Be my guest

One of my beautiful nieces and her handsome husband had a baby two weeks ago and in a few weeks I'm off to DC to see the three of them and the rest of my family. I am looking for some guest bloggers to fill in for me while I'm gone. I will be away for five days, from 10th of December through the 14th and I'd like at least one post a day to appear while I'm gone.

I plan to work this the way I always do. I'm going to set up my guest bloggers as contributors and just let them do their thing. I don't want to see in advance what ends up being posted and there are no real restrictions on content other than the usual "be decent."

So if you're interested in borrowing my podium for a day or for all five days let me know. I can't promise you fame or riches, but your name will show up in Google searches and these days, that's all that matters anyhow.

Cave Canum

At the entrance to Pompeii's House of the Tragic Poet, you will find this.

It's the original Cave Canum, and translated from Latin that means Beware of the Dog.

Here's a cleaner shot of it.

There are a number of these mosaic entryways scattered around Pompeii and most of them just show a chained dog.

They're yet one more thing that really humanizes the experience of walking around Pompeii. As an archeological site, Pompeii is enormous. Once you're on the grounds you cannot see out of it. It seems to extend in all directions for as far as you can see.

That's Vesuvius looming over the back of the Forum here.

Pompeii's definitely a ruin. Most of it has been exposed to the elements for the last 200 or so years and those years have not been kind. At the same time though, Pompeii's unique beauty comes in a large part from that state of decay. The place is a paradox. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that it was once a thriving outpost of Rome at its height. Every once in a while though, you'll turn a corner and get poked in the eye with the humanity of the people who once called Pompeii home.

The Cave Canum is one of those humanizing touches.

Two million people a year file past the Flintstones-themed campground (I'm not kidding) to get that glimpse into those ancient lives. And each of those two million people leaves a mark. Very little of Pompeii is off limits or behind velvet ropes. A visit there has you walking across real Roman floors and running your hands over real Roman architecture. It's easy to get carried away and despite the crowds, it's not difficult to get off the beaten path and have some quiet time in the ruins.

Yesterday, my great friend Nancie Mills-Pipgras (who along with Bill Buckingham, edit one of the world's premier art annuals, Mosaic Art Now) posted a notice on her Facebook page and it reminded me of another one of Pompeii's quirks.

Pompeii has a large number of stray dogs walking around the place. It's somehow fitting that they're there. Pompeii is in Naples after all. Now I don't mean that as a slam. To say Naples has a culture unto itself is an understatement of biblical proportions. Naples is a place of mind-boggling chaos played out against a back drop of nearly indescribable beauty. It's a place where 700,000 people live cheek by jowl in the shadow of a volcano that could blow at any moment. It's a place where stray dogs roam at will across what's arguably the world's most important archeological site.

I took this photo as I was walking out of the Suburban baths. This dog was sacked out in the middle of the floor and you had to step around him to get past.

A year-and-a-half ago, the Italian government declared a state of emergency for Pompeii and decided to spend some money cleaning up the place. A part of that is a new program to adopt out the stray dogs of Pompeii. Three of Italy's animal charities, the Anti-Vivisection League, the National Animal Protection Authority and the National Dog Protection League have been spaying, neutering, vaccinating and preparing the stray dogs of Pompeii for eventual adoption.

There's now a website, i Cani di Pompei that's dedicating to showcasing these dogs and searching for homes for them. The search is being extended worldwide, so if you've ever wanted to own a dog that can parla l'italiano, now's your chance.

From my portfolio: this was my favorite job of the year

I spent the early part of 2009 working on a renovation that ended up transforming a home. I don't usually publish a whole lot of my work here, but I'm particularly proud of this one.

Like a lot of homes built in the early '80s, this one was full of unnecessary, non-structural walls and dropped ceilings. I met the clients in question in late January and luckily, I took a couple of photographs of their home as it was the first time I saw it. Here's one:

In this photo, I am standing at the entrance to the kitchen from the breakfast nook and I'm looking toward the dining room and the front of the house. Remember that perspective. Running along the left side of that photo is a nonsensical hallway and here's the entrance to it:

That hallway was restricting the space I had available for the kitchen, but inside of its dropped ceiling was a whole host of AC equipment. Losing the ceiling and the hallway was going to make this a pretty extensive renovation. Here's the floorplan as I found it:

The kitchen was shoved into that space on the left side of the compound angle wall. Compound angle walls are a particular pet peeve of mine and I couldn't wait to get in there and bring some efficiency and some decent sight lines to this family's life.

Once I started drawing, I removed the angles and drew in a very large island.

The island needed to do a couple of things. It had to hold the sink and the dishwasher of course, but I also had to be able to hide a big espresso and coffee machine. The appliance in question is 17 inches tall, and I knew a normal raised bar wasn't going to cut it.

I called in my favorite contractor Tim Brandt from TNC Builders and we started hashing out a plan to remove everything I wanted to remove.

At around the same time that I was playing around with layouts, my pals at Google SketchUp asked me if I had a model they could use at their trade show booth at KBIS in Atlanta and the AIA show in San Francisco.
So I sent them one of my early concept drawings.

This was pretty early into the process and my clients hadn't even seen it yet. It was helpful to get an idea out there though. By the time I had everything worked out, my idea had changed a little but the concept was pretty set.

