So by popular demand, here's an image of the kitchen that caused the ruckus I wrote about on 15 and 16 September. I think it's pretty mild, but to the eyes of my client, it was pushing so far into the realm of the avant-guard she could barely stand it.
The tile:
The cabinet color:.
The counters:
The lights are showing up really orange-y in this image. In life, they are an amber-y brown that plays against the wall tile nicely. Here they are:
The pendants are the Sasha II from Besa Lighting with an "Amber Cloud" shade.
This was by no means a bad kitchen or a bad job or anything I think is unattractive. It's a reasonably-priced job that I made look a lot more expensive through a couple of the tricks and tips I've learned over the years. Even so, it's not something that would make it into my brag file under ordinary circumstances.
Again, there's nothing wrong with it and I'm having an epiphany here. Hold on a minute. I see myself as a high-end designer and in a lot of ways I am. The work that ends up in the file I show prospects is from high five-figure (and more than a few six-figure) jobs. But now that I think about it, I haven't landed anything with a budget that high since the stock market crashed a year ago. The biggest job I have going right now has a budget of $60,000 that's going toward a major kitchen overhaul, a master bath and a significant reworking of the interior walls on the first floor of this house. Two years ago, that job would have had a budget twice what it is now and would have been a significantly more ambitious project.
But it's not two years ago and in this market at least, people are spending less money on home renovations. I'm thrilled for the work and the project I'm describing will most definitely make it into my brag file. But since the bulk of everything I've done for the last year has been more along the $28,000 renovation pictured at the beginning of this post, is my glamor job brag file spooking people? I wonder if I should show off my lower-budget jobs in these troubled times.
Seriously, what do you think? If you were a client interviewing designers, what would you want to see? Is an aspirational portfolio a turn off?
Great rooms deserve great art, great original art. Vicki Shuck is a Bend, OR artist whose work was brought to my attention by a reader and client in Oregon.
8"x6"
Oil on Board
$200 includes domestic s/h
Vicki's oil paintings are a feast, a visual feast. Her work shows an impressionist's passion for composition yet with an undeniably modern perspective. Like all great art, Vicki's work grants a viewer a glimpse into the world as she sees it. Yet, there's a generosity at work here. Even though I'm capturing a sense of Vicki's world, I'm being invited to insert my own sensibilities and experiences into the scenes she captures.
6"x8"
Oil on Board
$100 plus $10 domestic s/h
An artists' job is to record her life and in so doing, record the lives of her audience. Art's at once private and public, personal and global. Or so I say at any rate, and Vicki's work accomplishes all of that to terrific effect.
8"x8"
Oil on Board
$150 plus $10 domestic s/h
Vicki's work is available for sale through her blog, What the Day Bringsand through a website called Daily Painters. Daily Paintersis a juried gallery featuring the work of artists who paint every day. There are 30,000 works contributed by 140 different artists on Daily Painters, and it's a great place to get lost. Vicki's blog is anothergreat place spend some time. As someone who doesn't paint and who hasn't dedicated his life to art, reading her descriptions of her work is as enlightening as it is entertaining. Spend some time with What the Day Brings and you'll see what I mean.
4"x3.5"
Oil on Board
$65 includes domestic s/h
I tell my clients all the time that a room's not finished until we find the right art, real art produced by a real artist. Vicki Shuck is one such artist. Buy a painting!
Oh the times! Oh the customs! Or so said Cicero in 63 B.C. in his first oration against Catiline. People have been repeating damnations of their times since the dawn of human civilization. Cicero complained about his age's corruption and enmity. People today complain about corruption, enmity and a lack of privacy in a digital age. I think corruption and enmity are with us for keeps, but our pals at Google launched a campaign to do something about digital privacy a couple of weeks ago.
The Digital Liberation Front is the guerrilla-sounding name of an engineering initiative Google's implementing across all of their products. In a nutshell, it means that removing your personal data (from photographs to billing information to blog posts) should be as easy as entering it.
It may not sound like much, but ask anyone who's been foolish enough to sign up for Classmates.com how much trouble it is to close an account and delete information on a lot of online sites and services.
Here's an excerpt from The Digital Liberation Front's website:
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The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to liberate their products. This is our mission statement:
Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products. Our team's goal is to make it easier for them to move data in and out.
People usually don't look to see if they can get their data out of a product until they decide one day that they want to leave For this reason, we always encourage people to ask these three questions before starting to use a product that will store their data:
Can I get my data out at all?
How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?
The ideal answers to these questions are:
Yes.
Nothing more than I'm already paying.
As little as possible.
There shouldn't be an additional charge to export your data. Beyond that, if it takes you many hours to get your data out, it's almost as bad as not being able to get your data out at all.
We don't think that our products are perfect yet, but we're continuing to work at making it easier to get your data in and out of them. Visit our Google Moderator page to vote on and add suggestions on what you'd like to see liberated and why.
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The Data Liberation Front is an engineering initiative at Google, it's a refinement to Google's core values. Don't expect any great announcements, but watch data hostage taking (Facebook) start to wane. Since it's Google who's embracing this path in a very public way, expect the rest of the internet to follow suite. Make that, demand that the rest of the internet follow suite.
