Check out a cool new water filter

My friends over at Treehugger.com mentioned something in an article about water yesterday, and here it is. This thing is my new favorite object. It's beautiful, really. It's a water filter that's perfectly designed, sure enough. Yet it's also constructed from inert materials like glass and porcelain.

Bottled water is bad news for a host of reasons. It's an expensive way to buy filtered tap water; millions of barrels of increasingly scarce oil get used to manufacture the bottles; once manufactured, polycarbonates are with us forever and their disposal is a growing problem; polycarbonates themselves aren't inert and their abilities to leach into the liquids they carry is of particular concern to me. If you'd like to read up on some of the research about just how dynamic supposedly stable polycarbonates are, check out this.

Anyhow, the point of this is to pimp this cool new THING that's the answer to filtering tap water while avoiding polycarbonate containers. Enter the Aquaovo. As fond as I am of my Brita pitcher and Da29-00020b fridge filter, it's not something I'd leave out to impress company. Considering that it's made from pseudo-estrogen-leaching polycarbonate I'm not so sure it impresses me anymore either.

More on walls and what do do with them

The kids over at Dwell keep a great section on their website they call "Marketplace." Dwell uses this section of their site to highlight interesting and innovative products for home that have a distinctly modern bent. Much like the magazine itself. Check out their website (http://www.dwell.com/) and click on Marketplace. Spend some time looking through their extensive listings.

What caught my eye this morning was a section on wallpaper. Like I mentioned before, I seem to have wallpaper on the brain lately. Anyhow, they highlight a San Francisco company called Ferm (http://www.fermlivingshop.us/) and Ferm sells some really great and unusual wall treatments. Their traditionally applied wallpapers grace the left side of this page and their innovative "Wall Stickers" are on the right side.

The wallpapers run about $90 a roll for a 32' roll and the stickers range from $50 to $175 apiece. The stickers come in a variety of colors and would look fantastic as an overlay on a striped wall I think.

What I couldn't help but notice too, was the website editor's mention of the great wallpaper rebirth of the last two years. I will blame the fact that I live and work in a naive market for my having missed this particular trend until last week. Things take a couple of years to trickle down to us here in Florida. Never mind my frequent trips to New York to engage in trend spotting. I guess I've been too distracted by Manhattan to notice the fact there there is wallpaper all over the place again. Oops. Bad me. Maybe I should just stick to the line that I'm cautious about embracing new trends. That sounds better at least. Hah!

Wild, wild walls

A designer I work with brought to my attention a website called Inhabit last Friday (http://www.inhabitliving.com/) and I spent some time digging around on it over the weekend. I must be grooving to some kind of wall paper vibe because I gravitated to a product they call Wall Flats. Wall Flats are made from embossed bamboo fiber --a sustainable, renewable resource by the way. Wall Flats are paint-ready or can be installed out of the box and left unpainted. According to the website, they are as stiff as dense hardboard.

They are glued into place in a way similar to how wallpaper goes up and though less resilient than wallpaper, certainly pack more than enough punch. Unlike a lot of techniques for adding texture to a wall, Wall Flats leave behind a flat wall when they're removed. Try removing some one's idea of stucco some time and you'll appreciate what a flat wall really means.

In the meantime, these things are cool!

Not your grandmother's wallpaper

I have had a raft of wallpaper news and events drift across my desk in the last couple of weeks. I know that sounds odd and I share a lot of peoples' preconceptions of the stuff. I hear wallpaper and my mind leaps to horrible magnolia borders in doctor's offices or that country crap that burns my eyes. Yuck! Look at it if you can.

The kind of wallpaper news and events I've been seeing are as far removed for the pastiche of sunflowers and herb jars (not to mention bow-wearing geese) as it's possible to get. Perhaps there's an opportunity here to call this new stuff something else. The term "wall treatments" gets bandied about but I think it sounds too fussy. Hey, why not refer to what I'm about to illustrate as wallpaper and garbage above as schlock? Hmmmm.

