Hardware: chapitre deux

I was in a really great older home today. It was a Tudor built in 1922 and it's in a historic neighborhood in Tampa. Older homes are great places to do a little research when I'm trying to put together a plan for someone who's building a new home. Although I was in the Tudor to put together a color plan, some of the photos I took this afternoon will be put to use as inspirations for the newer places I work on.

It is no longer 1920 and houses that are built in 2008 shouldn't try to make it seem like it is. So when I see an older home up close, I'm not looking for ways to imitate it in a newer home. Rather, I look to them to see what lessons I can learn from the people who built them. In 1920, architects and builders had a completely different idea about scale and proportion than most of what you see today. There are lessons galore.

So many times, contemporary homes are built with the idea that more is always better. When in doubt; increase the scale, slap on more ornamentation, and lose whatever sense of serenity a structure has in a sea of more crap. Enough already. Most great vintage homes don't do that. Exceptions abound, but for the most part, an older home that feels like a home does so because of the human-ness of its scale and design. When my 1920s Tudor was built, times were simpler in the sense that people had lower expectations and ornament was expensive and beyond the reach of most people. Too, there was a civic modesty people subscribed to and its demise is clearly evident to anyone who passes through the gates of any suburban enclave in the nation.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Scale is not a difficult thing to demand or get. Even in a gated enclave. A house should fit its lot and not frighten passersby. Proportion isn't subjective and it's not subject to the winds of change. It's also not too much to ask. For more information on this and related topics, our friends over at Taunton Press have dedicated a publishing company to the call for more reasonable building practices. Check them out at http://www.taunton.com/ Pay close attention to the books written by an architect named Sarah Susanka. The woman changed my life and she can change yours too.

Now how does any of this relate to door knobs? I'm not quite sure, but let me try to pull off a graceful segue here.

When I was in the 1920s Tudor this afternoon, what struck me more than anything were the door knobs and hinges that were original to the house and were everywhere. They were simple and elegant and beautiful. When that house was built, the hardware for the doors came from a foundry where men toiled in wretched conditions and they cast bronze using the "lost wax" method that you learned about in social studies in grade school.

The hardware you're going to find in your friendly neighborhood home center is going to be mass produced in China under reprehensible conditions. The conditions there are probably worse than they were in a foundry in the US a hundred years ago, and the artisanal qualities are nonexistent. So what you get for that bargain price is poorly designed dreck and increased trade imbalance with China. So what's somebody with a taste for simple elegance and a social conscience to do?

It's easy, log onto the website of Sun Valley Bronze (http://www.svbronze.com/) or Rocky Mountain Hardware (http://www.rockymountainhardware/) and feast your eyes on the offerings of two companies who still cast bronze using the lost wax method. Minus the horrible working conditions. The door hardware to the upper right is from Rocky Mountain and proves that contemporary settings can still benefit immensely from some old world craftsmanship that doesn't look like a cartoon of old world craftsmanship.

To the left and right are the inside and outside faces of a set of door hardware from Sun Valley Bronze. To feel hand cast bronze is to touch the face of God. Bronze has a tactile quality that's unmatched by any other metal. It been popular since, well, the Bronze Age for a very good reason. It looks good and feels better. I even like the way it smells. Who knew that an alloy of copper and tin could bring such joy to the world?

To the left and below slightly is a set of hardware for French doors that whispers odes to your good taste. To the lower right is a lever handle, and each of these sets is from Sun Valley Bronze. Of course, these photos can't begin to do them justice, so do a little research on your own and find some of these things. You'll be happy you did.

Hardware musings

As I sit and write this tonight, there is a small box in the back seat of my car. That small box has a thousand dollars worth of cabinet knobs and pulls in it. There are 44 individual pieces in the box and that averages out to around 22 dollars per piece. $22 for a cabinet knob doesn't strike me as exorbidant, but then again, I do this for a living and I'm used to seeing prices like that. Add it all up though, and a thousand dollars speaks to me very loudly. That's a lot of money. But good hardware isn't cheap and cheap hardware isn't good.

