Thank you Dixie Carter

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- ''Designing Women'' star Dixie Carter, whose Southern charm and natural beauty won her a host of television roles, has died at age 70.

Carter died Saturday morning, according to publicist Steve Rohr, who represents Carter and her husband, actor Hal Holbrook. He declined to disclose the cause of death or where she died. Carter lived with Holbrook in the Los Angeles area.

''This has been a terrible blow to our family,'' Holbrook said in a written statement. ''We would appreciate everyone understanding that this is a private family tragedy.''

From The New York Times.

Urban chickens? For the love of God no.

from Flickr

Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world.
- Werner Herzog

I read an article on Re-Nest yesterday and it was about how to build a backyard chicken coop. Re-Nest is a website owned and operated by Apartment Therapy, an organization devoted to the propagation of inane ideas and harebrained schemes. Except of course, when they're quoting me.

Apartment Therapy and it's ideological me-too-ers seem to be driving the idea that it's somehow a good thing for urban dwellers to start raising chickens. It looks like a new form of eco-narcissism to me but I'd be willing to take a look at that if anybody else has a better idea. Whatever's driving it, it's pretty flawed for a bunch of reasons.

A hen in a quiet moment. It won't last. Poultry Ireland

For starters, you need a flock of quite a few birds to yield enough eggs to wean you from the grocery store. Even then, I'd hate to have to depend on a backyard flock exclusively. In order to keep a flock going, you'll need to keep a rooster around. Once there's a rooster around you'd better get used to eating fertilized eggs. Trust me, there are few things more surprising than cracking an egg into a cake batter only to find a bloody pulp in the middle of the yolk.

Not to mention that chickens are loud, aggressive, foul-smelling salmonella delivery devices. Why would someone want that in their life? On behalf of urban dwellers everywhere, please re-think the idea that a chicken has any place in an urban environment other than in a bucket from KFC. If you live out in the hinterlands, set yourself free. But let's keep cities chicken free zones please.

Weapons of mass destruction. Paul Midler

We had chickens when I was a kid. The very spawn of Satan they were. Hens are aggressive and roosters are downright dangerous. That's a slight exaggeration, but not really. Chickens are not pets. You can attribute as much human emotion and intelligence to them as you want to, but they will not respond to you, they will not be affectionate and they will not look at you as anything other than an irritation at best.

A rooster catches his breath between violent outbursts. Poultry Ireland.

Roosters do not crow at dawn. They start crowing before dawn and they crow all day. Very loudly. Your neighbors will hate you.

Hens form flocks and use their hive minds to plot murder and mayhem.

We had a hen house when I was a kid and my brothers and I had to feed the chickens every morning before school. They figured out that there was a ledge over the door where they could roost. It took a day or two for them to then realize that the ledge was the perfect launch pad for an aerial attack. So it went every morning. Whoever's job it was that week had to go down to the chicken coop to feed the chickens. The second that he opened the door and entered, they'd pounce --spurs first. There's nothing quite like having blood drawn by a "domestic" bird at 5:30 in the morning, let me tell you.

These hens are scheming, don't be fooled. Whoever wrote the Velociraptor in the kitchen scene from Jurrasic Park raised chickens. Gardening without Skills

Due to chickens' foul dispositions and even more foul habits, this is trend with a built in expiration date. Knowing that makes it easier to read about. But still, save yourself the trouble, the expense, the physical and emotional scars. Chickens belong on farms.

The happiest day of all when you raise chickens. Cool Creek Farm

Notes on renovating the American Gothic house

On 4 March, I wrote a post I titled Help Me Grant Wood and in it I detailed a presentation I was working on that had to do with an imaginary renovation of the house that sits in the background of Grant Wood's American Gothic.

What started out as an interesting idea has become my life's work over the last five weeks. I have never used SketchUp at this level before and I've never researched something so exhaustively in my life.

