Brrrr!

This is the screen capture of my home page's weather gadget from a minute ago.

It didn't hit 40 degrees today. It's more than 30 degrees below normal for today here and this is without a doubt the coldest I can remember in nearly 20 years of living in Florida. It snowed about 40 miles north of here last night and tonight's due to be even colder. There's a frost warning in St. Pete for tonight and we haven't had a frost in ten years. It's bizarre and I don't like it one bit.

Everyone looks shell-shocked and cold. A lot of the buildings here have no heat and it shows up in the pained faces of my fellow St. Petersburgians. I get it that it's one degree in Fargo and six in Minneapolis. They're used to it and they live in homes with furnaces.

This photo is just wrong. I just found it on the internet. It doesn't look like this around here yet but at this stage of the game nothing would surprise me. All is woe. All is woe!

New year, new stuff from Room and Board

The gang at Room and Board released a number of new items this week and I like to take a moment to fawn over four of them. Room and Board's furniture, carpets, lighting and accessories have a clean and modern aesthetic I like a great deal. There's a bit of Mid Century Modern in all of these pieces but they never cross the line into camp. Their stuff's exceptionally well made and sold at a price point that makes my head spin sometimes.

If you're in the market for new furniture, please don't buy junk. Buy good quality furniture and buy it once. Do your research and I can't think of a better place to start that research than at Room and Board.

This is the Louis Chair and Ottoman.

The Louis comes in five fabrics or can be customized with any of the hundreds of fabrics in Room and Board's collection. The Louis chair sells for $899 and the ottoman $399.

This is the Ventura table.

The Ventura is available in solid cherry, solid maple, and solid walnut. It comes in four lengths and its prices range from $1399 to $1899.

This is the Spill carpet.

The Spill is made from handmade wool felt and is available in the color and pattern shown. Other colors and patterns have other names. Imagine. Out of all of them though, I like the Spill the best. Nothing like a jolt of orange to start the day, right? Anyhow, the Spill comes in two sizes and ranges in price from $2160 to $3,600.

And finally, this is the Adams table.

In the Adams table, Room and Board managed to inject some Mid Century Modern sensibilities into a traditional Shaker form and I love the effect.

Again, if you're in the market for furniture, don't buy junk. Research like crazy and then buy the best you can afford and buy it once. If you have to buy something on impulse, but a pack of gum at the check out. Furniture purchases should be agonized over for months. Or in my case, years.

A trip to New Ravenna

via Flickr

Across the Chesapeake Bay from Annapolis, MD sits the Delmarva Peninsula, so named for the three states that divide it. There's the whole of Delaware on the eastern side. It's flanked by Maryland to the west and the bottom 70 or so miles of that spit of land make up Virginia's Eastern Shore.

via Flickr

US 13 runs down the spine of the Eastern Shore and to drive south on it is to leave behind the pace and the hassles inherent in living in the rest of the northeastern US. The miles pass wide expanses of fertile fields dotted with pine and oak flatwoods. Ocassional, orderly towns come into view and there's a Spartan efficiency to them.

It's clear that for a lot of these towns, their best years are behind them. There's no real sense of loss that's readily apparent though. History runs very deep on the Eastern Shore, and that kind of history leaves a people with the steely resolve that even though the good times are in the past, they'll come back.

About two-thirds of the way down the peninsula sits the town of Exmore, VA; and in what was once an Arrow shirt factory, New Ravenna Mosaics and Stone creates some of the most beautiful work in glass and stone available anywhere.

New Ravenna Mosaics and Stone is the largest employer in Northhampton County. The 100 people who arrive at that old shirt factory every morning are artisans in every sense of the word and their workplace is an atelier much more than something that could be called a factory.

Sara Baldwin founded New Ravenna in 1991. She started as an artist with a passionate vision to bring beauty to the world through the medium of stone tesserae. That vision still burns as brightly as ever and her enthusiasm, her love, for the medium infuses everything about New Ravenna.

While it's true that New Ravenna utilizes an impressive assortment of water jets, tumblers and wet saws; at the end of the day they create their art the way mosaicists always have. Someone considers a piece of stone, cuts it into the shape she needs and then sets it in place. Repeat 10,000 times.

19 years ago, New Ravenna started out as a woman with a vision. 19 years later, New Ravenna is 100 people with a shared vision.

Look through their entire collection on their website and follow New Ravenna's latest developments through Sara Balwin's blog. Oh, and if you ever find yourself in Exmore, VA; stop in for a visit. If you can't make it to Exmore, you can find a bit of New Ravenna's Exmore at distributors far and wide.

Claudio Silvestrin presents i Frammenti

That's a sheeted mosaic tile believe it or not.

I registered to attend this year's Coverings recently, that's the tile and stone industry's big trade show. I sat it out last year and in anticipation of this year's show I've been digging through my library and revisiting all the cool stuff I saw the last time. That's where the Petracer's and the Dune posts came from last week.

As amazed as I was by those two offerings, what will always stand out to me from that show was the Brix booth. Brix is another tile company based out of Modena but to call them a tile company doesn't begin to do them justice. Brix is a design company that expresses itself through tile is a better way to describe them.

One of Brix's coolest products is a tile series developed for them by the architect/ designer Claudio Silvestrin and the series is called i Frammenti. Frammenti means fragments in Italian and the name fits.

The series gets its name from the 5mm pieces of porcelain it's made from. Each piece is a nearly perfect half centimeter by half centimeter by half centimeter cube and they are bound together on a flexible, silicone mesh. The combination of the small sizes of the individual pieces and the silicone backer make for a mosaic tile that's inherently, amazingly flexible. Because it's porcelain, it can be used indoors or out, and in wet and dry areas. The Brix booth at Coverings in 2008 featured a series of columns and other rounded shapes that were covered in i Frammenti mosaics and I'd never seen anything like it.

This product and the rest of the products made by Brix are available worldwide through better showrooms. I go to trade shows like Coverings as often as I do in order to keep on top of what new. The Italian manufacturers never fail to disappoint. And that's just the Italian manufacturers who come to the US to show off their wares. One of these days I will make to to Cersaie, in Bologna. Just as an FYI, Cersaie is the international version of Coverings though from what I understand it's in another league all together.

In the meantime, you can find more information on i Frammenti and the rest of Brix's offerings here, here and here.

Decorno strikes again

This blog will pass the two year mark in a couple of weeks and I've been thinking a lot about how I got to where I am now over the course of those two years. There are a number of blogs and bloggers who helped and inspired me along the way and very high on that list is a blog and a woman who goes by one name, Decorno.

Until I came across her blog, I had the idea that I needed to remain objective and un-opinionated in order to be an effective blogger. Reading her columns for a couple of days cured me of that, let me tell you. If you've never read Decorno, I encourage you to do so immediately.

Decorno is a community of clever commenters as much as it's a well-written and thought-out design blog. Sometimes, particularly noteworthy comments turn into posts in their own right and that's what happened over there recently.

Last Saturday, Decorno wrote a post about costly design mistakes. Her post consisted of a list of things she'd have done differently if she were given the chance to do them again. She ended the post by encouraging her readers to tell their own stories of design regret. Tell stories they did.

One of them, left by a reader named John, prompted another post all together. To wit:

Her comments section that follows that post is a riot of creative color naming and casual obscenity. Do yourself a favor and read through it. Since there's a pony at stake, leave a color story of your own. Look for a heart warming story by me and really good one from Sara Baldwin. The hands-down winner has to be a woman who goes by the name Goddess of Purple. If there's an award for best comment left on a blog, the Goddess of Purple deserves it. So again, cruise on over to Decorno's color post and wade into the comment pool.