There was a time in my life when I thought buying three dollar handles at Home Depot was all I needed to know about cabinet handles. I thought that the two-for-one packages of Stanley door knobs was all anyone needed. I had a vague idea that there were more expensive options out there, but they struck me as overkill.

If you are someone who still thinks that way and wants to continue doing so, stop reading now.

The terminally perky show hosts on HGTV call things like hardware "house jewelry," an expression I loathe. Loathe it though I do, it's pretty accurate. There is something about good hardware that broadcasts to the world that you thought about the details in your home. Thinking through the small stuff is what sets apart great homes. When I hear that stupid expression, my mind turns to the stuff at the left by Schaub & Company (http://www.schaubandcompany.com/) and I get over my bad reaction to that term and end up embracing it. That hardware over there is made with real black pearls and Swarovski crystals. It runs counter to they types of things I'm drawn to, but I cannot help but admire the craftsmanship. To see it in person is another thing completely. That "Branch Collection" as they call it, is transcendant. Schaub goes on to showcase some really glorious turns on the very idea of a cabinet knob. In the world of cast brass hardware, these guys rule the roost. In the image to the right is their take on sea creatures. That octopus is beautifully cast, perfectly patina-d and still has a sense of whimsy without descending into cute. This designer thanks them for the cuteness avoidance, even if no one else does.

What makes great hardware great and what separates it from the masses out there is a multi-faceted thing and it's difficult to describe very clearly. Price doesn't always guide you to quality, but quality will almost always be expensive. The hardware in the collection below shows a collection that you will have no difficulty finding knock offs of in a Home Center. Other than faint resemblances, the similarities stop there. The hardware from Schaub will cost more and I can almost guarantee that. But it will also weigh more, feel better in your hand, have a finish that will last for a lifetime and will be better designed. When you buy a less-expensive option, it is imitating things like the Charlevoix collection from Schaub and Company. If you're OK with a knock off, then go buy a knock off, but study the expensive thing they're knocking off so that you can buy a better knock off. However, be warned that the knock offs only immitate the good stuff that sells well. If you're looking for something truly distictive like the Black Pearl series I showed above, you are out of luck, they won't do it. Ditto the prismatic chrome series to the left here. This hardware really does look like jewelry and it is buffed to such a shine that the many facets on the surface of the hardware capture and reflect back whatever colors are in front of them. The first time I saw the hardware to the right I was wearing a light blue shirt. When I stood in front of the knob in question, it appeared to have light blue enamel all over the surface, then I moved and could see the taupe walls of the showroom reflecting back and it appeared to be enameled in taupe. What a great effect, and not something you're likely to find a Home Depot.

And it's late. I haven't covered half of what I wanted to write about. So tomorrow it's going to have to be more hardware musings. Tune in tomorrow and I'll go over some quick guidelines on where to put what and why doorknobs are important in the scheme of things. Trust me, they are.

Kitchen shock and awe --built-in refrigeration

Somebody sent me an e-mail this morning about a built-in refrigerator we'd been planning to use in a kitchen I'm designing. It seems that this person had spent yesterday shopping for appliances and had come to the realization that I was speaking the truth when I told her we were talking about a six thousand dollar option to go with a built-in. When these things are just ideas on paper, they are easier to swallow it seems. When confronted with the thing you're going to keep milk and lettuce in, and that thing has a price tag with so many digits it's a different matter. It's a perfectly understandable reaction to have. I can relate completely.

Her e-mail went on to ask what the deal was with built-in refrigeration in the first place, and what options are out there should they decide against the built-in route. Well, I'll tell you. Here's my promised honors track lesson in refrigeration for the home.

A standard refrigerator is usually 36 inches wide, 72 inches tall and about 30 inches deep. It has finished sides and can be built loosely into a niche or left standing on its own. I live in Saint Petersburg, FL and the idea of a built in fridge is a bit cutting edge here so more often than not, I do what I call a fake built in. I build a 30" deep, 90" or 96" tall enclosure for the sides of the appliance and put a 30" deep cabinet above the appliance. The result is a loosely fitting enclosure for a free-standing fridge that makes it appear to the uninitiated as a built in. However, free standing refrigerators need to have air space around them so they don't overheat. So, they need to have a gap left to either side and above them. This photo shows such an arrangement. If you look closely enough, you can see the air space between the appliance and the cabinetry on all sides. This is as convincing an effect as is possible unless you buy a true built in model.

