New York's Grand Central Terminal beckons weary travelers

As I mentioned last week, in exactly one more week I'll be in New York as a guest of Brizo faucets. Brizo is flying me and 18 other designer/ bloggers to attend a product education seminar and a Fashion Week runway show by the designer Jason Wu. This promises to be an event that will live on in story and myth for centuries, and that's no exaggeration. In the interest of keeping the FCC off my back I need to state loudly and clearly that Brizo is picking up the tab for this excursion. And to that I'd like to add thank God for Brizo.

My itinerary arrived yesterday and as was the case last September when I went to this same event, I'll be spending the weekend at the 70 Park Avenue Hotel in Manhattan's Murray Hill neighborhood. The hotel, as the name would suggest, is on Park Avenue at 38th Street. Four blocks to the north is New York's famed Grand Central Terminal. Inside the Terminal, on the east balcony, is Charlie Palmer's Métrazur. My fellow attendees at the Brizo event and I will be dining at Métrazur next Thursday night.

I was looking over the menu last night and I cannot wait to try the place. The restaurant looks incredible, and it's impossible to beat the location. Grand Central Terminal is another one of New York's great buildings. By extension, that makes it one of the world's great buildings.

If I were to walk out the front door of the hotel where I'll be and stand in the middle of Park Avenue then look north, here's what I'd see.




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Grand Central Terminal sits in the middle of Park Avenue at 42nd Street. Since the building opened in 1913 (after a ten year construction), The south facade has risen up from Park Avenue like a Beaux-Arts mirage. From the outside, you'd never imagine that underneath that building is the worlds largest train station. Grand Central Terminal occupies 48 acres in total. Now that, is a big building.

At the top of the south facade is the station's clock. At 13 feet in circumference, it's also the largest example of Tiffany glass in the world. Surrounding the clock is a statue depicting Mercury with Minerva and Hercules alongside him. To give you a sense of the scale, zoom in on the Terminal's facade in the Street View above. That statuary and clock grouping is 48 feet high. There's a great blog called Which Yet Survive, and it's all about Manhattan statuary. Here's a great post about the Mercury statue if you'd like to read more about it.

The terminal was nearly torn down in 1968 and threats to demolish it led to the establishment of the US historical preservation movement. The drive to save Grand Central Terminal .enlisted some pretty high profile supporters, most notably Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis.

Once saved, the building languished in a state of filthy disrepair for decades. The enormous windows were so caked with grime that no light passed through them. The incredible ceiling had become so coated with the residue of 70 years of tobacco smoke that the mural of the constellations couldn't be seen. The building was restored to its original glory in 1998, after a four-year renovation.

It's an incredible structure, and it's most definitely one that's etched into the American psyche. The 80,000 square foot main concourse has been in more movies than just about any other location in the city. From North by Northwest to I am Legend, there always seems to be a good excuse to film inside that building. Dreamworks even worked in an animated version of it in the movie Madagascar.






So the next time you're in New York, or maybe it'll be the first time you're in New York, it doesn't really matter either way. What does matter is that you find your way to Park and 42nd. Once inside the building, walk into the main concourse and just look up. Spin in a slow circle if you want to, I always do. Just look up into that cerulean sky and marvel. Who cares that everybody'll know you're a tourist? You'll never see any of them again anyhow. So as you're doing your slow spin, thank the Vanderbilts for leaving behind such an incredible legacy.

But wait! There's more! After you're done having a moment under those 125 foot high ceilings, find this passage just off the main concourse.

The area under that arch has the most amazing acoustics you'll ever experience. It's called the Whispering Gallery, and this intrepid Manhattan blogger describes it better than I can. Grand Central Station's Hidden Acoustical Wonder. Amazing!

All images and a handful of the factoids about the terminal are from Wikipedia.

Mosaic Masterpieces Tour

Julie Richey is an award-winning master mosaicist and great friend of this blog. She won the prestigious Orsoni Prize in Venice last year for her dimensional mosaic, Night Shirt.

Night Shirt now hangs in Venice's Orsoni Gallery alongside the other greats from the long history of mosaic as an art form. Julie's based in Dallas and shows her work all over the world. She can still put in a mean floor too.

Well Julie Richey put together something she's calling the Mosaic Masterpieces Tour, an eight-day excursion to explore the art, culture, food and wine of Italy this June. Julie's leading the group and she'll be accompanied by another titan in the world of fine art mosaics, Nancie Mills-Pipgras, the editor of Mosaic Art Now. The group is limited to 15 to make sure that this tour is un-tour-like as possible. This trip's been coordinated through ACIS, the American Council of International Studies. ACIS is the world leader in educational travel. ACIS' superb planning ensures that this trip will be about art and laughter, not missed connections and lackluster meals.

