Reader question: Can I get a living finish to look the way it used to?

Hi! I was reading your blog piece on patinas of Feb.10 2009  but silly me I cannot figure out how to find the next day (you said it would be continued tomorrow.)

I impulse bought a hammered fired huge bathtub on Craigslist for a song, and am designing my bathroom. Due to space limitations, I will use the tub also as a shower, behind a wall of heavy glass doors. I read today on another site that the dark fired finish will turn as it is a living finish unless I treat monthly with beeswax. I'm trying to decide if I want to just let it go into its living finish and enjoy that evolution or treat it now. It's been in the garage for some months and I notice that where a drip of water got on it it is green patina'd. Do you know if it's possible to bring it back to a dark fired finish after I let it go green and beyond? I am chemically sensitive so I wouldn't want to use caustic chemicals to do so.

The problem with buying things for a song on Craig's List is that you have no idea where something's been. Seriously, unless you can find out the name of the manufacturer and contact them, you're shooting in the dark. That tub appears to be copper from that photo and based on the fact that it developed a green color in reaction to a water drip. But beyond my assumption that you're dealing with a copper tub, I haven't a clue whether or not your tub's been patina-d or spray painted to look the way it does.

So here are a few things I know about patinas and living finishes. I wrote a five-part series on this topic in February of '09 and those posts are here:

So What the Devil's a "Living Finish" Anyway?


No Really, What's a Living Finish?


Patinas on a Budget


The Peoples' Faucetry


All Good Things Must End: My Last Post on Faucets for a While


In a nutshell, metals like copper are reactive. That means they react to chemicals in their environments. Copper usually reacts to acids and alkilis to form a variety of chlorides, sulphides and carbonates known collectively as verdigris. Verdigris is composed of  copper carbonate or copper chloride primarily and those chemicals make up the green patina most people associate with copper. However, not all patinas on copper are green and not all patinas are the result of natural, chemical processes.

That's a lot of chemistry for somebody who says she's chemically sensitive, whatever that means, but reality has a way of intruding on the best-laid plans.

Pure copper develops a patina in what's essentially a process of decay. Patinas are the symptom of that decay but they also serve as a protective surface. A patina-d surface layer on copper seals off the copper from the outside world and the decay stops. Remove the patina and the decay starts again until it forms a new patina then it stops again. Repeat this process for a thousand years or so and your copper object will disappear.

The confusion with all of this comes from the imprecise language used to describe patinas. In the commercial sense, a patina is a surface treatment of a metal. The same word gets used to describe a patina that occurs naturally and a patina that's applied. Copper left out in the rain and elements will eventually turn green in reaction to oxygen in air and water. The brown color on the tub in the photo got there as a result of some chemical or several chemicals and pigments being applied to its surface.

Whether or not its a living finish is a function of it either having or not having a clear coat on its surface. Applying a clear coat stops the chemical reaction driving the patina. Not applying a clear coat allows the patina to evolve.

Don't waste your time applying beeswax. Use polyurethane instead. It lasts forever (more or less) and beeswax will have its own effect on copper over time. Just because one material comes from a bee and another material was developed in a lab doesn't make beeswax a better sealer, nor is it automatically benign. Whatever you end up doing, never scrub your copper tub because you'll disturb either the patina or the clear coat preserving the patina.

So to answer your question, once your tub starts to change color, it won't ever go back to what it was when you bought it.

SketchUp 3D Basecamp, Continued: Great Minds Think Alike (or Not)

Note: Google invited 250 of their devotees to a three-day meeting that started Wednesday. I was among those invited and although I couldn't get my schedule cleared enough to attend, I was asked to nominate someone to attend. I nominated Rachele Harless Gorsegner, a friend of mine and the woman who writes The Conscious Kitchen. Rachele's already written a dispatch from day one of the conference and now here is day two. Thanks Rachele!

The three-day 3D modeling conference for the SketchUp community continued Thursday, with a solidly packed day of "unconference" sessions.  Affable and highly entertaining Google emcee, Aidan Chopra, facilitated a large brainstorming session in which various individuals nominated topics for sessions.  Individuals were asked to write their ideas on sticky notes and then step up to the microphone to introduce their idea.  Their sticky note was then taken by Googlers and put up on a scheduling board.

As you can see, there were plenty of ideas to be exchanged at this unconference!  The brainstorming session was actually so fruitful that it ran over the time allotted, and the first unconference session start time was pushed back from 10a to 10:30a.

The topics were incredibly wide ranging, all the way from somewhat expected and highly relevant topics like "Tips and Techniques," to more elite super-user topics such as photorealistic rendering and building information modeling (BIM). There were some tangential topics such as exploring and harnessing the power of social media, as well as eclectic topics such as using SketchUp for set design in the film industry.  How creative and unexpected!  Unconference sessions ranged in size from 5-6 attendees all the way up to, by my estimate, 40 attendees.

Mitchel Stangl, shown as a topic leader in this picture (see the green shirt), was definitely one of the more engaging and passionate speakers.  Mitchel is the very definition of a SketchUp power user; he works with incredibly large and complex models, and has been using SketchUp since 2001, when it was "born."  One of his sessions, on the topic of creating 2D construction documents from 3D models, turned out to be one of the most popular topics of the day.