A built-in refrigerator is a beautiful thing and a great idea if you can swing it and it makes sense in your house. They are not cheap. Ever. A built-in refrigerator will start in the neighborhood of six thousand dollars and go up from there pretty quickly. This beauty from Sub Zero is the Pro 48 and when it came onto the market three years ago it carried a sticker price of $14,000 (http://www.subzero.com/). They are not just expensive for the sheer joy of charging you more, at that level they do everything but peel your vegetables for you. In looking at that photo, you can see the thing that makes all built-ins, regardless of their manufacturers, instantly identifiable. That is the vent grill that's on the face of the appliance. That built-ins vent exclusively through their fronts and not a combination of their backs and bottoms is what allows them to be built in in the fist place. Due to that front ventilation, there is no need for the air space around the appliance and you can get them to disappear more easily. Well, maybe not disappear, but at least not stand out so much. A built-in refrigerator doesn't have finished sides, and it has to be enclosed. That's usually done with cabinetry, though sometimes I seem them sink into niches in the wall.

A built-in fridge is taller than a standard and it's also shallower. A built-in fridge will allow you to have stainless steel doors as in the model shown above, or you can panel them. In the photo to the left, I used a 48" built in refrigerator from KitchenAid. The left side of the appliance is the freezer and the right side is the refrigerator. Every appliance in this kitchen was built in, so it made perfect sense to do the same with the fridge.

Once you decide to go with a built-in fridge though, you have a couple more things to decide beside the obvious one of how big. The refrigerators I've shown so far have had stainless steel door panels. I think they look modern and cool, but not everyone shares my enthusiasm for modern and cool unfortunately. A built in can be paneled in one of two ways and it is a specific model that handles each of these panels, no one model can do both.

The first is what's called a framed panel. I'm showing a framed panel to the left. Panels that match the cabinetry in a kitchen fit into grooves and channels on the face of the appliance. This leaves a refrigerator door that framed with steel, hence the distinction "framed." The upper vent grill can also be made to accept a panel in the same way. This will get you half way there so far as I'm concerned.

If you're going to panel a built-in refrigerator, go whole hog I say and do what we call an integrated panel in the parlance of our friends at Sub Zero. A refrigerator (or freezer for that matter) model that can accept an integrated panel dispenses with the grooves and frames on the door, and leaves no trace of how the panel are attached ot the appliance. It's like magic almost. Most times, integrated refrigeration gets disguised as an armoire or other piece of furniture, and is unidentifiable as a fridge until it's opened. In the photo to the left, the Sub Zero model sits quietly and pretends to be a pantry until it's called into use. Pretty slick of you ask me.

So the long and short of built-in refrigeration is that it's pretty simple to explain, expensive to buy, and unless it's in the hands of a professional, a bloody mess to figure out how to install. Fully integrated, built-in refrigeration like the one shown in the photo to the right is not a project for the do-it-yourselfer. I cannot state that enough times. The learning curve on these things is steep, steep, steep and dealing with them is unfit work for dilettantes and the faint of heart.

Microjive talkin' and some notes on ventilation

Like no other appliance that gets so little use in a typical home, the microwave oven gets a huge amount of attention when people are looking at new appliances. Yet a typical homeowner uses a microwave oven to boil water, make popcorn and reheat the occasional leftover.

However, this nearly useless appliance gets slapped up on a wall over the range in an attempt to make it good for something, namely ventilation. So now in addition to making chicken rubbery and unappealing it pushes a few puffs of stale air around. Over-the-range microwave ovens are lousy ventilation systems and placing them so high above the ground makes them uncomfortable to use as a cooking, or reheating, appliance. If you are considering a kitchen renovation in your future, for the love of God don't hang a microwave oven on the wall.

