Sears' Blue Crew, the latest update

Who knew, when I wrote this post on 10 October, that it would take on a life of its own? Last Tuesday I reported that I'd heard from Sears and that we were going to arrange a conference call between a bunch of Sears folks and a panel of designers I'd assemble.

Well by last Thursday, I had a panel of 12 people lined up and ready to help build something positive in partnership with the online team from Sears. The 12 people on the panel for what's come to be known as the Spec Summit are a cross section of the industry. We represent the face of kitchen design today and we range from an architect who designs some of the most exquisite rooms I've ever seen to a designer who designs stunning in their own way, lower-budget jobs. Most of us make up the space between those extremes. Some of us are new to the industry, but most of us have been around for a while. Another wild thing is that all of us know one another either personally or by reputation and we know one another through social media. Whether it's Twitter or our blogs or Facebook or some combination of all of those things and none of this would have been possible until very recently. It's pretty neat to be involved in this project. But more than anything, my real excitement about this is that everybody's volunteering to help make something positive.

So as a result of a blog post I wrote about my frustration over some missing dimensions, a group of 12 professionals are helping to solve the problem of missing dimensions. This is now bigger than me and my frustrations, that's for sure. It's satisfying to know that in helping out like this, we'll be playing a role in preventing other designers' frustrations in the future while at the same time helping an esteemed American company find its way in a brave new world.

As of last Friday, our conference is scheduled for Thursday the 22nd. Believe me, I'll keep you posted.

Where the Wild Things Are

I saw this last night.




Maurice Sendak wrote and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are in 1963. I was born two years later and I think my mother read it to me for the first time in 1969, the year I started kindergarten. Where the Wild Things Are was the first book I ever owned and between it and The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack, my lifelong fascination with the world outside the one I call home was set.

I poured over Wild Thing's ten sentences and 48 pages every day for years as I remember it, but it was probably more like a couple of weeks before I moved on to something else. However, that book looms large in my imagination still. Six months ago, I learned that Spike Jonze was making a film adaptation of it, and I was worried that my childhood memories would be short-changed by a movie version.

I had nothing to worry about. Jonze's adaptation is brilliant, and that he manages to flesh out Sendak's original 10 sentences into a two hour movie is a testament to his skill as a filmmaker and story teller. Honestly, It didn't feel like he added a thing, so seamlessly does the script play into the original story line.

Despite the source material, this is not a children's movie. It's an adult dissection of the memories and moods of a child, Max, the main character. In Max's fantasy world, time speeds up and slows down as needed. His imagination is glorious in its breadth but held in check by the limited experiences of a seven-year-old. He can't see those limitations of course, that's the allure of childhood. But the audience can and the result is a slow motion thrill.

The theater was full of other 40-somethings last night and sometimes, it's nice to share a cultural touchstone with a room full of strangers.

Bring me a Power Mat

An increasingly important consideration I have to take when I'm putting together a design for somebody's kitchen is where to put the chargers? I dislike cluttering up my designs with an assortment of wall warts, so usually I bury a cluster of outlets inside of a wall cabinets. That way, people can plug in their chargers and then just shut the door. This works when I have enough room to make one of these impromptu charging stations. A lot of times though, storage space is a premium and I can't spare the room for a buried charging station.

Enter the Powermat. Check it out.

The iPhone will lie down with the Blackberry... Cool! That Powermat can charge three devices at one time and it has a single, streamlined plug. Brilliant. It looks good too. I wouldn't mind something like this sitting on a counter in the least. Here's a video tour of the new must-have in every kitchen I design from now on. At $99, who can argue?.




It really does make that sound when it engages. I know what I'm buying myself this Christmas.

Quick! Buy a brand new indoor air polluter for just $68!

Someone sent me this yesterday along with a gushing note, "OMG! Did you see Jonathan Adler has reed diffusers now?" No, I didn't know and I suspect that I was happier not knowing than I am now.

Good Lord, in what kind of a world to people gush over a $68 bottle of stink? And no, $68 is not a typo. Further, why would anyone pay someone $68 for a bottle of stink who's previously recommended this for a girl's bedroom?

How is that even remotely attractive? I get it, he's being campy. But please, does an eight-year-old girl need to live with a middle-aged man's idea of what's clever? Does anyone really want their kids to sleep in a room that purposely ugly? If I haven't mentioned this in a while, the emperor has no clothes.

If I want a reed diffuser, why should I not buy this one from Target for $9? At $9, it's still a waste of money but it's a little more palatable than it is when it costs seven-and-a-half times as much.

