Kitchens.com just unveiled idea boards for real people

The great site Kitchens.com rolled out a big new initiative, for lack of a better term, last week and I want to give it some attention.

Not all kitchen renovations are big-budget, high-end projects. The overwhelming majority of them aren't. But for the people in the middle, there doesn't seem to be anywhere to go for any kind of professional design guidance. That's unfortunate and the fault for that lies squarely with people like me and the industry we're part of.

Well Kitchens.com set out to begin to correct for that omission. In what is the first part of an ongoing project, Kitchens.com took three, well-designed, accessible kitchens and turned them into ten completely different kitchens.

Everything been done virtually of course but where it gets interesting is that each of the designs is shown in a nearly photographic rendering and there are at least five different perspectives of each design.

Then they took and found a source for every element that's used in each design. You can use these design boards for inspiration of course, but you can also use them to generate shopping lists.

It's a really great idea that's long overdue.

The images scattered around this post are some of the stills from Kitchen.com's new idea boards of course and I urge you to go see the whole project. It's quite a compilation. So kudos to the entire Kitchens.com team. real people everywhere are singing your praises.

A Blog Off post: I am an optimist at heart

The following post is part of a biweekly blogospheric happening called a Blog Off. In a Blog Off, bloggers from all walks of life write about the same subject. The topic for this Blog Off is: Is There Reason to be Optimistic? Blog Off topics are left vague intentionally so that participants can run freely with their musings. If you's like more information on the Blog Off, check out the website. At the end of this post will appear a table with links to all of the participating blogs and that table's repeated on the main Blog Off site. So excuse me while I take a break from my niche (again) and throw it all out there.

I am an optimist. As skeptical and suspicious as I am, at the end of the day I'm thrown to see the positive way forward in any situation. That's not always been the case, I've trained myself to be an optimist. It took a number of years to get to the point where seeing the brighter side is my default mode but I got there. If I can do it, anybody can. Really. I don't see optimism in the same way a lot of people do though.

To be an optimist is to be a realist. All too often, optimism gets confused with sentiment or nostalgia or naiveté but the key to seeing the positives is to be able to assess and gauge reality as it is, not as I'd like it to be.

We live in troubled times. Though 2010's hardly a uniquely troubled time. Humanity's been watching great civilizations rise and fall for a very long time and in the big picture, that story arc never changes. Our times are no different than times have ever been. Here are some of humanity's greatest hits; Elam, Egypt, Assyria, Minoa, Persia, Greece, Phoenicia, Rome, Byzantium, The Ottoman Empire, the Portuguese Empire, The Spanish Empire and The British Empire. That's just a list of sequential empires off the top of my head. All of them have come and gone and each one followed a similar story arc. That's a simplification of course, but each of those civilizations believed itself to be special, ordained by god (s) even. Each one had a rise, a plateau, a decline and then a collapse.

I believe I live in a declining empire and I don't think that makes me a pessimist to hold that opinion. Believing that the decline of the US and by extension the rest of the West can be arrested and reversed isn't optimism, it's a delusion. It's a delusion to believe that everybody can have a bachelor's degree and a 2400 square foot house on a cul de sac. It's a delusion to believe that we can fix everything if we all speak English, or if none of us are Muslim, or if we keep hounding gays until they all jump off bridges. No one can delay the inevitable by manufacturing new enemies.

Admitting to and owning reality isn't pessimism, it pragmatism. It's only in assessing things as they are, not as they ought to be, that people can then choose to be optimistic. I don't think the current decline can be reversed, but I do think it can be slowed. The US doesn't have to collapse in an orgy of civil unrest and it doesn't have to be conquered on a field of war. Those things aren't automatic but to avoid them it's going to require a rational assessment of things as they are and the positive, optimistic, collective choice to keep the upper hand and maintain the rule of law.

