Geek-to-chic events showcase K&B/interior designers' “Tech Moxie”

The following post is written by Mark Johnson, FAIA. Mark's a good friend and colleague and he's reporting from two events I didn't make it to this year. I'm happy to host his dispatches from a conference at Google's Boulder Campus and then from Fashion Week in New York. Unrelated events? I don't think so. You can follow Mark on Twitter; he tweets as @MarkJohnsonFAIA. So without further ado, here's part one of Mark's adventures from the road.


--Paul

I was delighted to attend major events in just two weeks where Kitchen & Bath (K&B) and Interior Designers dominated social media and embraced the newest design technology offered from Google. Why is this tipping point so important? Historically the K&B/Interior Design community has been content to follow rather than lead in adoption of online and tech tools. Architects have been the resident design geeks, but not for long…

Question: “Can a designer be Geek and Chic?” You say it’s an oxymoron and I’m a moxie moron for even suggesting? Stay with me for this two-part blog and I’ll try to prove it’s an important sea-change. Dive in, I promise you won’t become a pocket-protector misfit.

The Podium at 3D Basecamp - A mashup of High Tech & Camping with Shrek

Google 3D Basecamp where "It's Hip to be Square"

The events I attended couldn’t be more different and that’s what’s so exciting. I’ll call Google SketchUp 3D Basecamp in Boulder, “Geek Week.” I’ll dub the Luxury Bath Design Challenge at New York Fashion Week 2010, “Chic Week.”

Mark Johnson FAIA proposing "Unconference" Session on Social Media and Google 3D Warehouse. Aidan Chopra wondering... Does this topic have traction??

Let’s start in beautiful Boulder where Google’s indoor camping theme had their employees wearing wool caps in August…yeah, pretty geeky, but in a chic sort of way. We talked tech around virtual campfires; amazing what you can do with LED lights, a fan, fabric and kindling…not very romantic, but it was a geek fest after all. Don’t worry fashionistas, Part 2 will cover New York Fashion Week so hang in there, you need to read this.

Camp #4 - The On-Stage Wilderness with Google dudes and a roaring virtual campfire.

Trekies, I mean Techies, from around the world converged on Boulder with the unbridled enthusiasm of tweenage boys attending a Boy Scout World Jamboree. All the while, who’s quietly tweeting to the world about the release of Google SketchUp Version 8? Why it’s a cadre of K&B designers at 3D Basecamp, iPads and Macs in hand, and their Florida friend, Paul Anater @Paul_Anater, tweeting from afar.

Camp #5 - "Unconference" Session on Social Media +Google 3D Warehouse. No campfire, just lanterns...

Rachele Harless Gorsegner @misedesign, Eric Schimelpfenig @SketchThis, yours truly @MarkJohnsonFAIA, and @IntDesignerChat interloper, Alex Oliver @igloostudios were all there to witness the Version 8 launch, post over 50 tweets, and add a 34 pic photo album to Facebook by the next morning. I’ve included some pics with captions so you can see the brain damage we inflicted. Not to worry, most of it was virtual.

Camp #3 - Rachele Harless Gorsegner & David Pillsbury @davidpillsbury goofing off with the Google Team

Boulder is pretty laid back so our band of K&B SketchUp power users showed them how it’s done. In fact, on “Unconference Day,” Alex Oliver and I each led conference sessions highlighting Social Media, Google Apps, 3D Warehouse and our segments of the design industry; building products for architecture, interiors and K&B. Our quantitative analysis demonstrating how to generate ROI metrics with free Google Apps raised some eyebrows…Uh oh, this is getting geeky. In plain speak; 3D building and interior products are some of the most popular collections in Google’s entire 3D Warehouse.

SketchUp Road Warriors: Mike Tadros, Eric Schimelpfenig, David Pillsbury, Mark Johnson, Alex Oliver So to our many friends on the K&B and Interiors side of the business, you were well represented at "Geek Week". We even recruited a few through the wormhole to the K&B side of the Universe. Next post; on to New York for "Chic Week". No camping gear allowed…although a few celebs were spotted wearing “camo” near the runway! Eeww.

Hansgrohe adds to their collection of water-saving showers

Hansgrohe just added two new shower models to their stable of water-saving showers. Interestingly enough, Hansgrohe figured out a way to inject air into the water stream of a shower and when the air and water are mixed in a 3:1 ratio, the volume of the spray doesn't decrease but the amount of water used drops by anywhere from 20 to 36%.

The whole process is pretty slick and as you can see in this illustration of a Raindance AIR shower, Air gets pulled into the face of the shower.

Once the air's inside of the shower, the air gets mixed with water behind of face of the shower. The pressure from the water supply then shoots everything out of the face of the shower in a consistent stream. The method of air injection Hansgrohe uses actually increases the water droplet size as it's using less water. The result is a more drenching shower.

Hansgrohe how has two new additions to their collection of air injected showers. The first is the Chroma Green, a transitional style. Here it is in the handheld version:

And here it is as a wall-mount:

The second is the Raindance Air. Here's it is as a handheld:

And here it is as a wall-mount.

These new showers from Hansgrohe will allow you to use less water, save more money and still enjoy a good shower.

Dragging an old bathroom into the 21st Century

I've been working with a client on a very small bathroom. The bath in question is in a 1500 square foot ranch house in a valuable neighborhood and it suffered an unfortunate brush with a flipper around eight years ago. Any original character that was in bath when he started ended up in a dumpster. What's left is an out of character attempt at some kind of Shabby Chic as seen through the lens of somebody with $1000 and a long weekend.

Awful stuff.

Enter me. The client wants something modern and he wants me to maximize the storage while eliminating clutter. As you can see below, this bathroom measures a hair over nine feet by seven feet and maximizing storage is going to be a challenge.