This same, thoughtful soul who sent me the alert about the Adler reed diffusers takes absurd delight and sending me all sorts of helpful reminders. Most of them have to do with the hidden dangers posed to me by the mysterious "toxins" that surround me and why I need to "live green" and "detoxify" myself regularly. So lady who will remain anonymous, this one's for you.

The conventional wisdom holds that one of the "toxins" that threaten me with every breath are VOCs. Well, conventional wisdom likes to latch onto a scientific concept and then run with it to as many silly ends as are available. VOC is an acronym and it stands for volatile organic compound. Volatile means that something evaporates at room temperature. Organic means that something's carbon-based (not the meaningless label people use to charge more for groceries), and a compound is a blend of two or more chemical elements.

VOC is a generic term and it can describe anything from the scent of a rose to paint fumes. However, the US EPA has identified a subset of VOCs as health threats. A small subset of VOCs are reason for concern,  and one of those VOCs is called dipropylene glycol methyl ether or DPGME. If you ran a business and you allowed you employees to be exposed to high levels of DPGME, you would be shut down and fined so fast you wouldn't know what hit you.

Now, reed diffusers are an odd bird. How they work is that a scented oil concoction is allowed to evaporate slowly through a wicking action. A scented oil (which is a VOC) by itself is too thick to wick efficiently so it's mixed with a chemical like ethyl alcohol (another VOC) to thin it out. Once it's thinned though, it wicks too efficiently and it needs a third chemical, another VOC, to slow it down. That VOC is more often than not our old pal dipropylene glycol methyl ether, or DPGME.

So when you buy a reed diffuser, whether it's an absurdly priced one from Jonathan Adler or a cheaper one from Target, you are filling your bathroom with DPGME and it very rapidly exceeds levels deemed to be safe for occupational exposure by the EPA and OSHA. Here's OSHA's fact sheet on DPGME. Isn't it hilarious that a lot of the same people who claim to get sick from paint fumes can fill their homes with reed diffusers and scented candles and thrive?

Chemistry's your friend folks. Really.

Updated Eichler kitchens

Last week, a woman named Johnna left a series of comments here and she mentioned that she was having difficulty making decisions about how to renovate her Eichler home. She wanted to update the kitchen particularly, but in a way that honored the architecture of her home while still allowing the business of life in 2009 to proceed efficiently.

Well, the terrific website Styleture ran a story yesterday about that very thing, updated kitchens in Eichler homes. So with all attribution to and great admiration for Styleture, I'm going to talk about the same thing. But first a little background. Johnna, if you're reading this, you can skip this part.

Joseph Eichler was a post-war, California real estate developer who built homes in a Modernist style. He worked with some of the most notable architects of the time and together the style of their buildings came to be known as California Modern. California Modern was a middle class homage to Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. The homes featured exposed beams, vaulted ceilings, open floor plans and they pioneered the idea of indoor/outdoor living through the use of enormous windows and sliding patio doors. California Modern is what gave the rest of the world the very idea of a great room.

Most of the remaining Eichlers are clustered in the suburbs of of San Francisco and there are pockets of them outside of LA and into Orange County. Nothing screams California to me like an Eichler and about the only thing that could get me to pack up and head to suburban San Francisco would be the chance to live in one.

Eichler homes were were revolutionary for a host of reasons that transcend architecture. Eichler built affordable homes for everyone. In 1950, Eichler Homes instituted a policy that stated that they would sell to anyone without regard to race or religion. He had a vision of an integrated, modern suburbia at a time when such views were considered to be beyond the fringe. The National Association of Home Builders refused to endorse his non-discriminatory policies and in 1958, he resigned from the group in protest. All hail Joseph Eichler.

Eichler homes never really took off while they were being built and Eichler eventually went bankrupt in the mid-sixties. He left behind an architectural and cultural legacy and today his homes enjoy a fanatical popularity he could never have imagined.

So, this brings me to the terrific piece in Styleture yesterday and Johna's comments from last week. The photo above is what a vintage Eichler kitchen looked like:

Now I want to stress that this is not Johnna's kitchen, but here are two before photos of a a kitchen in an Eichler in Palo Alto.

Here it is post-renovation and ADA-compliant.

Oh my oh my is that gorgeous or what? It does everything it needs to do while honoring the home in which it sits. I'm getting goosebumps.

And Johnna, here are a couple more inspiration photos.

If you have never spent any time poking around on Styleture, please add that site to your reading list.

***Update, noon 10/15
Styleture has an expanded look a the Palo Alto, ADA-compliant renovation and you can find it here. All of the cabinetry in the Palo Alto house is by Alno USA.