How to sell kitchen cabinetry: my slide back into advertising

I have a couple of sidelines, one of which is doing project work for an ad agency. Over the last year or two, I've been taking on some different things to see where I want my career progression to head next. Part of that is writing for this ad agency. Well as luck would have it, the agency happens to be the agency of record for the design studio where I ply my trade. I'd been unhappy with some of the copy that ended up in ads and on the website and as someone who's a pretty good writer and who has a vested interest in how a kitchen studio presents itself, having me write the new website was a logical choice.

In January, I was in a brainstorming session with the ad folks and we were figuring out how to position the studio in the new website. Kitchen design's a curious thing in a lot of ways. Kitchen designers make their money from selling cabinetry but selling cabinetry isn't what I wanted to emphasize. Any monkey can sell cabinetry, and many of them do. It takes a real designer to build on that and to make rooms that capture the fundamental essence of a particular client.

I refer to my essence capturing as story telling. I work with my clients to have their homes tell their stories. Good design follows a narrative. Always.

I've been at this for long enough that I know that kitchen design as a business presents itself to the world by showing completed kitchens. These completed kitchens are terrific for portfolios, they tell a potential client what a given studio is capable of. However, these completed kitchen designs don't allow a client to project himself or herself into the image. Often times, these completed kitchen images are a barrier. Most people lack the vision thing. And when I show someone one of these photographs, I spend a lot of time guiding the person in front of me. "Imagine your home with something like this but not really like this." It makes for unnecessary confusion a lot of times.

Usually, I assemble a presentation board of finishes when I'm rolling out an idea rather showing a lot of completed projects.

So when it came to how to show the skills of a kitchen design studio on its website, I wanted to take my presentation board idea and make it a more fleshed out marketing position.

The result is something I call design stories.

We played around with this idea for a couple of months and then three weeks ago we booked a photographer and a studio and I directed the shoot. Actually, it was a collaborative effort but my resume claims sole credit for it. Resumes exist to toot my horn, right? And just for the record, none of this would have been possible without the great Amy Allen of Allen Harris Design or incredibly talented and patient photographer Chris Stickney.

Anyhow, we spent the day in the studio and assembled five still lifes (I was calling them Still Life with Cabinet Door) and shot all five of them in a single day.

The first one is called Sustainability and my body copy follows.

Every room tells a story, and every room has a different story to tell. At Kuttler Kitchens, we consider it to be our top priority to help you select the finishes that tell your story.

To help you get started; here are five, very different color and finish palettes. Each one tells its own story and we call them Tranquility, Classic, Sustainability, Grounded and Energetic. Using these as a starting point, how can we help you tell your story?

Renewable cork floors by US Floors, rich fabrics and Du Verre hardware inspired by a pomegranate can tell a story of sustainability. A modern door in sustainably-harvested Wenge or Zebrawood can bring a touch of the exotic to your home while honoring your commitment to a cleaner, greener planet. Sustainable kitchens tell the quiet story of organic, earth-friendly comfort and balance.

When I started this blog, about the last thing in the world I would have predicted as an end point would have been a slide back into advertising copy writing. Directing was a bonus. I'm insanely proud of this project and it's been a real blast to excel in an arena so far removed from what I do usually.

Buon compleanno a me

It's my birthday today. I'm 45 and that sounds weird to me. I certainly don't feel 45 although I suppose that how I feel right now is how 45 feels. It a curious thing to realize that I'm more than half way through and I have to say that where I am and what my life looks like at 45 bears scant resemblance to where I imagined it would be 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Ask me how thrilled I am that none of those old imaginings came true. I'll take things as they are right now any day.

The word for birthday in Italian, cumpleanno comes from the verb compiere. Compiere looks like but doesn't always mean to complete. In the sense that it's used in relation to birthdays, compiere means to fulfill. So my opening sentence, It's my birthday today would read Oggi compio gli anni in Italian and it would translate as Today, I fulfill my years.

I like to think of birthdays as fulfillments rather than as completions. Birthdays in English mark off time served. In Italian, birthdays commemorate a fulfilled life. It may be a semantics game but it helps me avoid dreading getting older. Thinking of my birthdays as fulfilled years rather than completed ones helps me concentrate on what a great, fantastic ride this is. When I think like this, it's easier to be grateful and stay grateful for the amazing people who begat me, the amazing people who surround me and the amazing people I have yet to meet.

So on that note, I am on my way out of town for the rest of the week as of this afternoon. I wrote a bunch of posts for the coming days that showcase my first foray back into the ad game in more than 15 years. I hope it's not too tedious, but I needed to do it as a credibility-building exercise. Bear with me and have a great rest of th week!

This sums up the Deepwater Horizon nightmare perfectly

Of all the images I've seen of the Louisiana coastline and the Gulf so far, this image by Gerald Herbert for the Associated Press drives home the point most bluntly.

The AP misidentified this damselfly as a dragonfly, but the point remains that nothing's safe from this spill. Scrubbing your bathtub with a half a grapefruit and some salt won't do anything for fix this or alleviate it.

