Great new patterns from New Ravenna Mosaics

It is no secret that I have a thing for marble, mosaics and anything made by New Ravenna Mosaics. Well New Ravenna just released some new mosaic patterns this week and I think they're spectacular. The pattern above and below is called Ganesha and it's shown here in honed Calacatta marble.

As is the case with the rest of their patterns, you can order any New Ravenna mosaic pattern in any stone or art glass color they have available. Trust me, the size of their materials library is staggering and they love made to order work.

The next pattern is called Jacqueline Vine and it's shown here in Thassos marble.

What's unique about these patterns is that they're all water jetted of course, but where they get interesting is that the grout lines are an integral part of the design. Jacqueline Vine gets a lot of its impact from the sanded grout that surrounds the pieces of Thassos. As stunning as it would look on a wall, Jacqueline Vine on a floor would be a real knock out.

Raj is shown here in polished Calacatta and honed Thassos.

I love how the two stones add a subtle tonal variation that accents the textures in the patterns.

It's a terrific, interesting effect. It's glamorous but not fussy and that's a tough act to pull off.

Finally, here's one of my favorite patterns from their extensive catalog. This is Octopus's Garden and I saw this one with my own eyes last April at Coverings 2010.

Octopus's Garden is shown here in a white art glass but as I mentioned earlier, it can be made with any of the materials New Ravenna can get their hands on.

Just as was the case with the Jacquline Vine, Octopus's Garden pattern is utterly dependent on the grout lines to define the shapes. Here's a close up of the seahorse.

There are a number of creatures in Octopus's Garden and you can mix and match them at will. Have a thing for seahorses? Then get it in all seahorses. Starfish? Sand dollars? If you can imagine it, they can do it.

Art and commerce can co-exist and New Ravenna Mosaics is living proof of that. You can find the rest of their collection on their website, but you'll only see these great new patterns here.

I love 'em all. Which one's your favorite?

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.