Anyhow, my beloved St. Petersburg Times ran a feature story on a Tampa wallpaper designer yesterday. Her name is Given Campbell and she's been getting a lot of press lately. I am crazy for her work. Crazy for it. She does both hand and machine-printed designs and to call her work beautiful only shows how limited our language is. Her stuff goes beyond beauty and distinction. Check out her website! http://givencampbell.com/default.aspx







A lot of her work uses the motif of a repeated letter. This pattern, called "Angelfish" is a series of repeated Ys











This pattern, called "Bamboo" is an arrangement of Capital Ts.











This safari-inspired design is a horizontal repetition of a lower case K.












This nearly Byzantine-looking paper is based on a capital Z.












She leaves behind the letter motifs easily and brings a fresh eye to the pop aesthetic of the mid-20th Century. This pattern is my new favorite thing in the world. My idolization of the glass tile mosaic might be coming to an end after having seen this stuff. Well, maybe not but it's still really cool.









This reminds me of a Pucci fabric circa 1968. I can see it in my bathroom already.









And if you can't resist a botanical print, here's a thoroughly modern one that will never grace the pages of "Country Living" magazine and for that we need to be eternally grateful.











I love this floral too. I can see the Eero Saarinen dining set already.






So wallpaper seems to be staging a comeback after a pretty long hiatus. The charge is being led by someone in Tampa Florida of all places.

Suburban chill --my rant of the day

Someone called me yesterday looking for an "Italian" kitchen.

Every time my phone rings, I treat whoever's on the line with as much courtesy and respect as I can muster. I feel it's my duty to deal with people honestly. There is no such thing as a stupid question or a request too outlandish so far as I'm concerned. However, the flip side of that is that I do not believe that since a client or potential client suggests something that I have to go along with it or that I have to suffer foolishness.

As soon as I heard "Italian" kitchen I knew exactly what she was after. I mean, I hear that description a couple of times a week. And baby, it is nails on a chalkboard. Before I heard the back story, I already knew the back story. Someone and her husband or girlfriends had been on a parade of homes in a suburb and saw a bunch of 4000 square foot builder's models and wants to recreate what she saw. Fine. Let's talk about what goes into those things.

To the left is a kitchen I worked on a couple of years ago. It is in a model home in a suburb and to an alarming number of people, that suburb represents the good life. To an even more alarming number of people, this model represents a dream home. But it's an empty shell, a cartoon of a home. This kitchen had a price tag of about $180,000 but lacks anything resembling a sense of home or place. It's gigantic and in its hurry to cram as much detail and ostentation into the space, it leaves out human needs completely. Someone cooking at the range can't converse with someone sitting at the bar waiting to be fed. Someone cleaning up the dishes is isolated from anyone else in the room. You'd need a Segway to get from the fridge to the seating area. Aside from the bottles of oil on the counter and the pasta displayed in jars, there is nothing Italian about it. It is Italy as seen through the filters of Disney World and the Las Vegas Strip. It represents the complete separation of form from function and will make marriages disintegrate and kids turn dope fiends.

To the left is an actual Italian kitchen in an actual Italian home in Sorrento. Through a combination of timing and resourcefulness, I'll be standing at this sink and looking out this window for two weeks in May. This is what I think of as a real Italian kitchen. It's tiny, inconvenient, quirky and maddeningly inefficient. Italy in a nutshell in other words. This kitchen has four cabinets, a sink, a cook top and an unobstructed view of the Bay of Naples.

It makes tears well up in my eyes when I look at it, but only because I cannot wait to get there. I couldn't imagine trying to prepare a meal in it every day. Clearly, this authentic Italian kitchen isn't what my caller had in mind.

So there's a middle road somewhere and this caller and I will find it together. Exhibit A is beyond her means and this is someone who adores her family --she loves being a Mom. That first kitchen is a model, a mirage. It isn't real. So rather than immitating a commercial set, she and I are going to work out a design that will empower her to continue be the great Mother she is already. We'll put together a room that brings her family closer together --it will lend itself to their connectedness rather than dissolving it. At the end of the day; that's a real and worthy goal. It's also why I do what I do.