The dirty secret of the appliance world is that the microwave generator of nearly all microwave ovens sold in the US is made by the same company --Sharp Electronics. What this means in practical terms is that the $1100 microwave oven shown here is virtually identical to the $89 one on sale this weekend at Best Buy. At least so far as the microwave oven part of it goes. The $1100 one has an inefficient and ineffective blower motor in it that somehow explains the additional $1000 added to its price.

Any time I have the chance to undo this horrible crime against humanity and good taste (using an over-the-range microwave oven that is), I take the opportunity to bury one as inconspicuosly as I can. My take on kitchen design is that you should concentrate your expenditures on things that work and things you can see. In the photos here, I'm showing you two examples from kitchens I designed. In the kitchen with white, painted cabinets; I put the microwave oven inside the tall cabinet to the right of the range shown. In the cherry kitchen, the microwave is in the tall cabinet to the right of the photo. In each instance, the homeowners were water boilers as are most people. In each case too, we went to an appliance store and bought a counter top microwave oven for under a hundred dollars. At the time of the cabinetry installation, I had the electrician put an outlet inside of the tall cabinet and that was that.

Now, with the microwave oven safely out of the way we could concentrate on actual ventilation over the cooktop in the cherry kitchen and over the Wolf range in the painted kitchen (www.wolfappliance.com). The cherry kitchen has a 36" electric cooktop underneath it and the painted kitchen, a 48" Wolf dual fuel. An electric cook top doesn't generate the kind of radiant heat that gas does, so it doesn't need quite so powerful a blower over it. The primary function of kitchen ventilation is not to remove smoke and grease as you might think. Though they do that, what they are there for is to remove radiant heat from the room while you're cooking. A pro range cranks out a huge number of BTUs that need to go somewhere or they will increase the ambient temperature in your kitchen to the point of discomfort. The hood over the Wolf range in the painted kitchen is by Independent (www.kitchenhood.com) and it has a 1200 cfm blower motor in it. The motor is actually mounted on the roof so that the noise won't deafen anybody. The only sound that large hood makes is the whistle of the air through its grates on its way out of the house. The cherry kitchen has a cooktop, hood, double wall oven and refrigerator, all by Bosch (www.boschusa.com). An electric cooktop doesn't crank out the same heat as a gas one, and in this kitchen the hood has a 600 cfm blower inside of the hood itself. Parenthetically, the power of a ventilation system is measured in cfms, or cubic feet of air per minute moved by the blower motor.

In addition to freeing you from the bondage of looking like you got your kitchen renovation at Home Depot, not using an over-the-range microwave oven opens up a world of possibilities from an aesthetic point of view. The two kitchens I'm using as an example here used stainless steel chimney hoods. The painted kitchen in particular could have just as easily used a wood hood that matched her cabinetry. A cabinetry hood will make your kitchen look less like a professional kitchen, something a lot of people find appealing.

There are a nearly unlimited range of styles of both chimney and island hoods. A less costly option is to use an under-cabinet hood. An under-cabinet range hood like this one from Kitchen Aid has a powerful enough motor to be effective and it tucks up under the wall cabinets above a cooktop or range. Curiously enough, most building codes don't require that cooking appliances be ventilated. The codes kick in only after you decide to use ventilation. There are reams of rules regarding hood placement, so which one to buy and where to put it are decisions best left to a professional.

So the lesson? No more over-the-range microwave ovens! Bury them at any opportunity.

Still more appliances: dishin' on dishwashers

Few things can make your life as uncomplicated as a good dishwasher. Conversely, a bad one will ruin whatever semblance of peace an order you house has. The dishwashers I'm showing here are from KitchenAid, who couldn't make a bad dishwasher if they wanted to. Mercifully, they don't want to. KitchenAid is not the best brand out there but they do make a pretty great appliance. At the lower end of its price range, it will out perform anything else you'll see for the same money. At the top of their line, they hold up pretty well to Bosch. In realm of thousand dollar dishwashers, KitchenAid and Bosch are neck and neck. Beyond the thousand dollar threshold, it's Bosch all the way.