Following the unconference sessions, all attendees were invited to an hour-long session to propose and prioritize features for SketchUp version 9.  Yes, you heard that right -- version 9.  The very day after version 8 was released, the SketchUp team was already encouraging and soliciting feedback for their next release.  (My only explanation is that they must have learned to get by with about three hours of sleep per day.)  It was interesting to see which suggestions met with wide support (e.g. reflection property for SketchUp materials), whereas other suggestions sparked quite a bit of debate (an iPad viewer for SketchUp?  "YAY!"...  "NAY!"...  a web-based version of SketchUp?  "COOL!"... "WRONG DIRECTION!"...).  If you missed out on the conference but have ideas for SketchUp 9, there's certainly many opportunities and avenues to offer your ideas to the SketchUp team.  If there's one thing I learned this week, it is that the SketchUp team is very accessible and receptive to feedback.

Mark Johnson, FAIA and Eric Schimelpfenig, AKBD

On the fun side, the 3D Basecamp event provided a great avenue for getting to know, as Google calls them, your "Birds of a Feather."  While at the event, I met some kitchen and residential designers, some manufacturers, and also the guys from Igloo Studios, producer of popular SketchUp tutorials and classes as well as creators of hundreds of  useful components in the SketchUp 3D warehouse (i.e. cabinetry, plumbing, appliances).

The second day concluded with dinner and a party at the Google offices.  The party was on the deck, which was accessed by going up the stairs of a central rec room.  It was something of an oversized romper room for adults, including not only this awesome rock wall (note "GOOGLE" in the upper right corner), but also: massage chairs, a ping pong table, a pool table, and super soaker water guns.  

The Google deck welcomed us with a beautiful vista of the Rocky Mountains.  Can you imagine being able to come out here to this gorgeous deck, to eat your lunch every day?  A brown bag lunch never looked so good.

Sadly, my last interaction with the Google SketchUp crowd was this parting shot (literally).  I was unable to attend Day 3 of the event, which promised numerous interesting demos from various plug-in vendors ("Friends of Google") for SketchUp.  Most of the plug-ins offered functionality for photorealistic rendering as well as energy analysis calculations -- all very interesting stuff.

Thanks to Google and the SketchUp team for being gracious, welcoming, and enthusiastic hosts!

On set and out of character: scenes from Mad Men

My great friend David Nolan (who's an occasional contributor around here) sent me some photos yesterday. They appeared in Rolling Stone, no wonder I missed them. Anyhow, they made me laugh and though they'd be a great kick off to a holiday weekend. It's a holiday in the US at any rate. Look for a screechy, pro-labor Labor Day post on Monday. In the meantime, Here's John Hamm checking his iPhone 4 between takes.

And here are Aaron Staton and Rich Sommer, who play Ken Cosgrove and Harry Crane, checking out Aaron's Mac Book.

Christina Hendricks, as Joan, hits her mark.

A creative meeting loses some of its Mad Men panache when you can see the cameras.

For three years running, Sunday nights have been the highlight of my week. So long as Mad Men's in season that is.

Bad taste never seems to go out of style

Fiorentino, the people who brought us the lacy floor lamps last week, has some companion pieces in their new offerings.

Their Leonardo collection features an array of tufted tuffets, poufs and other things to trip over. They are available in white tufted leather, black tufted leather and most classy of all, gold tufted pleather. All of which come laden with Swarovski crystals and the occasional lion's foot.

Lovely. But there's more.

Now that I can see this whole thing set up with one of those lacy floor lamps I am beginning to see something.

Are we poised for an I Dream of Jeannie revival?

Sub-Zero/ Wolf's Westye Bakke Center: better photography

As I posted last week, I was a recent guest of Sub-Zero/ Wolf at their Westye F. Bakke Center and corporate headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin.

During the Depression years of the 1930s, self-taught engineer Westye F. Bakke worked as a refrigeration consultant with Frank Lloyd Wright. He invented and developed built-in refrigerators and freezers for such Wright projects as the Johnson Wax Building and Wingspread. In 1945, Bakke founded Sub-Zero and he named his company for the fact that his freezers were the first to hold a consistent temperature below zero.

The Westye F. Bakke Center is a training and meeting facility that sits between the Sub-Zero refrigeration plant and the Wolf cooking appliance plant. As incredible as the building is, that it sits squarely between the two factories that made the building possible speaks volumes about Sub-Zero/ Wolf as a company and as a group of people.

I was dissatisfied with the photos I took of the Center when I was there last week, and Diane White from Sub-Zero/ Wolf's marketing department sent me a collection of their official photos. Here are some highlights of the things I saw in Madison.

Here's the building itself. It was designed by the Madison architectural firm Zingg Design.

This is the staircase to the second floor, where the administrative offices and main dining room are.

Suspended from the second floor ceiling are the Chihuly chandeliers that catch everybody's attention when you enter the building.

As I mentioned last week, I have a connection (though tenuous) to the Art Nouveau lounge in the center. The man who designed it, Bill Draper, is a genius.

I think his Brasserie des Artistes is as perfect an homage to the Art Nouveau movement as I've ever seen.

Down the hall from it are two adjoining Mick de Giulio kitchens that despite their size, don't feel anything like the commercial spaces they are.

The entire Westye F. Bakke Center and my experiences there were the sorts of things kitchen designers daydream about. Designer people out there, do not pass up an opportunity to take a pilgrimage to Madison.

And for all of you non-designer people, Sub-Zero/ Wolf has extended their current instant rebate program through March, 2011. At stake is an instant rebate worth up to $2500. You can find more information on their website.

Many thanks again to my Sub-Zero/ Wolf rep, Cathy Bame, for making all of this possible. Many, many thanks go to the great people at Sub-Zero/ Wolf in Madison for being such enthusiastic hosts. Let's sell some refrigerators and ranges!

You can see Sub-Zero/ Wolf's entire collection of food preservation and preparation appliances on their website.