Case closed! Mysterious marble a mystery no more!

Last week I wrote about designer Marc Newson's London apartment and I was struck particularly by the marble he used in his bath. Here's the bath in question.

Identifying that marble has become my life's work for the last few days and I'm beyond pleased to announce that I found it. According the stone wholesale site Alibaba, it is Calacatta Zebrino. It's sold by a quarry in Italy and I'd love to have a geologist explain to me how a marble could form with such pronounced strips intact.

Marble is a metamorphic rock. It starts out in life as limestone. Limestone forms from layers of sediment that accumulate at the bottom of a sea. At that point it's a sedimentary rock and it's expected to have layers. In order for it to turn to marble, the limestone has to be shoved down under the surface of the earth and be subjected to extreme heat and pressure for a few million years. Then, miracle of miracles, it has to work its way back to the surface. When it emerges, it's marble. Now, how could a process like that happen without messing up the layers? Anybody care to share an explanation?

However it happened, at least I know what it is. Oh happy day!

Newform's Minimal outdoor shower is an exercise maximalism

The every energetic and ever-talented Emilie Williams-Romero mentioned Newform's Minimal shower in a comment the other day. I'd never heard of it before so I tracked it down. Here it is.

Good glory here it is again.

It comes in four forms for outdoor use and four for indoor. There are also three kinds of coordinated body sprayers. What gets me though are its outdoor forms.

This is the single.

This is the crossed double.

This is the uncrossed double.

It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. The controls are on the floor and controlled by your foot by the way.

Newform has been manufacturing water fixtures of arresting beauty from a small town in Italy's Piedmont (we call it Piemonte in Italian) since 1981. Who knew that the foothills of the Alps held such beauty? Other than the obvious beauty that is. Bravi!

Kitchen desks: absolute necessity or absolute waste of space?

So the yahoos at Apartment Therapy ran a post last week that touched a nerve. The post was about kitchen desks, but that's not grand enough so they refer to them as kitchen offices. "We spend lots and lots of time in out kitchens and we're so busy nowadays we'd be lost without being able to run our empire from a super cute kitchen office like this one." I'm paraphrasing but not really.

The gushing was directed toward the desk in the photo above. I suppose that if you're a nine-year-old and your empire consists of a front yard lemonade stand, a desk such as that would be fine. For anyone over the age of nine, it's going to come up pretty short.

I rip out kitchen desks so often it's practically a side line. I rip them out and replace them with something meaningful, like a pantry, because nearly every kitchen desk I've ever encountered was the size of the one above. The current owners can't use it as a desk so it ends up the repository for the junk that has no other place to go. Here are a couple of shots from my Before files.

The owners of those desks would be mortified to see them plastered across the screen like this, but they prove a point. Kitchen desks are a waste of money and space. Besides, who sits at a desk in the kitchen anymore? Am I wrong? Do you have a desk in your kitchen that you use and love? Or is it the junk repository?

Speaking of the New York Public Library...

I quoted my friend Tom the other day when I mentioned the New York Public Library and his description of it as a Beaux Arts pile. I ran a couple of photos of some of the building's ceilings and it occurred to me later that not everybody knows that building. It's an icon, that's for sure and I think the lions in front of it are pretty iconic. What's less seen is the lobby, Astor Hall.  Astor Hall is the largest marble room in the world; even the ceiling is made from white marble. Needless to say it makes me swoon. I never miss an opportunity to stand in that lobby and gaze up in mute appreciation of the stone cutter's art.

Art history for the kids of today

The song doesn't do a whole lot for me but this video's fantastic. Many thanks to the brilliant David Nolan for sending it my way.





70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.


I love the René Magritte buried in there!