Anyhow, let me run through some dishwasher basics before I start testifying.

In the mid-seventies, my mother got her first dishwasher. It was a portable model as were most of them back then. We wheeled it over to the sink and hooked it up to the kitchen faucet. When it was done, we wheeled it back. Believe it or not, you can still buy a portable dishwasher. I cannot imagine who would want one, but there are still a few of them out there.

In 2008 though, most dishwashers are built in. They are usually the only built-in appliance in most American homes. You can spend anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars on one. The more more money you spend, the better the appliance, obviously. At the low end they are noisy and inefficient. At they high end, they are so quiet you cannot tell whether or not they're turned on. It's counter-intuitive, but a modern dishwasher uses less water and electricity to wash dishes than handwashing does.

Aesthetically, dishwashers start at the low end of the market with the controls on the front door of the appliance, like this first one. In a model such as this one, they are sold in white (do people still buy white appliances?), black, an off-white the industry calls "biscuit," and stainless steel. Some of these controls-on-the-front models will accept a wooden panel, but most won't. Most of the models you'll find in a home center are in this style. If you do some searching around and if you see enough high-end models, the controls on the front start to look dowdy and old-fashioned.

A newer and cleaner version of this old design is an integrated door. An integrated door has the controls hidden on the top rim of the door. When the door is closed, you can't see any controls, just a sleek door and handle. They will be available in the same basic colors as the lower end models, but you will be hard pressed to see one in a showroom in anything but stainless steel. Some integrated models are designed to accept a wooden panel and cannot function without one in place. An integrated panel in the door style of the surrounding cabinetry will make a dishwasher disappear effectively.

In the photo below and to the left, there is an integrated dishwasher to the right of the sink. What it's hiding is a $1400 Bosch dishwasher that's so quiet it shines a light on the floor to let you know that it's running. Sweet! Be warned though, a coordinated cabinetry panel for a dishwasher will add a couple of hundred dollars to the price of an already-spendy appliance. I've seen them disguised as full-height doors as is this one, and I've seen them masquerading as door/drawer combos and sometimes as banks of drawers.

A couple of years ago, a New Zealand-based appliance manufacturer called Fisher-Paykel (Paykel rhymes with "Michael," so be sure you sound like you know what you're talking about if you ask a dealer about them) introduced a new concept in dishwashers called a drawer dishwasher. (http://www.fisherpaykel.com/) Fisher-Paykel drawer dishwashers are slick and the idea of a drawer dishwasher makes a lot of sense when you look at how people actually live. They come as either two stacked drawers, or as separate drawers that can be placed in different areas in a kitchen.

For single people, having the option to do a half load of dishes is a more efficient and sanitary practice than letting dishes sit until you've accumulated a whole load. For households of more than one or two, you can split the functions of the two drawers. Pots in pot scrubber mode in one drawer and glassware in the glassware mode in the other drawer.

Fisher-Paykel had the drawer dishwasher idea to themselves for a couple of years until four years ago, when KitchenAid came out with a knock-off.

The KitchenAid is not as good an appliance, but that's as much a function of this being a new product for them as much as anything. The double KitchenAid in stainless steel is to the left and the Fisher-Paykel with integrated panels is to the right. Both manufacturers offer single drawer options as well. The single drawer dishwashers are great to use in a bar or in some other part of the house. I've also used them singly in kitchens for small families or single people with one drawer to the right of the sink and the other drawer on an island.

Fisher-Paykel makes some really great stuff and they are going after the American market like gangbusters. I'll get into some of their offerings when I get into honors-track appliances later. But at KBIS (our big indistry show) in Las Vegas last spring, they rolled out a gas cooktop they call the Luna that I still can't believe I saw with my own eyes. The Luna is a glass cooktop and when you turn it on, lit gas burners rise from the surface of it. I can't describe it very well, but their website goes into it in some detail. Go to their press release, http://www.fisherpaykel.com/press/pressreleases/luna.html and read about it for yourself. Amazing, absolutely amazing.