Pretend your last name is Eames

I love birds and I love Charles and Ray Eames. Apparently, they loved birds too. Here's a photo of their living room.

In the foreground is a primitive-ish sculpture of a crow-like bird. The Eameses used that bird sculpture as a prop in a lot of their photo shoots. All reports report that it was a treasured object. It was a carving they brought back from Appalachia during one of their many excursions around the world.

Vitra has made a reproduction of the Eames bird and now you can have one of your very own.

Even at $210 I think it's pretty darn cool.

Interlam's stone veneers are nothing short of revolutionary

I had a sales rep for Interlam in my office last week and he showed me this photograph.

I thought it was pretty cool. The image is kind of small here but it appears to be a wall made from stone slabs. I said something like "I cannot imagine how much something like that weighs." He laughed and said, "Try about 50 pounds."

That display is made from a stone laminate invented by Interlam.

Actual slabs of slate are rough cut into layers 1/16th of an inch thick and then they're bonded to a thin sheet of fiberglass.  The result is a lightweight, rigid stone slab about an eighth of an inch thick. It can be used indoors or out and looks for all the world like a slab of slate.

Remarkable! Check out Interlam's website.

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?