With ACIS taking care of the specifics, Julie and Nancie can be the personable, knowledgeable and good humored people they are. These women are even bigger Italophiles than I am, and that's quite an accomplishment. Travelers on the Mosaic Masterpieces Tour can expect to see masterworks up close and from behind the velvet ropes. They can also expect to experience Italy as Italy and at a pace where it can be savored.

The tour will start on June 9th in Venice. Then it's on to Ravenna, Siena and finally Rome. Ahh, Rome. Julie assures me that Rome's famous Carciofi alla Giudea will be in season when she and her group arrive. Carciofi alla Giudea are an early summer treat, fried artichokes. Their description loses something when it's translated to English, but to eat one is to taste the very essence of the sun-drenched fields that surround the Eternal City.

A tour such as this is an ideal opportunity for design professionals, mosaicists and mosaic aficionados to get a real feel for the history of this ancient art form while at the same time, seeing up close its expression today. From the Orsoni foundry and gallery in Venice to the Byzantine wonders of Ravenna, from the Medieval treasures of Siena to the High Renaissance glories of Rome, it's all here.

If you's like to read about the specifics of this trip, including prices and registration deadlines, you can learn more on Julie's Website, Julie Richey Mosaics. If you're interested in booking, you can e-mail Julie through her website directly.

All photos courtesy of Julie Richey

Change is coming and I need your help

"Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer"

Caspar David Friedrich , 1818

I have big changes and big plans in mind.

I've begun the process of rethinking Kitchen and Residential Design and so far as I'm concerned, everything except for the name is fair game in this reworking. I'm going to move everything over to a new Word Press template and that's going to give me a lot more flexibility so far as how everything is going to look and function. This is a process of course, and I'm not in any great hurry to have all this done tomorrow. I have however set a goal for a re-launch in May.

I want to use this planned change to ratchet up what I do here by a couple of notches and that's where I'd love your feedback. For starters, what's missing? I mean that in the layout sense and in the editorial sense. Is there a function on another blog you like and wouldn't mind sharing? Are there topics I don't touch on or touch on too much? I write this thing as a means of self expression of course, but what keeps me writing it is the feedback I get from you guys. So now's your chance to help me make this a better site. Pretend for a moment that you're running the show. What would you do differently? How can I make this site better? Oh, and unless some angel investor wants to descend, this has to be done on the cheap.

Now about that angel investor...

A new idea in sinks from Blanco

That is a drop-in sink not a flush-mount. It's Blanco's new MicroEdge™ sink and it just won an honorable mention in KB+B's Product Innovator Awards for 2009. Blanco's MicroEdge™ was one of nine products named as a stand out for the year.

Since the advent of undermount sinks ten years ago, nobody's really done anything with drop-in sinks. That was until Blanco took another look at them and decided that the traditional drop-in kitchen sink needed a face lift. So Blanco developed a 1.25mm thick sink rim and called it MicroEdge™.

Drop-ins are usually less expensive to deal with and if you're replacing an existing sink, you options have always been limited to the traditional 17- to 18-gauge stainless steel the rest of the sink was made of. Blanco found a way to make the transition from an 18-gauge stainless bowl to a 1.25mm rim. Pretty slick!

Go to Blanco's website to see their complete collection.


In other departments, Blanco started a company blog recently and it's called Blanco by Design. On it you can find last minute updates on Blanco products as well as items of interest to the kitchen and bath world. To quote from their new site:

BLANCObydesign.com provides a forum for homeowners, kitchen and bath design profesionals, BLANCO representatives and showroom sales associates to exchange information. Here you’ll discover the latest product news, program introductions, support tools, sources of inspiration, design ideas and more.

BLANCObydesign.com will also create a channel to lend your voice to the BLANCO community. Just hit the Comments link to share new ideas, or anything that’s on your mind. Your contributions are the key to making this blog successful for all.

The center tab on Blanco by Design's page is something called the Blanco Design Council. Blanco's Design Council is intended to be a group of professionals who've been brought on board to lend a hand and an ear to Blanco's new undertaking. At the top of that list you'll find yours truly.

So bravo to Blanco on the recognition awarded to MicroEdge™ and three cheers for wading into the world of Social Media.

Tile wallpaper by Trend USA

Who says mosaic tile is only for back splashes and shower floors? Not me. And neither do the folks at Trend USA. Trend has a series called wallpaper tile and within the series are four separate collections. There are hundreds of variations on these themes available and any one of them would be a great idea for an accent wall.

Think about it, why not a 5/8" mosaic tile in glass instead of a coordinated paint color for an accent? Wouldn't it be cool to get pattern into a room from a source where no one ever thinks to look? I say yes, emphatically. Here are some highlights from Trend USA's Wallpaper Collection.

Pretty neat stuff and definitely not what most people will think of when the phrase "tile wall" gets uttered. What do you think? Would you ever use a geometric, floral or damask mosaic pattern in your own home?