So after all that, the question is Is there reason to be optimistic? I say you bet there is. There are all kinds of reasons to be optimistic. I'm alive and I'm in charge and everything flows from there. I can't fix the problems of the US but what I can do is vote for candidates who show something close to a grasp on reality. I can't fix the housing market, the banking crisis or the dreary jobs picture. What I can do though is shield myself from that stuff as best I can and keep plugging away to keep a roof over my head in a mess of an economy. You can't stay flexible, you can't change with the times, you can't assess a situation accurately until you can see it and then chose to be optimistic. The world as I've come to know may be going down the tubes but I don't have to go with it. You know, life isn't easy but it sure is fun. And if all else fails, I have tickets to go see La Bohème at the Met on December 11th.

Liberty from Trend USA proves that recycling is beautiful

At Cersaie, the international tile showcase held every year in Bologna, Trend USA launched a significant enhancement to its already impressive Liberty collection.

The glass used in the Liberty collection is 75% post-consumer recycled glass and the collection's now available in 14 color forms.

Each sheeted mosaic is hand cut, which gives it an imperfect leavening to the geometry of the pattern as a whole. The effect is subtle and hand made yet thoroughly modern at the same time.

It's patterns like Liberty that get me thinking about all the ways other than backsplashes where a dramatic mosaic can set the tone of a room. As the photos here show, this is not tile you'd want to hide.

Trend USA's products are available through showrooms worldwide. With the Liberty collection, Trend USA proves yet again that recycling and sustainable designs are beautiful.

Autumnal re-runs: Dirty money, filthy lucre; a designer's confession

The following post appeared originally on 6 September 2009. Here we are more than a year later and the payola situation out there seems more chronic than ever. I still won't dirty my hands with it and that it goes on as often as it does sticks in my craw like few other things.

A long, long time ago, I worked for a fancy schmancy kitchen design studio. We worked the very high end of the market and with the help of a whole lot of smoke and mirrors, we had a reputation as the high class joint where somebody with money to burn could go to get a kitchen or a bath straight out of a magazine. In fact, a lot of our stuff ended up in magazines. We had a reputation for being an ethical, service-oriented firm peopled with designers who were completely committed to their clients' needs, wants and whims.

I worked there for two years and in those two years I worked on a couple of interesting projects, but most of it was just overpriced exercises in more is more. It was pretty soul-deadening. My big project though, was a home that was under construction for the entire two years that I was at the fancy schmancy studio. It was a grand home; a complete, period-perfect reproduction of a plantation house. We were contracted to design all of the cabinetry and casework in the entire house. It was a tremendous opportunity to learn how to design such things as coffered ceilings and wainscoted walls. It took a year-and-a-half to complete the designs.

Finally, when we priced out all of the cabinetry and casework the first time, the numbers came back at 1.3 million dollars. And no, million is not a typo. Eventually, we edited down the designs in the project and got it to a more palatable but still galling $400,000. A couple of hours before my boss and I were to present that revised proposal to the architects, he and I met to review the numbers one last time. When I was digging through the internal, itemized price sheets I came across an $85,000 charge that didn't have any kind of history or back up. The $85,000 had been folded into the total and since the client never saw the itemized back ups, no one would really know that it was in there. I asked what that charge was and he informed me that it was to pay for the builder's kitchen renovation.

I wanted to vomit. I am not a naif, I know that payola and kick backs go on all the time in my industry. But I'd never seen so naked a grab in my life. What ever respect I had for my boss or the contractor went out the window at that very moment. I swallowed my revulsion and made it through the meeting. I went along with it and said nothing. I was a junior designer on the project and I told myself that it wasn't my place to make waves about the graft I'd stumbled across. I left the firm a couple of weeks after that, and I never got to see the completed house. It didn't matter by then. In my mind the whole thing was tainted and I had a hard enough time looking at the plans, seeing the real thing would have done me in. Many years later, that situation still bothers me.

The payola, the graft, I stumbled across that afternoon wasn't an isolated case. I don't mean just at that studio either. "Paid referrals" are a common practice throughout the industry and I react to them now the way I did then. I'm repulsed. I think the practice is sleazy and unethical. I don't pay for referrals and I won't accept money for one. Take the money you would pay me and charge your customer less. What a concept!

I'm hooked into a network of tradespeople and suppliers I know and trust. When I refer my clients to my tile setter, or my electrician, or my lighting supplier, I want them to know that I am referring to the best person I know for the job at hand. I want them to know that they will be taken care of. Their job will be completed as promised and they will be charged a fair, though not necessarily a low, price. I want them to know too that the fair price they're paying doesn't include a kick back to me.

