Happy birthday Gram

This was my Grandmother, Guellma Gevene Flowers-Smith-Stewart and today would have been her 104th birthday. Of the many people who played a significant role in my life, none loom larger than Gevene. The older I get the more I see her in me. And the older I get too, the more I see just how great a thing that is.

She loved life and embraced it, warts and all, with a passion and an energy that makes me marvel even now. In the photo above, she's playing with her first great-grand daughter. Oh how she loved that baby. I remember when that photo was taken, I was standing right there. It really doesn't feel like it was very long ago, but I suppose it was. The baby in that photo got married a year ago and she and her husband are eagerly awaiting the arrival of a baby of their own.

Somehow, somewhere, Guellma Gevene Flowers-Smith-Stewart is ecstatic.

I am shocked and appalled

By this.

This island made of Legos is making the rounds of the design blogs this week and it's being met with near-universal heaps of praise and squeals of delight.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. The trappings of childhood are best left behind in childhood if you ask me. This is not cute, this is not clever and this is not cool in any way.

I get it, the designers are attempting to be smart and stand out from the crowd. Maybe they're trying to teach some kind of a saccharine lesson about the virtues of simple mindedness. Again I say. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

But on a happier note, I found this story on a host of sites but in following the links back through a bunch of them I came across one of the best finds I've found in ages.

A commenter who goes by the name of Clarity left a comment a couple of weeks ago and her Google profile was a dead end. I'd resigned myself to not knowing who she is. Well, in digging around about this absurd island, I came across Kitchen Clarity, commenter Clarity's blog. And oh what a blog it is. Seriously, check it out. She has fantastic taste, isn't afraid to say what's on her mind and unlike me, can express herself completely in one or two paragraphs. Astounding! Check out Kitchen Clarity and tell her I said hello.

In the meantime, what do you think about this island? Is it as mortifying as I think it is, or does it have some hidden redeeming qualities I just can't see?

*All images by Goluza Photo for Maison Francaise.

How many CFMs do you need for your cubic feet?

Many thanks to the gang at Faber Hoods for this very helpful guide on the technical side of kitchen ventilation.  True kitchen ventilation (rather than the cheap and usually ineffective method of hanging a vented microwave over your cooking surface) is an idea that's catching on again. All ventilation uses a measure called Cubic Feet per Minute to indicate how effective the blower motor in a ventilation system is at circulating air. Few topics can confuse people as quickly as CFM ratings. There is a mistaken belief, that like most everything else in appliances, bigger is better. Not necessarily.

Using a hood with higher CFM (above what you need for your cooking surface) means more air is being pulled out of your kitchen and your home than needed. Therefore a lot of cooled or heated air is being pulled out your home, which would lead to higher heating and cooling bills.

Also, a situation of negative pressure can also occur when too much air is being pulled out of the home and isn't being replaced by air from the outside. Homes built today are increasingly air tight and when too much air is pulled out of a home, you need to sometimes make up for that lost air by pumping outside air into the home. There are all kinds of rules of thumb regarding make up air and it's best to consult with an HVAC specialist before you install a high-powered ventilation system in a newer home.

When you're choosing a hood for your cooking surface, one that has too many CFMs won't be energy efficient and too few CFMs won't provide adequate ventilation. The more CFMs, the more energy they use and the more noise they make. The key is to buy the right hood for the job at hand. Somewhere there's an ideal CFM count to match your needs.

So buy a hood that can remove the heat, steam, odor, smoke and grease produced by your cooking properly while at the same time not overdoing it. This diagram below shows a good way to estimate how many CFMs you need for your kitchen. In this kitchen, the ceilings are ten feet tall (Z). The walls are 10 feet (X) by ten feet (Y). So Z x X x Y = 1,000 cubic feet. If you have a 500 CFM rangehood in this kitchen, in 2 minutes you will have completely exchanged all the air out of the kitchen (or 30 exchanges in an hour). The National Kitchen and Bath Association recommends 8 to 15 air exchanges in an hour for proper ventilation, so in this example, we're at double the recommended level. Rules of thumb like this can get you started but the amount of heat generated by some cooking appliances throws a wrench into the works. Heat is measured in British Thermal Units, or BTUs. There are additional calculations that need to be worked out when it comes to using professional-style ranges so be sure to consult with a professional kitchen designer before you commit to buying anything.