Right after I learned that it was a real house in Eldon, Iowa (that's currently rented to a caretaker by the way), I started digging around for anything I could find out about it. I found an entire library of photographs. That was relatively easy.

I hit on the mother lode when I found the Wapello County Assessor's website. On it, I found the property records for the house. I was hoping to find the plat for the property, but I found something equally useful in its place. Ta-da!

It's the measured footprint of the American Gothic House.

I saved it as a .jpg and imported into a SketchUp file and then I scaled it up to the proper size. So now that I knew how big the interior walls were, I could figure out the heights of everything from looking over the library of photographs I'd accumulated.

Here's the final exterior view I drew.

When I was digging around for photos, I came across this one.

It's the only image I could find of the back of the house. Who knew that there was another Gothic window and a back porch on the American Gothic house?

Speaking of that window, it took me the better part of a Saturday to get the radii right on that Gothic arch.

So there are the exterior shots. Ultimately, that model's going to end up Google Earth and that's pretty cool. I never thought I'd have a model on Google Earth some day. It's an interesting thing to ponder.

I finished the interior yesterday and I think I did the house proud. I'm not showing the interiors here just yet, though I will eventually. If you really want to see them though, you'll have to come to Chicago next Thursday.

Profiled by the Decorating Diva

My great friend Carmen writes the great website The Decorating Diva. Back in February, Carmen asked me to put together a Designer's Look Book for her site. Designer's Look Books are a regularly-appearing feature on The Decorating Diva. Carmen asks a designer to put together a list of selections and then Carmen assembles everything into a single page look book. To say I'm honored by this is an understatement.

The things I put together for Carmen are a departure from my usual fare and it was a blast to really run with that. Carmen's request came at the same time that I was working on my presentations for KBIS, one of which covers something I'm calling New Traditionalism. That's also the name of my presentation.

New Traditionalism is an aesthetic I first started seeing on design blog's like Gina Milne's Willow Decor, Joni Webb's Cote de Texas, Things That Inspire and Decorno. There are many more of course, but they're the ones that come to mind.

Maybe it's just me and my market but the Las Vegas-inspired Mediterranean kitchens that were all the rage a couple of years ago have disappeared completely. To that I say Hallelujah.

This seems to be a trend that was started by Christopher Peacock but it's been taken and run with by Mick De Giulio and countless others. It started on the extreme high end and trickled down pretty quickly and I swear half of my calls come from people who are looking for white painted cabinets and marble counters. I don't think it's a bad thing at all but it's important to remember that this aesthetic, like the ones that preceded it, is a trend. It's a throw back to an earlier time and it takes a lot of its cues from the early 20th century. But in the early 20th century, a kitchen was a dark room in the back of the house. This is pure trend. Not that that's a bad thing, but it's important to call things what they are.

Anyhow, I have a hard time picking finishes for the idea of a room. I need a real room to work with. Here's one of my perspective drawings.

This is also the room I had in mind when I put together a Look Book for Carmen. It fits this New Traditionalism aesthetic pretty well if I may say so myself and some of the finishes I listed for it in my Look Book are:

A walnut table from Spekva.

Pasadena Chairs from Thos. Moser.

Calacatta Gold marble.

An Aga Legacy range.

A bronze sink from Rocky Mountain hardware.

A chandelier from Vaughan Designs.

They're just my favorites. Check out the rest of my finishes for this room on The Decorating Diva and let me know what you think. What do you think too about this whole New Traditionalism thing? I'm I onto something or am I out to lunch?

A request for guests. Guest posters that is.

Next weekend is the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show in Chicago. My schedule for those four days is rather daunting and I'm wondering if anybody out there would like to write a guest post during that time. I'm looking for people who can write something within the confines of my niche here, but if you look at how broadly I define my niche you'll see that just about anything goes. All I ask is that you be authentic and interesting.

I need someone or several someones to cover next Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. I'll be doing short posts as I can, but you'll end up carrying the day. Leave me a comment here or drop me an e-mail at p.anater@gmail.com.

Thanks!