Is this Italian style?

When I think of Italian design and Italian style, especially when it comes to kitchen designs, my mind goes to rooms that look like this beauty from Snaidero.

However, I have a feeling that Snaidero is showing me Italian style for export. Oh it's authentically Italian, it's just that it's on a scale that I suspect wouldn't work in Italy. Most Italians don't live in homes large enough to accommodate something this size for starters.

My firsthand experiences with Italian kitchens, though limited, are pretty far removed from the Snaidero room above.

I can remember seeing a kitchen showroom in Rome and wondering what my work life would look like if I were to ply my trade in Italy rather than in the US. I suspect that it would look more like the following kitchens from Acquario-Ceramiche in Padua.

I have a feeling that those kitchens from Acquario-Ceramiche come a lot closer to authentic Italian kitchens than a lot of what passes for "Italian" in the US.

Maybe one of my Italian readers will weigh in on this pressing question. Do contemporary Italians look to kitchens that look like the ones shown by Acquario-Ceramiche as something to be emulated? Is this Italian style?

This house is a Candle in the Wind

This photograph of Marilyn Monroe was taken about a month before she died. Allen Grant took the photo for Life magazine and in it she's kicking back in her Brentwood home. On the surface she looks like she doesn't have a care in the world. I think that's what made her an actress.



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The home Marilyn Monroe lived in at the end of her life was on 5th Helena Drive in Brentwood. 12305 5th Helena Drive to be exact. How do I know? Someone sent me the listing for the house. Here's the link. It's on the market for three and a half million dollars and compared to the listing I wrote about earlier this week, that's a bargain. According to the listing agent, it's a four bedroom, three bath 1929 hacienda on one of the most desirable streets in Brentwood. I don't know enough about LA real estate to judge that so maybe somebody from LA will chime in.

The room where Marilyn's sitting in the photo above is in the photos that follow. Anybody want to guess which one?

It's a lovely home. Really. I like the scale of the rooms and how bright everything seems. It needs some work on the furnishings department but maybe not. I think the lack of really fine furnishings in it adds to the relaxed air it gives off.

It's a curious thing now that I think about it. Would you ever buy a home that once belonged to a now dead movie star? Would Candle in the Wind take on a whole new significance?

Get the ax murderer look for less

So last week I found this shower fixture from Bagno Sasso. Hilarity ensued. Here's the link to the story. We'll wait while you go read it because today's post will lean on it heavily.

OK, everybody back? Excellent, let's proceed.

Now, I spend a lot of time with my clients talking about how to recreate what they really want for a budget they can really afford. There's an art to finding a good knock off and a lot of times it can be useful to take a step back and think about what it is about the spendy original that's so appealing. A lot of times, it's not so much the object, it's the feeling it invokes. I find that selecting the right knock off is a matter of tuning into that feeling.

So if you have your heart set on that many thousand dollar man in the shower from Bagno Sasso, there's a $28 shower curtain from Urban Outfitters that brings up some of the feeling invoked by that original. Here it is.

Many thanks to the terrific Raina Cox, whose If The Lampshade Fits is a daily read. Make it one of yours too.

If you can't live on the Las Vegas Strip, bring the Las Vegas Strip to you

Anne Samowitz is a regular, dedicated reader of this blog and the other day she mailed me an MLS listing for a property on the market in long Island, New York. The house is a nightmare of ostentation and bad taste and it can be yours for a very reasonable $17.5 million.

The listing agent calls it the antithisis of fine living in the listing. Hmmmm. Antithesis means opposite and let me get Dictionary.com's official definition before we go a step further.

an·tith·e·sis   [an-tith-uh-sis]
–noun, plural -ses  [-seez]

1. opposition; contrast: the antithesis of right and wrong.
2. the direct opposite (usually fol. by of  or to ): Her behavior was the very antithesis of cowardly.
3. Rhetoric

• the placing of a sentence or one of its parts against another to which it is opposed to form a balanced contrast of ideas, as in “Give me liberty or give me death.”
• the second sentence or part thus set in opposition, as “or give me death.”

So either the listing agent is being clever or she needs a vocabulary refresher. There's a life lesson here though kids, don't use words you don't understand.

OK, onward. Let's take a stroll through the wonders that await the rapper/ professional athlete/ lottery winner/ Celine Dion in this once in a lifetime listing. The Celine Dion crack was Anne's and it's perfect.

Don't you love the human scale of this room? It just invites you to curl up on the sofa and read a book.

This kitchen's listed as a Custom Peacock Kitchen and I'll bet Mr. Peacock would be surprised to receive credit for that room up there. Wasn't it clever of them to make the ceiling so unrelated to anything going on in the room under it. That seems to be a recurring theme in this house. Context? We don't need no stinkin' context!

Nothing says "You've made it" like his 'n hers Skee Ball.

Again, why just admire The Bellagio when you can live in it full time?

The photo above seems to be the "lobby" of the home theater.

This is the box office. Note the two movie posters. To the left we have 1996's Striptease starring Demi Moore. Striptease made Showgirls look like Gone with the Wind. If you don't remember it you're not missing much. To the right hangs a poster for 1997's Titanic. I will never understand the appeal of that awful movie. Never. But it seems were just in time for a screening of 1991's What About Bob? Based on the movie mentions, I'd say the current owner had a career that peaked at some point in the '90s. Jean-Claude Van Damme? No, then the posters would be for Cyborg and Kickboxer. Hmmm. I wonder wonder wonder.

Here's the inside of the theater. If this home doesn't come with a resident company of Phantom or Riverdance, it needs one.

It has boxes. Two of them. For visiting royalty.

I don't have $17.5 million laying around to spend on a house. If I did however, I think I could do better than to recreate the Las Vegas Strip. What do you guys think?

Beginning this August, IKEA will start phasing out incandescent light bulbs

On August 1, 2010 IKEA stores in North America will being phasing out the sale of incandescent light bulbs and by January 1st, 2011 IKEA will stop selling them all together. Here's the link to IKEA's press release.

IKEA's move makes it the first US retailer to end its sale of incandescents and it's doing so a year ahead of the federally mandated timeline to begin. As I understand it, the mandated timeline in the US is a phase out that starts in 2012 and ends the sale of incandescents all together in 2014 and please correct me if I'm wrong.

Frankly I applaud them just as I applaud the move away from incandescents in general. I made the switch several years ago and the difference in my electric bill was as obvious as it was instantaneous. Then again, I don't have any light fixtures that feature exposed, decorative bulbs.

Have you guys given any thought to this scheduled phase out? Do you plan to make the switch or do you plan to stockpile incandescents before they're gone for good? Is this news?

I'm very fond of the warm-tone CFLs I use and if enough people would find it useful, I'll start rerunning my earlier material about how to buy a warm CFL. On second thought, here's a breakdown of lumens, footcandles and degrees Kelvin.

In the meantime though, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is IKEA's phase out too soon or is the rest of the country's too late?