A follow up with Hansgrohe's Pura Vida

I wrote a column on the 22nd of April that was a recap of sorts of the sights and sounds of Kitchen and Bath Industry Show 2010 in Chicago. I said it then and I'll restate it here, the Hansgrohe PuraVida hand shower was the best thing at the show.

Every morning at the show in Chicago, Brizo's grande dame Jai Massela and I would head over to Hansgrohe's exhibit and get an espresso or two before the show opened. Without fail, I'd walk past the Pura Vida exhibit and let the water run over my hand. I was smitten. With a showerhead. I had no choice but to call it my personal best in show.

Hansgrohe's espresso bar at KBIS 2010

Shortly after I stated that in my blog post, Hansgrohe sent me a PuraVida hand shower. I write product reviews all the time and I don't expect anything in return, really. It was a generous gesture made even more generous by the fact that I'd already said nice things about the product.

Well I sped home and installed my PuraVida the day it arrived. No sooner did I have it installed I jumped right in. It exceeded my lofty expectations. It's a different experience to have a shower hit your back in privacy instead of your hand while you're standing at a convention.

My hand shower (it clips into a hook when I'm not holding it) has three settings I can click through by pressing a button that reminds me of the button on a wireless mouse. The first setting is a soft rain, the second is what Hansgrohe calls Caresse and the third is a combination of the two.

It's the Caresse that made me fall for the PuraVida. I don't know how to describe it so I'll show you instead. At :52 in the video below, a shower head similar to mine springs into action. It's a controlled stream that swirls.

It's also an engineering marvel that feels like fingers dancing across my back. In fact it's so convincingly finger-like, it rinses the shampoo out of my hair --hands free.

I couldn't be happier with this shower head and not just because it's an indulgence. Hansgrohe's patented system for mixing air bubbles into the water flow at a ratio of three to one keeps this a low-flow shower. I have been suing low-flow showers for the last 20 years and this is the first one I've ever come across that doesn't feel like a penance. Had I not known in advance I never would have guessed this was an efficiency-minded addition to my life.

So thank you Hansgrohe, you have a terrific product. And I have to say that as a specifier and as a consumer, it's good to know that Hansgrohe is more than just great product photography. Speaking of which, here are few examples.

Get me to Puerto Rico STAT!

Did you see this house in yesterday's New York Times?

It's the absolutely stunning home of Nikos Buxeda-Ferrer and Inés Rosas in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I never knew it until yesterday, but San Juan abuts a protected rain forest. The elegant Buxeda-Ferrer and Rosas home overlooks this protected forest and is still ten minutes from San Juan's downtown. It sounds idyllic frankly and you can read more about it is yesterday's Times.

Here are some highlights.

all photos by Moris Moreno for The New York Times

I think it would be safe to say that this is a modern home. It's also one I'm drawn to like a moth to a flame. I cannot get enough of those clean lines and enticing sight lines. I get it that modernism isn't for everybody, but it sure speaks to me.

Don't let the fact that I love it dissuade you from critiquing it though. I'm curious to hear from  people for whom this doesn't sing. Of course anybody's allowed to praise it too, but what is it about modernism that just rubs people the wrong way?

HGTV's Design Star spawns an uprising

The fifth season of HGTV's Design Star debuts on Sunday night. Yeah, I'll watch it. But it'll be the way somebody watches a train wreck. Here's the promo shot.

Guts? Glory? Glam? Come on, it's interior design; and hokey interior design at that. Can we please stop caging interior design in terms that conjure acts of bravery and daring-do?

Anyhow, Design Star has a panel of judges made up of HGTV's resident stars; Vern Yip, Genevieve Gorder and Candice Olson. They furrow their brows and act mean for the cameras as the contestants whip out poorly-executed rooms in a vain attempt to communicate their signature styles. Ugh.

I think the whole enterprise does a disservice to our honorable profession and the show would benefit from some levity. A whole lot of levity.

A couple of us were opining about the show on Twitter last night when @layersandlayers and @ZiaPriven and I came up with the idea to draft Joy and Janet, the Moggit Girls, to be judges on Design Star.

Any why not? They are already HGTV stars in their own right and they would counteract the sitting judges' mean-ness perfectly.

The future of humanity itself hangs in the balance here if I can borrow some of HGTV's heroism talk. If you're a Twitterer, join our movement. The Moggit Girls tweet as @moggitgirls and when you tweet your demands that they be cast to sit in the throne of judgment, use the hashtag #judgemoggits. If anybody has a better idea for a hashtag, let me know.

C'mon kids, let's start an HGTV uprising, a revolution. To the barricades!

Is this tub setting up your kids for a life of disappointment? The sequel.

On 23 April I ruffled a whole bunch of feathers by posing the not so rhetorical question "Is this tub setting up your kids for a life of disappointment" with regard to this very expensive "kid-friendly" tub.

I say yes, of course. Well it gets even better, because the same company who came up with the fire engine now has a princess' carriage tub.

Lord knows we'd never want a little girl to bathe in a fire truck. It'll turn her into a lesbian. Quick! Let's find something that'll keep her appropriately girly.

How did I manage to survive a childhood where I took baths in an iron tub surrounded by glass bottles of shampoo?

via Christian Montone on Flickr

Clothesline controversy? Huh?

There was an article on Shelterpop last week about the controversy surrounding clotheslines in suburbia. Huh?

In what universe can this be an eyesore,

Heidi Zech Photography

but this isn't?

I fear for this country, I really do. The Shelterpop article mentioned a piece from the New York Times that dug into the matter in more detail. Apparently, 60 million people in the US live in 300,000 private communities. In most of them, hanging out laundry is forbidden. I cannot imagine ever living in one of those places, but plenty of people do. No clotheslines is but one of what are no doubt hundreds of Gladys Kravitz-isms written into the the community agreements that bind these places together.

I grew up wearing clothes that were line dried. I hang my stuff out now because I like how sun-dried laundry smells. More than how it smells, I like how it feels. There's something about stiff jeans and undies that makes me think my clothes are really clean.

When I was a kid, there was a madwoman who lived next door. She lived to terrorize us kids but she liked my mother. She liked my mother a great deal. Her reason for this unexpected affection? My mother "hung out a nice wash."

I wonder if suburbanites would get along better if they were allowed to have clotheslines. Of course, what drives all of this is that graven image, resale value. Around six percent of all residential electricity use goes to power clothes dryers. If even some small portion of that were conserved by hanging out some laundry some times, the savings could be significant.

Besides, isn't nice to be a human being from time to time?  Even in a gated community?

Well have no fear because there's a fledgling "right to dry" movement in the US. How American is this by the way? One side bans clotheslines and the opposition declares a right to a clothesline. Anyhow, this right to dry movement has spawned a documentary film called Drying for Freedom. Here's the trailer:




Well that seems a bit extreme, but no more extreme than the absurd idea that it's against the rules to have a clothesline. What do you guys think? Would your rather die than line dry? Would you man the barricades to defend your right to hang your clothes in the sun? What do you think of this clothesline controversy?