It's official, they love me in Italy

As of today, my travel writing has a new home on an Italian website called Napoli Unplugged. Napoli Unplugged is the brainchild of Bonnie Alberts, an expatriate who's lived in Napoli for five years. Napoli unplugged is dedicated to the promotion of Neapolitan culture and travel and it is nothing short of an honor to be included in their mix. If your travels take you anywhere near southern Italy, spend some time on Bonnie's site. There you'll find everything you could ever need to help you plan a stay in Naples and Campania.

Here's a screen shot of my first Napoli Unplugged piece.

Ugh

If you can't see that tripe, it reads: With a butterfly kiss and a ladybug hug/ sleep tight little one like a bug in a rug.


A child who grows up surrounded by that kind of pablum will end up either a heroin addict or a compulsive hoarder.

Now back in my day we heard such gems as:

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home
Your house is on fire, your children will burn.

Or how about:

Good night
sleep tight
don't let the bed bugs bite.

The veiled threats and frank admission that life sucked filled us with an anxiety that kept us on the straight and narrow. Maybe the fix for the current childhood obesity epidemic is the reintroduction of brutal children's rhymes. Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales for Everyone!

Let's start with The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage.

More on cork floors

I have been barking about cork floors for years and all of the sudden the rest of the world seems to have caught up with me. Well, I wouldn't go that far, but I'm hearing a lot of noise out there that agrees with my opinion of the stuff.

Tim Carter writes a syndicated column called Ask The Builder that runs with some regularity in The St. Pete Times. Here was his column from yesterday's paper.

Q: I'm interested in cork flooring planks and wonder if it's really as good as the salesmen tell me. Because money is very tight, I'm looking for a discount cork floor. A local carpet store is having a cork flooring sale soon, so now's the time to make a decision. Do you have experience with this material? If so, would you install it again in a home you'd build? Is it as durable as they say? How do you protect it? Is it easy to clean?

A: I understand your doubts about whether cork flooring is really a suitable material to walk on day in and day out. After all, when you hold a cork from a wine bottle in your hand, you can see it's somewhat friable. In comparison, a piece of oak seems impossible to break apart or chip.

I had my doubts, too, until I saw a cork floor. About 35 years ago my father-in-law took me along for a ride to visit a business partner. When we walked into the kitchen, I saw the strangest floor.

It was cork kitchen flooring, resembling the deck of a ship, with planks that were very long and about 8 inches wide. When I asked what kept it from disintegrating, the man said, "Son, you don't have to ever worry about this floor wearing out."

I later discovered that cork flooring was used in many commercial and institutional buildings that receive heavy foot traffic. You don't have to worry about durability if you purchase a high-quality cork floor.

To give you another example of its toughness, I installed cork plank flooring tiles on the steps that lead to my basement. Steps are a great place to test flooring as your foot typically slides on the tread surface as you climb.

My basement steps got heavy traffic because our home office was downstairs. Countless trips were made up and down these steps, which were not vacuumed that often, adding grit to the equation.

Just yesterday I cleaned these steps, getting them ready for an open house. They looked the same as the day I installed them 10 years ago. I owe much of this to the toughness of the cork, but also to the fact that I coated it with five coats of high-quality urethane.

Another thing that helped the cork on my steps was the custom oak nosing I installed. Because I knew shoes would be sliding onto each tread, I had the top piece of oak milled so that it was 1/64th of an inch thicker than the thickness of the cork planks that were glued to the steps. This prevented the shoes from wearing away the front edge of the cork on each tread.

I used clear water-based urethane on the cork on the steps and on the floor in the entire basement. It was easy to apply and is easy to clean. I just use regular liquid dish soap and water to clean up spills. For regular mopping, I add 8 ounces of white vinegar to 2 gallons of warm water.

You can read more from Tim Carter on his website Ask the Builder.

With that ringing endorsement in mind, I have two cork floors being installed in two projects in the next few weeks. Both jobs are getting a wide plank, engineered floor from US Floors in Georgia. Job one is getting a floor called Cleopatra.

Job two is getting a floor called Merida.

I can't decide which one I like more. US Floors has really broadened my horizons when it comes to the flooring I specify and cork's rapidly replacing my former knee jerk use of travertine. US Floors also sells flooring made from bamboo and oil-finished hardwood. Check out this floor sample.

Now guess what it's made from.

Give up?

That's bamboo pretending to be tiger wood and I will not rest until that ends up in one of my projects. I have never seen anything like it. Well, I have. It's just that it was real tiger wood.

Anyhow, back to cork. What do you guys think? Anybody out there already have it? Care to share a story?

Paraphrased Reader Question: What do you think of open shelves?

Open shelving (replacing wall-hung cabinets) has become very popular over the past few years, and I'm curious as to your opinion.

The ever tasteful and hilarious Raina Cox from If the Lampshade Fits posed that question to me last night. Before I answer it though, I need to crank out some effusive praise for the work of La Cox. If the Lampshade Fits is one of my daily must-reads. Poke around on her site and you'll see why.

Anyhow, onto Raina's question. I see these magazine spreads too and there's no doubt that there's a trend afoot.

traditional kitchen design by seattle architect Bosworth Hoedemaker

Done and styled correctly, open shelves in a kitchen photo spread look terrific. But there are a couple of things at work here.

contemporary kitchen design by san francisco interior designer Amoroso Design

The photos you see in magazines are styled and propped extensively. They are also lit perfectly and professionally. Styling and photographers' lighting then gets enhanced further by our pals at PhotoShop so by the time it's all said and done, what's left is a cartoon of a kitchen, it's not real.

Cabinets have doors on them for a couple of reasons. One of those reasons is that they keep dust and airborne cooking goo off your stuff. The other thing cabinet doors do is hide your stuff. Stuff stowed behind a door doesn't have to be pretty or arranged.

When you replace wall cabinets with shelves you seriously limit your storage capacity and you set yourself up for the additional chore of arranging and dusting your magazine-perfect kitchen shelves.

However, all is not lost.

I love the idea of limiting the number of wall cabinets in a kitchen design and I love the idea of white space in any room, kitchens particularly. In my own designs I lobby tirelessly to go easy on the wall cabinets and instead rely on tall cabinets and efficiency-minded base cabinet inserts for storage. The kitchen in the photo below illustrates the concept perfectly.

contemporary kitchen design by san francisco interior designer Nicole Hollis

The only wall cabinets in that photo are very short and they're probably where glassware goes. All other dish storage has been shifted to the two-drawer base cabinet on the rear left and into the tall cabinet between the wall ovens and the refrigerator on the back wall. Once all the storage needs were met, there was ample room for two display shelves on the left side of the rear wall. The next photo shows a variation on the same theme.

traditional kitchen design by san francisco general contractor Mueller Nicholls Cabinets and Construction

The two stainless shelves are for display only, the storage heavy lifting gets done by the wall cabinets to the left.

So as lovely a fantasy as this may be:

Remodelista

This is closer to reality.

De-Victorianization on Division

Proceed with caution is all I'm saying.

Chair lust, Italian style

I saw these beauties on Trendir and I had to spread 'em around.

This is the Loop 3D Vinterio, designed by Claus Breinholt for Inifiniti.

These stackable chairs are available in six veneers; dark-stained oak, amazakoue, American walnut, black cherry and my favorites, sapeli/ sycamore and character tulip.

I don't know about you guys but I'm coming down with the shivering fits over these things.