Fun, new refrigerators

I found this line of refrigerators from an Italian appliance manufacturer called Ardo. Ardo's website is in Italian and it's worth picking through. If you're on their home page, hit the tab "Prodotti" (Products). Once on the Prodotti page, hit "freddo," and you'll be directed to their refrigerators. Freddo means cold by the way.

Now, if you're not in Europe, you're not going to find an Ardo. Even if you do find one, it won't work on American current. So why am I telling people to check out their site? It's simple really. Companies like Ardo are on the cutting edge of where the appliance world is headed. Ardo's fun new refrigerators are interesting because Ardo doesn't treat a refrigerator as a necessary evil. Ardo spend a lot of time and energy designing them and making them interesting. That impulse falls in line with the American kitchen design trend to make the kitchen the center of the home. Ardo may end up coming into the American market in the same way that a lot of other European brands have over the last 20 years. And even if they don't, the impact of the refrigerators pictured above will be.

Ardo's nearly furniture-like refrigerators are in perfect keeping with the idea of a kitchen as a furnished room used for entertaining as much as for food preparation. So remember that name kids.

Elmira Stove Works is an Canadian company that makes retro appliances. Until recently, their products have concentrated on wrapping modern cooking technology in an appliance that would have looked at home on the prairie in about 1860. In fact, Elmira still makes wood-burning cook stoves for the purists out there. But new from them is a line they're calling Northstar. Northstar ranges and refrigerators are an exaggerated return to the middle of the last century.

I mean, look at these things. They make me laugh sure enough, but I'm not sure sure I want that kind of a laugh every morning. But Florida being Florida, there is a lot of mid-'50s architecture here. An increasingly popular thing to do with a vintage '50s Florida ranch house is to take it back to the period when it was built. Finding Eisenhower-era furniture and lighting isn't so tough. Linoleum is making its old vintage patterns again to fulfill that niche. When it comes to appliances however, you're left with trying to breathe life into actual vintage appliances or abandoning the idea of a period kitchen.

Enter Northstar. Trying to make a go of it with 50-year-old kitchen appliances may sound like a good idea, but even when they were new they didn't work as efficiently as modern ones do. I remember what a pain non-self-defrosting freezers were and thanks but no thanks.

Northstar's stuff is different though. They are modern, efficient appliances wearing retro clothing. Though they are not cheap, their prices don't cross the line into outrage either.

Now if you notice the color of the gas range I'm showing a couple of inches above. I would call that Avocado Green. It's the first use of Avocado Green I've seen on a new appliance since Avocado joined hands with Sunset Gold and disappeared some time in the late seventies. I am no psychic, but the smart money's on a resurrection of those old colors.

So Ardo and Northstar speak to a larger trend of attention-grabbing appliances. Expect that to be a trend that will continue well into the future.

More retro fun

I found this gem on another website dedicated to vintage TV ads for appliances and detergents. Man, there really is room for everybody on the Internet, isn't there? This one is a three-and-a-half minute promo from Frigidaire and I can't stop watching it. I guess that makes me a song and dance man at heart.

The appliance industry is huge and has been for a long time and it's interesting how their approach to reaching their target market has changed over the years. As someone who specifies appliances for other people every day, that industry is always sending me new stuff to get me to specify their brand above all others. I'll tell you though, the minute any of those manufacturers decide to start doing numbers like this old Frigidaire video, they will win my everlasting loyalty. I don't care who the brand is or how good the appliances are.

Frigidaire has come a long way since 1957 and has come back onto the American scene with a vengeance. Check out their website and see some of their new offerings.

More mid-century daydreams

I just can't help myself. Here are parts one and two of a video of Monsanto's House of the Future, an attraction at Disneyland that opened in 1957 and kept pulling in the crowds until 1967. Part one is nearly ten minutes long. Part two comes in at about three minutes.

