needed from a manufacturer. I stressed to him that I wasn't alone in my frustration and he listened. He asked if I'd be willing to talk to him and a couple members of his team and of course I agreed. I don't want anyone to fail, whether I'm a customer or not.

I was so impressed with the conversation we were having that I volunteered to ratchet up the level of discourse by an order of magnitude. I told him that I would assemble a team of my own, a group of kitchen designers. My team would have a mega conference call with his team and together, we'd tell Sears what we need from them. Again, this is not an attempt to sway brand loyalties, but what it is is a rare opportunity to communicate directly with a very large player in the appliance business.

So I need some brave volunteers to participate in this conference call. Jamie, Susan, Kelly, Pam and Clarity; as commenters on Saturday, I'm starting with you. Whattya say about taking the opportunity to do something about our complaints? These guys are willing to listen and all we have to do is pick up the phone. I'll arrange everything so that it happens at an appointed time some time in the near future. Think about it, they want our feedback, how cool is that?

I'm opening up this invitation to any kitchen designer who deals with appliances. I'd like to get a list of participants and their availabilities to them by Friday. So designers, spread this around to your colleagues.

This not an opportunity to complain, but rather a chance to build something. Come on gang, let's do it!