Here's an interesting finish for a fridge

Amana (http://www.amana.com/catalog/product.jsp?parentCategoryId=588&categoryId=638&productId=1761&scr=category) just came out with a new refrigerator they call the "Jot" and I think it's an interesting idea. A lot of times I get caught up in specifying expensive appliances that don't necessarily reflect the way everybody lives. That was a point made abundantly clear to me when I was at my sister's house on Saturday.

My sister and her husband are the proud parents of seven really great kids. I noticed when I was over there last weekend that they'd bought a new fridge in a stainless steel look-alike material called Satina. Satina is a laminate that has the vague appearance of stainless steel. Satina, unlike stainless, is a magnetic metal. For someone like my sister and for a family like hers, the refrigerator sides and doors are where important papers, photos and drawings go so that they won't be misplaced in the crush and rush of humanity.

It's easy for someone like me, forty-something no kids, to dismiss needs like this because they aren't my needs. It's easy too for someone like me to lose sight of the fact that real people end up living in my projects and "where will we hang the kids' artwork and report cards" are the real needs of some of those same real people.

Anyhow, Amana has a new fridge called the Jot. The Jot's claim to fame is that its doors and sides are made from dry erase board. It's only available in their top-mount 30" size, but it's a start. What a cool idea though. Thanks Amana.

You light up my life (and projects)

I have a meeting this morning at the home of two new clients. I am meeting up with a lighting supplier and we're going to figure out the feasibility of the lighting plan I worked out for a kitchen and great room.

The house in question is an early-'90s open floor plan on two floors and the first floor has cathedral ceilings. The house is on the water out at the beach and my task in this case is to bring all of that fifteen-year-old "glamour" into the 21st century. As it stands now, the place looks like a set from "Miami Vice." But I'm planning to make pretty short work of it. Even though the first floor has ceilings that peak at 18 feet above the floor, the builder used ceiling-mounted lighting exclusively. Achieving a sense of scale and intimacy in this warehouse-like first floor is impossible without addressing the lighting. Enter my friends at Tech Lighting (http://www.techlighting.com/).

When I proposed using track lighting throughout the rooms of the first floor, my clients weren't exactly responsive to the idea. Like a lot of people, the image conjured up by the phrase "track lighting" sent them back to about 1978 and a space filled with spider plants in macrame plant hangers.

The new generation of track lights were pioneered by Tech Lighting and the market is flooded with knock-offs in price points across the spectrum. Tech remains the gold standard of the category. Their products come at a premium, but none of the knock-offs look as good or work as well. Tech calls their track systems "Monorail Lighting" in an attempt to dispel the image of the cover art from Carol King's classic, Tapestry.

Monorail tracks are suspended from the ceiling and the tracks themselves are scaled down to the point where they nearly disappear. In suspending the lights (and in the case of a cathedral ceiling, the tracks hang from wires ten feet off the floor) it's possible to imply a ceiling and bring the scale of a room down to something more intimate and human. The other great thing about Tech's Monorail system is the nearly overwhelming number of fixtures that attach to the tracks. In using a Tech Monorail system, I can combine ambient, task and accent lighting in one fell swoop. The effect is terrific and needn't be coldly modern. Tech just introduced a series of drum-shaded pendants that brings a little tradition along for the ride. I love you Tech Lighting!

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!