I was reminded of that whole situation this week when I got a phone call from an interior designer I'd never met. She had two clients who wanted to renovate a kitchen but that a kitchen plan was beyond her skill set. As we talked about the job she was proposing, she told me that her clients wanted something nice, but they were pretty price-sensitive. She then told me that she was willing to waive her usual 10% referral fee and "only" wanted me to tack $1000 onto the job total for her. Only. This was a sentence or two after she described them as price-sensitive.

I told her that I'd love to talk to her clients but that I wasn't going to give her a dime. There was a stoney silence on the other end of the line. "Really?" she asked in a near whisper. "Why is that?"

"Because it's sleazy," I said. "It's unethical and it makes projects cost more than they should. If you're any good at what you do, you should be able to make a living from the fees and commissions you earn. Payola is dirty money, it's a used car salesman move. I'm not a used car salesman. Are you?"

"Ummm," she nearly whispered, "maybe we're not a good match."

It was the smartest thing she said during the three minutes she was in my life.

Autumnal re-runs: Induction cooking rules the universe

This post ran originally on 9 July 2009. I wrote it after I returned from a really great trip to GE Monogram's headquarters in Louisville, KY. I know a couple of people who are headed to Louisville this week to take the same class and I know they're going to learn a lot, eat a lot and enjoy themselves tremendously. Wear your thinking caps kids but tie them too tightly.

OK, so I spent the beginning of the week this week In Louisville, KY as a guest of GE Monogram appliances. While I was at GE I was not only treated like a prince, I was assigned a cooking station in GE's Monogram test kitchen. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the other designers who attended this appliance summit and I prepared most of our own meals under the expert tutelage of GE's chefs.

The bottom line was that I had a kitchen with $20,000 in appliances at my disposal and I was in heaven. I spent most of my time falling in love with the GE Monogram Pro 48" range I wrote about the other day. But the bulk of the actual cooking I did was on a GE Monogram 36" induction cooktop.

I have been on the induction bandwagon since my first hands-on experience with induction cooking at a Wolf seminar about four years ago.

I wrote a description of how induction cooktops work back in January, give it a look if you need a primer.

Induction cookers are highly efficient and they work with unusual speed. For example, an induction cooktop can boil six quarts of water 400 percent faster than natural gas can. I'm a bit of an efficiency nerd and despite my former preference for cooking with gas, I conceded that preference to induction years ago. Get this, from the energy expended from a gas burner, 62% of that energy gets lost and does nothing more than heat up a room. Only 38% of that energy gets delivered to the food being cooked. That lousy efficiency is why gas cooktops have to be vented. Old school radiant electric cookery is more efficient from an energy perspective. In this case, 72% of the energy expended goes toward heating the food and 27% is lost. In induction, 84% off the energy expended goes to the food being cooked and only 16% is lost.

This is the actual electromagnet and circuitry inside an induction cooktop

Anyhow, I've played around with induction at a variety of training seminars I've attended over the years, but I've never actually cooked with it. Until this week that is.

On Tuesday afternoon I browned chicken and made a red curry on an induction cooktop and I was really impressed. The process of browning chicken was faster, but it wasn't due to my using higher cooking temperatures. It was faster because the skillet got to the correct temperature in seconds. It was amazing, actually.

On Wednesday, I made pasta with a sauce of bacon, pine nuts, feta and mascarpone. I made the sauce in a sautee pan. I was always concerned about how well induction would fare with sauces, but my concerns were unfounded. My pasta sauce turned out perfectly. Ditto a caramel sauce I whipped up later. The butter, brown sugar and cream blended flawlessly at a medium heat and then stayed warm on simmer until it was time to eat. Best of all, when I cleaned out the pot later, there was nothing scorched on the bottom.

So, even though I've been responsible for getting induction cooktops into a bunch of peoples' houses in the last few years, I'd never cooked on one until recently. After having done so, all I can say is that induction cookery exceeded even my lofty expectations. So I guess the next step is to get one for me. Hmmm.