So even though the example above has us at twice the recommended CFM, using a four-burner gas cooktop will put you 100 CFMs under the required 600 CFMs for use over gas. If you're upgrading to something more substantial, a 48" range top for example, you're going to need at least 1,000 CFM. In the opposite direction, because induction cooktops generate so little radiant heat, a 300 CFM ventilation hood over it would work out perfectly. Confused? Don't be.

Calculating the volume of your room is helpful and knowing the heat output of your cooking surface is helpful too. Combining the two and coming up with a satisfactory CFM takes a bit of judgement and experience, but that's why I'm here. Me and a whole bunch of compatriots who like nothing better than to figure stuff like this out.

Sears' Blue Crew, the latest update

Who knew, when I wrote this post on 10 October, that it would take on a life of its own? Last Tuesday I reported that I'd heard from Sears and that we were going to arrange a conference call between a bunch of Sears folks and a panel of designers I'd assemble.

Well by last Thursday, I had a panel of 12 people lined up and ready to help build something positive in partnership with the online team from Sears. The 12 people on the panel for what's come to be known as the Spec Summit are a cross section of the industry. We represent the face of kitchen design today and we range from an architect who designs some of the most exquisite rooms I've ever seen to a designer who designs stunning in their own way, lower-budget jobs. Most of us make up the space between those extremes. Some of us are new to the industry, but most of us have been around for a while. Another wild thing is that all of us know one another either personally or by reputation and we know one another through social media. Whether it's Twitter or our blogs or Facebook or some combination of all of those things and none of this would have been possible until very recently. It's pretty neat to be involved in this project. But more than anything, my real excitement about this is that everybody's volunteering to help make something positive.

So as a result of a blog post I wrote about my frustration over some missing dimensions, a group of 12 professionals are helping to solve the problem of missing dimensions. This is now bigger than me and my frustrations, that's for sure. It's satisfying to know that in helping out like this, we'll be playing a role in preventing other designers' frustrations in the future while at the same time helping an esteemed American company find its way in a brave new world.

As of last Friday, our conference is scheduled for Thursday the 22nd. Believe me, I'll keep you posted.

Where the Wild Things Are

I saw this last night.




Maurice Sendak wrote and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are in 1963. I was born two years later and I think my mother read it to me for the first time in 1969, the year I started kindergarten. Where the Wild Things Are was the first book I ever owned and between it and The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack, my lifelong fascination with the world outside the one I call home was set.

I poured over Wild Thing's ten sentences and 48 pages every day for years as I remember it, but it was probably more like a couple of weeks before I moved on to something else. However, that book looms large in my imagination still. Six months ago, I learned that Spike Jonze was making a film adaptation of it, and I was worried that my childhood memories would be short-changed by a movie version.

I had nothing to worry about. Jonze's adaptation is brilliant, and that he manages to flesh out Sendak's original 10 sentences into a two hour movie is a testament to his skill as a filmmaker and story teller. Honestly, It didn't feel like he added a thing, so seamlessly does the script play into the original story line.

Despite the source material, this is not a children's movie. It's an adult dissection of the memories and moods of a child, Max, the main character. In Max's fantasy world, time speeds up and slows down as needed. His imagination is glorious in its breadth but held in check by the limited experiences of a seven-year-old. He can't see those limitations of course, that's the allure of childhood. But the audience can and the result is a slow motion thrill.

The theater was full of other 40-somethings last night and sometimes, it's nice to share a cultural touchstone with a room full of strangers.