Here's what I showed my clients and what they signed off on. The raised section on the left side finished off at 54 tall as measured from the floor to the top of the counter.

I specified a wide-style Shaker cabinet door in cherry with a dark brown, nearly black stain on it.

This is pretty close to the stain color.

The floors were going to get a travertine-looking porcelain. I picked a 19" tile and I wanted it to be set on the diagonal through the whole back of the house.

The final tile was one very similar to this one from Mohawk.

I still like blue and brown color combinations, despite the conventional wisdom about them. So when it came to lighting, I looked to my old standbys, Besa Lighting.

This is Besa's Sasha II line-voltage halogen and the shade is in their Granite glass. I also used a flexible monorail from W.A.C.

The enormous island was showing a lot of back and I thought it would be a great canvas to cover in a glass tile.

This is Montana from Emenee and I ended up wrapping every exposed inch of the island and the back wall in it.

The counter is a sand-colored quartz composite from Cambria.

The kitchen faucet is the Clairette by Kohler and the sink is the Poise, also by Kohler.

The hardware is a steel bar pull from Schaub and Company, the bar stools are the Radius from Room and Board and the appliances are from KitchenAid. Hmmm, I think I have everything covered now.

So without further ado, here's how the room ended up.

And If you remember the first photo at the beginning of the post, I took it while I was standing at the dinette. Well, here's that same perspective now.

Let's see that before again:

Back in July, I wrote a post about a floor transition I'd designed and was very happy about. Here's the photo of my S curve transition.

Well, that transition was done for this project. It's kind of hard to see but the flexible track on the range and refrigerator side of the kitchen has the same S curve as the transition between the kitchen and the dining room has. Pretty slick if I may say so myself.

So bottom line, my clients spent somewhere around $60,000 for this entire project. That included a significant amount of construction as well as removing the popcorn ceilings from everywhere in the house. We were within the range of our original budget before the add-ons got added on. We started the tear out in May of '09 and walked out for the last time the first week in July. That's a nine week completion and we brought it in on budget.

And that is about as full a description of what I do as I can muster. You may now leave glowing comments. Hah!

It's a warehouse sale at Form Plus Function

BiBiBiBi by Ingo Maurer

Form Plus Function is on my short list of favorite online sources for modern and contemporary lighting. They stock and sell all of the greats and I can usually find anything I need somewhere on that extensive website. I have an unusually difficult time finding lighting sources locally. Oh they're here. And how. But have yet to find a lighting source that's capable of returning a phone call let alone delivering my lighting in anything close to a reasonable time frame. It's an endless source of irritation.

I prefer to do business with local, independent vendors. But when my local independents don't seem to want my business, I take it online.

OK, with that off my chest, Form Plus Functions is having a warehouse sale and there are some real deals to be had. Form Plus Function sells lighting by my favoritest lighting designer Ingo Maurer. I have never seen Ingo Maurer originals go on sale in my life and it must be a sign of the times.

Birdie's Nest by Ingo Maurer

Ingo Maurer is a German typographer turned lighting designer with a world wide following. His fixtures are functional art and feature a perspective that amuses as it illuminates. His work walks a line between the conceptual and the practical. Improbable though his work looks, it never loses sight of the fact that at the end of the day it's still a light fixture.

Floatation by Ingo Maurer

So of course, in addition to Ingo Maurer, Form Puls Function stocks such notable brands as Besa, Artemide, Flos, Tech Lighting, W.A.C., George Kovacs, Modernica, Hubbardton Forge and too many more to list here. Seriously, their warehouse sale is not a gimmick, check it out if you're in the market for new lighting.

Oh Mei Ma White by Ingo Maurer

Hugs not bugs

Ceiling images from Angelos.be

A couple of weeks ago, I started reading a new (for me) design blog called Doorknob. Like just about everything new and interesting I find any more, I found @doorknobdesign on Twitter. Doorknob is run out of New York and it's the project of a man named Kurt Kohlstedt. He finds some great things, give him a peruse the next time you're looking for some inspiration.


Anyhow, he was tweeting about a fantastic ceiling he'd found the other day and I followed his link back to the story. I was floored by it. Bah dum bum. Yes, I was floored by it. Here are the photos he ran. 

Pretty cool, huh? That ceiling is an installation in the Royal Palace in Brussels and it's the project of an artist named Jan Fabre.


It gets better. Here's a close up shot of the ceiling and you can really see how textured it is.

Even closer. Guess what it's made from.

That ceiling is a mosaic, for lack of a better term, made from the shells of 1.3 million jewel beetles. Jewel beetles are members of the family Buprestidae, and the particular Buprestid here is Sternocera aequisignata from Thailand. 

Thai bugs

S.aequisignata is a food source in Thailand and Fabre set up a cottage industry in Bangkok to gather enough beetle shells to make his ceiling. Beetle shells that would have been discarded get upcycled here in every sense of the word. Along the way, some people who's lives aren't real fun got to make some money from what would have been their garbage. That's what I call a win win and the result is some downright arresting art.


So what do you think? Did Fabre usher in a new era in the decorative arts? Will we see beetle shell ceilings in the US any time soon? I can't wait to find out. Thanks Doorknob!