Because this room's so small, I want to make it appear to be as large as possible. So instead of a shower stall, I'm calling for a single sheet of clear glass to define the shower area. All of the cabinetry will be raised a foot off the floor and every square inch of this room is going to be tiled in white marble.

If I remove the wall behind the shower you can see the sink elevation.

Here's the vanity and mirror from a little closer in.

All of this cabinetry's being made by a local cabinet maker and all of it will be natural walnut. That vanity cabinet is based on the idea of a Luce vanity sink from LaCava acting as both a sink and a counter.

In the interest of maximizing space, There's a pull out rack behind the right door of the vanity and the mirror slides to the left on hidden guides. Once the mirror's slid out of the way it reveals a counter sunk medicine cabinet in the wall.

On the other side of the bath, there's a tall cabinet. It too is sitting a foot off the ground.

The center compartment has a fold out dressing table, for lack of a better term, that slides in and out of the center compartment.

There's general storage in the compartments above and below the fold out table.

I'm still hunting for the right wall-mounted toilet and I welcome any and all suggestions.

The wall-mounted faucet will be the Virage from Brizo of course, as will the shower.

Although I have to admit I was lured by the siren's song of Hansgrohe, mostly for this photo.

Wow. Now I need to take a cold shower.

So by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, this bathroom will have been dragged into this century and by using decent finishes and fixtures, this client won't ever have to renovate this bath again.

A beautiful new faucet series from Gessi

From deep in the heart of Italy's Piedmont Region, comes the Goccia series from Gessi. Goccia means "droplet" in Italian and designer Prospero Rasulo found a new shape and in doing so, he found a way to bring faucets out of the kitchen and bathroom and into the rest of the house.

See what I mean? It reminds me of Achille Castiglioni's Arco lamp from 1962 but the similarities stop pretty quickly after that first flash of recognition.

I tell clients all the time to pick bar and prep sinks with intention but this exceeds even my definition of intention.

As dramatic as the large size of this faucet it, I can see integrating one of its smaller cousins into the end of a dining table or a buffet.

And of course, Goccia comes in sizes, shapes and configurations that work well in bathrooms as well. I'm really taken with this shape.

Goccia is a wide-ranging suite of fixtures, it extends far beyond what I'm showing here. And Goccia is but one of the hundreds of products offered by Gessi. Spend some time on their website and you'll see what I mean. There will be more to come from this company, believe me.

In the meantime though, what do you guys think of having a sink and faucet in the dining or living room? is it an idea whose time has come?

Late summer re-run: This is whack!

This post ran originally on 15 August 2008. In keeping with my "weekends are for old posts" experiment, I'm running it again.

I had a conversation with a client yesterday and I was trying to explain to her that the images of glamorous kitchens she sees in catalogs and magazines aren't real places. For the most part, those images are sets in a studio or on a sound stage. As fully-designed sets, their reason for existence is to sell you something, not to act as a template for what your life should look like. I hear that same sort of thing a lot; "make my house look like the one in As Good As It Gets" or "I want this to look like a Pottery Barn catalog." It's a strange, internalized kind of consumerism. One where it's not enough to want the goods for sale, rather the goal seems to be the acquisition of the advertiser's whole imaginary universe. It shows up for me in requests from people who think they want to live in a magazine spread or in a model home. Newsflash: no one actually lives in a model home and that magazine spread is peddling a fantasy.

Real life is messy but it's also a lot of fun. My goal as I set out design a space for someone is to minimize the messy part of life and accentuate the fun parts. Clean up should be simple. Everything should have a place that's easy to get to. Rooms should be furnished and accessorized with things that reflect the lives of their owners. I want the art on the walls to be art you like and that you pick out. I want the photos on the book case to be your photos. I want the stuff that's lying around to tell a story about your life. It's your house, not Arthur Rutenberg's and not Pottery Barn's and not mine.

Anyhow, as I was ruminating about that I came across something on Consumerist that may be the root of why I approach residential design the way that I do.

Buried on their page two was a brief mention of something they were calling Wacky Packages. Well, I remember them as Wacky Packs and for better or for worse, my design sensibilities were deeply affected by them when I was nine or so.

Wacky Packages were a collectible sticker series that were put out by Topps (the baseball card people) in the '70s. They were graphic, sophomoric, brilliant spoofs of consumer products and my brothers and I couldn't get enough of them. The mention in Consumerist alluded to their value as collectibles now and there's actually a website dedicated to buying and selling them. What does that have to do with making a house reflect the people who live in it? Hold that thought.

This is a photo of my mother in the kitchen of my childhood home in about 1973. Looming behind her is a cabinet door covered with, you guessed it, Wacky Packs.

Here it is in close up.

My mother, bless her heart, allowed her six sons to cover a cabinet door in her kitchen with Wacky Packs. It's an extreme example, but there can be no doubt that the house I grew up in reflected the fact that nine people lived in it. Seven kids are hard to miss to begin with; but just in case you did, check out this cabinet door! Thank you Mom for putting up with us, thank you Tom for getting us started with Wacky Packs, thank you Steve for scanning all of these old family photos and thank you Consumerist for the walk down memory lane.

Here are a bunch of original issue Wacky Packs, many of which were on that cabinet door. They mock the Cold War, they mock hippies, they are decidedly irreverent and gloriously offensive. They are aimed squarely at nine-year-old boys, yet they include some heavy allusions to cigarettes and liquor. I cannot get over how many of these things I remember, yet I haven't given them a thought in at least 30 years.





Now I doubt that I'll be encouraging someone cover a kitchen cabinet door with stickers any time soon, but if somebody really wants to; what's it going to hurt?