One of my favorite things about living in Florida is the daily parade of exotic creatures that cross my path. I live a pretty urban existence, but it's not at all an unusual thing to have a small flock of white ibises get out of my way as I walk to the car in the morning. As the white ibises feign their mute alarm (the things are unflappable I swear) the monk parrots in the date palm across the street make a racket that more than compensates the ibises' silence. I love that scene and I love the very routine-ness of these encounters. The creatures I come across less frequently are an even bigger thrill. Out of all of the curiosities I've encountered in the last (almost) 20 years, my all time favorite has to be Nephila clavipes.
Nephila clavipes is Florida's yellow silk spider, variously known as a banana spider, a calico spider, a writing spider, a giant wood spider or a golden orb spider. Whatever you call it, N. clavipes is hard to miss.
As some of their names suggest, N. clavipes spins an orb web of unusual color. It's a rich, golden yellow and it has to be the strongest spider silk I've ever come across. If you see one of these webs in the woods, you can pluck the support filaments as if they were guitar or harp strings. They don't make any noise of course, but those web filaments feel every bit as strong as the strings in an instrument.
The spiders themselves are harmless to humans, though they are a bit intimidating. Ever since I first stumbled upon one during my first summer in Florida, they have cast a spell over me I can't quite explain. There's a lot of information out there on them and this tells me I'm not the only one who's fascinated by these beauties.
There are Nephila species located all around the warmer parts of the world and the New York Times broke a story this week about some clever soul in Madagascar who took his fascination with Nephila further than anyone else ever has.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York this week unveiled the world's only brocaded textile woven from spider silk. Simon Peers is an art historian, textile expert and 20-year Madagascar resident. He joined forces with Nicholas Godley, an American fashion designer and fellow Madagascar resident, to recreate and perfect what had been tried and abandoned for as long as there have been human beings around to admire spiders. They were going to make a fabric from spider's silk. It had been tried before in Madagascar, so their idea wasn't without precedent.
100 years ago, a French priest, inventor and educator known as Father Comboué figured out a way to spin spider silk harvested directly from the business end of a Nephila inaurata into a thread. He was said to have made enough of this spider's silk fabric to outfit a bed canopy. Reports differ about how true that story is, and whatever fabric he did create no longer exists. So from the attempts of Father Comboué until Peers and Godley waded back into the spider silk business five years ago, no one had successfully made anything from spider silk.
Peers and Godley perfected earlier attempts through their persistence and tenacity as much as anything. The fabric unveiled this week required the output of a million spiders. With the help of the Malagasy people, Peers and Godley collected upwards of three thousand N. inaurata a day. They would place each spider in a harness and then connect it to the harnesses of 23 other spiders. The 24 spiders would spin a single filament each and the filaments would be wound into a thread and then onto a spool. Each spider could produce a single filament 400 feet long before it could produce no more. Once spent, the spider would be re-released to the wild where it would regain its strength in a day or two and could be recaptured and "milked" again or go about its life.
Once they had enough thread, they could in turn spin that into a yarn and start weaving. Madagascar was once known for its intricately woven textiles. Peers and Godley wanted to revive the dying art of Malagasy textiles and to teach a new generation about the weaving traditions of their ancestors. They chose a traditional brocaded pattern once reserved for kings for their project and commenced weaving.
The men estimate that it cost a half a million dollars to produce an eleven foot long shawl, which they regard as a work of art more than an economically viable textile. Whatever it is, what they produced is the first example of a brocaded fabric hand woven from spider silk ever recorded. It's an quite an achievement. The color is the natural, yellow gold of the Nephila species and it's said to be as strong as if it were woven from Kevlar.
Needless to say, I'm captivated by this story and it has me looking at my beloved yellow silk spiders in a whole new light. I found this video yesterday that was shot at the unveiling and it features Peers and Godley describing their work.
If you're in New York, head up to the museum at 79th and Central Park West and let me know how it looks in real life. This is just cool.
Just when I thought it couldn't get any better, SketchUp went out and made it better. Google SketchUp released an update yesterday and it's amazing. My expectations are kind of off the charts when it comes to SketchUp updates and this one has left me as satisfied as the updates that proceeded it. Some of its new features are really stunning in a gee-whiz-who-thinks-of-this kind of way. Watch this video:
Pretty slick, huh? Applying actual textures to the exterior of a building that you can put in context on a map. Wow.
If you design for a living, and I mean design anything, download SketchUp now. If you don't design anything but you want to see what's available to help you turn a thought in your head into a real object, download SketchUp too. It's the ultimate visualization tool and it keeps getting better.
You candownload SketchUp here. There are two versions, a hugely functional free version called SketchUp Free and a Professional version you'll need to generate measured plans. Appropriately enough, it's called SketchUp Pro. So learn how to use it int he free version and when you upgrade to Pro, the first eight hours of use are free. It's amazing stuff and the gang in Boulder done good. They done good again.