This spill is the result of an industry that regulates itself and the end result of 30 years of "business friendly" government policies. Encouraging investment and innovation is a good thing, but that not what "pro-business" means. What that expression means is to allow multinational corporations to run roughshod over anything that stands in their way. That's at best short-sighted and worst criminal. It's also been the de facto operating procedure of the United States since about 1981. Hearing the party that's spent the last 30 years systematically dismantling the EPA and anything that smacks of a regulation complain that the current administration isn't doing enough is a level of hypocrisy I find hard to believe. Hearing the party that stood by and let it happen trying to assert itself is almost as bad. This isn't about political parties, it's about a deeply flawed idea of governance.

This spill is bigger than BP, it's bigger than the Minerals Management Service, it's bigger than the EPA and it's bigger than the entirety of the US Federal Government. This is a catastrophe of a scale never before seen and one that will play out in the Gulf for years and decades to come. And for what?

Industries cannot regulate themselves. Repeat after me. Industries cannot regulate themselves.

Clean your tub with grapefruit and salt. Or not.

Those crazy kids at Apartment Therapy are forever touting labor-intensive and probably ineffective "green" alternatives to household cleaning supplies. The idea seems to be that if you're inconvenienced, then you're somehow saving the earth.

I am a huge proponent of sustainable practices and stewarding resources sensibly and equitably. With that said, scrubbing out your tub with a half a grapefruit and some salt is absurd.

The piece in Apartment Therapy went on to break the process down into four easy to follow steps. I have a better idea. Here are my four steps. At the end of my steps you'll have a clean shower and full tummy.

1. Peel and eat grapefruit, preferably an Indian River pink.

2. Sprinkle salt on some fresh, crusty bread. Top with high quality olive oil and be transported.

3. Spray down shower with SC Johnson's Scrubbing Bubbles.

4. Come back ten minutes later and rinse.

Done.

Many household cleaners are a gimmick, they are marketing messages in a bottle. Developed to exploit your fears and perceived inadequacies, they represent an absolute waste of resources in the sense that they waste your money and your time.

Similarly, just because it came off a tree doesn't mean something's benign.

If you read that there was 1-Dimethoxy-2, 5-trimethyl-4-hexene, Acetic acid and decyl ester in something you were about to slosh around your bathroom would you be concerned? Well, they are but four of the thousands of chemicals in a grapefruit. They're probably harmless (I say probably because no one really studies them) but why are they inherently better than Disodium Ethanoldiglycinate, Butoxydiglycol, Ethoxylated Alcohol, Quaterinary Ammonium Chlorides? Those are the four ingredients that make Scrubbing Bubbles so gosh darn effective.

Chemicals that come from a lab and chemicals that come from a tree aren't inherently good or bad. In chemistry it's all about dose and duration. Most synthetic chemicals are engineered specifically to break down into their component parts and to do so quickly. What's in them is controlled tightly and studied thoroughly. I don't know that they're safer, but at least they're known.

Whether or not you use them is entirely up to you. There are some things I won't use because they waste resources. Usually my money, often my time and a lot of times I don't use things because they waste the earth's resources or they'll have an impact I don't want them to have. I say there's a balance you have to strike and the best way to strike that balance is to arm yourself with knowledge and to make decisions based on reason and not emotion.

To that end, SC Johnson has a new website called What's Inside. What's Inside is a product-by-product list and explanation of what's in their products. It's enough to make me buy more SC Johnson products if only to demonstrate how much I applaud their move.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with one of my neighbors the other day. He's looking for a pesticide to kill off the caterpillars that are eating his tomato plants. He's concerned about what he's going to spray and rightly so. However, he wants something "natural" because he thinks it'll be safer. I reminded him that rattlesnake venom is natural but I doubt I'd eat a tomato that had been treated with it.

Cuban tile isn't encaustic, it's cement. It's not really cement either, it's concrete.

For as long as I've lived in Florida, I've been enamored with what's known in these parts as Cuban tile. Cuban tile was all the rage in Florida from the turn of the last century up until the 1950s. The embargo against Cuba pretty much sealed its fate as a lost material until fairly recently.

I live in an old neighborhood and this house is down the street from me.

Wild as it is, all that Mission-style mish mash and stucco is original and that house is about 70 years old. The front porch had been closed in at some point after the advent of air conditioning, but if you look in the door you can see what's on the floor in there.

It's an original Cuban tile floor.

I've written about Cuban tile before though it's been quite a while. All this time, I've been using the terms Cuban tile, encaustic tile and cement tile interchangeably but it's come to my attention recently that encaustic and cement tiles are very different things and to split the hair even finer, cement tile's more accurately called concrete tile. Zoe Voigt, a writer and great friend of this blog, explains the differences thoroughly in an article called The Difference between Encaustic and Cement on Tile Style.

In the comments that follow Zoe's post, Richard Holdshuh explains that cement tile isn't really cement after all. It's concrete. Richard's opinion is backed up in a follow up comment left by Jorge Aguayo of Industrias Aguayo.

Industrias Aguayo is one the world's few manufacturers of concrete tile. From their factory in the Dominican Republic, Aguayo keeps alive the Cuban tradition through a concrete tile series they call Herencia Cubana. That's Cuban Heritage in English.

Bill Buyok, another friend and occasional contributor to this blog, happens to sell Aguayo's Herencia Cubana from his fashionable shop, Avente Tile, on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. I think we can safely call it Cuban Tile 90210.

Bill's Flickr stream is where I got these images of traditional Cuban patterns that are back in production and readily available.

So the next time someone asks, Cuban tile is cement tile and not encaustic tile. And it's not really cement tile either, it's concrete. Got that?