This stuff's amusing now, and incredible how all of it hinges on the idea of cheap oil and cheap electricity. I paid $3.40 a gallon for gas on Friday. So much for cheap oil. What all of these future forecasters missed was how much people in that future would look back to 1966 and 1957 respectively, with unapolegetic longing. Hah!

The kitchen of the future

This is a Google Video I found this morning from a 1967 movie called "1999 AD." It's a look into what 1967 thought 1999 might hold. Hilarious! This is also the first time I've ever tried to embed a video in this blog. If it doesn't work, try This Link. HTML is fun kids, try it some time.

Anyhow, I'm old enough to remember the Brave New World-like predictions about what life would be like in the year 2000. I remember thinking that 2000 was so far in the future that anything was possible. I think a lot of people felt that way. All of those forward thinkers did get some of details close if not necessarily right. But one thing all of them missed was how much we'd have to work to pay for all of this life-enhancing stuff. I guess I'm present to both; the future and working a lot, because it's a Sunday afternoon and I'm working on actual kitchens of the future.

I've getting e-mail blitzed with new stuff and ideas for homes all week and I'll start sorting through it and posting a lot of it here in the next week or so, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, the movie 1999 AD is available through a website called AV Geeks. Man, you gotta love 'em for the name alone. Sniff around on that site --all of the old, ridiculous films and filmstrips from High School Health calss are available. I'm actually glad someone saved them.

Trend-proof design is a contradiction in terms

I had someone ask me yesterday if I could design a room that would be trend proof. I explained politely that I could design a room that went easy on obvious trends (Tiffany box blue and chocolate brown color schemes come to mind) so that someone could get more time out of a room before it looked dated, but to try to make something last forever is a fool's errand. A time-resistant kitchen is even more so.

A kitchen in 2008 is the de facto center of a home and this is an entirely new concept. A kitchen 40 years ago was seen as a private area for the family, not ground zero of every social event on a homeowner's social calendar. From the looks of things, kitchen-as-the-omphalos will continue, and that's as good a guess as anybody's. Even so, it's a guess. For the sake of my livelihood, I hope it continues but who knows?

Rooms and buildings that are considered to be classics now are considered to be classics only because they've been around long enough to have survived the winds of change and the ravages of time. I live in what's now considered to be a classic Florida structure. It's a beautiful pre-1920s frame building with original heart pine floors. It's a classic today because no one bulldozed it in the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s or '80s when tastes changed. In 1955, this building would have been considered an eyesore and the people who owned it then lacked the means to tear it down and build something more in keeping with the times then. For most of this building's long life, it has been stuck in a time warp --retro before retro was cool.

Who knows? The next ten years may bring in a wave of nostalgia for the '70s, heaven help us. All things Bicentennial may become the new stainless steel. I keep an issue of House and Garden from 1965 in my bookcase to keep me humble. I was born in that year and the interiors featured in my old copy of that magazine are jarring to say the least. Will the glass mosaics and inspired color schemes I dream up now be as jarring to someone 40 years hence? You bet they will. But in the unlikely event that my designs are around in 90 years, I'd like to think that they will be considered to be classics. As I said, I'd like to believe that.

But as I look at the photos that are accompanying this posting today, it really makes me wonder. Will any of this stuff ever look good again? (Man! the yellow Congoleum floor in the first photo is the identical floor to the one that made my mother the envy of the neighborhood in about 1977) To my mind though, it's not something I spend a whole lot of time stewing over. I believe strongly that architecture and design should look like the time when they were created. I don't try to re-create 1940 (trendy now) any more than I try to re-create 1970 (most definitely not trendy now). In 2008, my clients use my projects differently than they would have 40 years ago. We have access to a world of products and services that no one could have predicted in a time long past.

So the answer to the quest for trend-proof design is to look for quality and value. Something that's still working doesn't need to be replaced. A stainless steel refrigerator goes with any color scheme and will look better longer than a harvest gold one. Buy good stuff and let the winds of change blow past you. Shifting your expectations will make something more trend resistant than any color possibly can.