More lighting fun with Kichler's Design Pro LEDs

Last January, I wrote two posts introducing Kichler's Design Pro LED lighting. You can read them here and here. Back then, the Pro series had to two models of under cabinet lighting. What's really interesting about Kichler's Design Pro LED lighting series is that the warm, white light they produce is similar to the light produced by an incandescent bulb. The similarities stop there though. The LEDs used in Kichler's Design Pro lights uses 75% less electricity and each bulb is rated with a 40,000 hour lifespan. That's 20 years. The energy and replacement light bulb savings over the course of 20 years makes the initial cost of LED lights a bargain.

Kichler just added onto the Design Pro series in the form of these rail lights.

The first is a modern, urban four-light rail. It's available in a brushed nickel finish with a white glass shade. Each light along the rail swivels independently.

And the second is a more transitional four-light rail. It's available in the brushed nickel finish with white glass as well as in an Olde Bronze finish with a light umber glass shade. As with its more modern cousin, each light swivels independently on this fixture.

Here's the more modern rail in a bathroom, and you can see the independent swiveling in action. That these lights can be positioned independently is the key feature here. This means that you can use the rail fixtures above an island with the shades positioned for reading the newspaper, or in the kitchen, trained toward a counter for food preparation. Each shade swivels 90 degrees and rotates up to 359 degrees. Each model has the same dimensions, 42-and-a-half inches in length, four-and-a-half inches in width and nine inches in height. These are substantial fixtures that when when placed properly, will provide years of proper lighting.

These are great features and that's a huge amount of light coming out of an LED. Kichler is really onto something with this Pro series. These lights are available at independent lighting showrooms and you can learn more about them on Kichler's website.

Rachele from The Conscious Kitchen installed Kichler's Design Pro LED under cabinet lights in her recent and beautiful kitchen renovation. I wonder what it would take to get her to weigh in with an opinion about them... Rachele?

More to love about New York and more art underground

I brought up New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority and their Arts for Transit program a couple of weeks ago. The MTA dedicates 1% of the money it brings in every year to fund permanent art installations throughout New York's entire transit system.

Over the course of the last 21 years, the MTA has assembled what's clearly New York's most expansive art collection. The works are all site-specific and feature media that range from mosaic to cast bronze and from faceted glass to enamel.

My smart friend Tom knows I love the Arts for Transit program and he sent me some images of some gorgeous mosaics located throughout the MTA's system and he sent me the link to the directory of these installations. I spent an hour poking around and jumping from station to station, just looking for works I already know and love and earmarking works to find the next time I'm in the City. I came across an old favorite and I hadn't thought about it in years.

This is Canal Street.

Canal Street offers what I say is the most intense example of urban life that there is to be found in the US. It's impossible to walk down Canal Street and not get caught up in the crush of humanity and traffic and noise and the thrill of being alive in the center of the universe.

Now if you duck down this hole in the sidewalk at the corner of Canal Street and 6th Avenue, you'll come face to face with Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz's The Gathering from 2001.

The Gathering is a collection of 181 life-sized, bronze blackbirds, grackles and crows and they're integrated perfectly into the grates and gates of the station and platforms.

Canal Street's about as far as one can be removed from anything resembling a non-human life form and it's a pretty jarring surprise to run into 181 black birds in a subway station underneath the bedlam unfolding in the streets above. I love birds, I love New York and I love art. It's a grand slam. Thank you MTA.

The Gathering is the work of Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz and I wrote about them last August. Martin and Muñoz created a series of provocative snow globes I am still crazy about. Snow globes? Yes, snow globes. Follow the link and check check them out.

Anyhow, if you find yourself in New York and want to take an unconventional museum tour, buy a $2 Metro Card and cruise from station to station. The MTA's website makes plotting out such a tour easy.

Art is important, I'll go so far as to say that it's vital to the health of a society. Seeing the amount of time, money and attention the Metropolitan Transit Authority spends on public art should serve as an example to cities across the rest of the US. In a time of contracting economies and squeezed budgets, Art's still important. Maybe it's even more important now than ever.

Follow up to a follow up to a post from two weeks ago: the wall tile that nearly did in my client

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?

Artist profile: meet Vicki Shuck

6"x8"

Oil on Board

$125 plus $10 domestic s/h

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 Brings and through a website called Daily Painters. Daily Painters is 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 another great 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!

6"x6"

Oil on Board

$125 includes domestic s/ h

5"x7"

Oil on Gessoboard

$135 unframed includes domestic s/h

O tempora o mores!

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:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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:

1. Can I get my data out at all?
2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?

The ideal answers to these questions are:

1. Yes.
2. Nothing more than I'm already paying.
3. 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.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

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.