Dornbracht re-imagines the air switch

Back in the dark ages, the switch to operate a disposer was either a light switch on the wall somewhere near the sink or a light switch under the sink itself. Using a light switch to turn on the disposer, especially while I had wet hands always bothered me.

Well along came the first Air Switches. An Air Switch is a button mounted on the counter near the sink. Underneath that button is a bellows. When you depress the button, the bellows forces air into a tube and the tube's connected to a power pack that plug into an outlet under the sink. What this means is that no electricity ever comes near the button itself. Air Switches made it possible to operate a disposer with wet hands in total safety.

But, there's always a but. But Air Switches were made by InSinkErator and despite InSinkErator's sterling reputation as a manufacturer of disposers and hot water dispensers, there were only a few finishes available for the Air Switch buttons. The Air Switch button's finish never matched exactly the faucet sitting right next to it.

Enter Dornbracht.

Dornbracht is a 50-year-old German company whose kitchen and bath fixtures pretty much define the cutting edge. Exceptional design and exceptional quality back up every one of those cutting edge fixtures by the way. Dornbracht is not just another pretty face.

Well, Dornbracht just changed all that. Dornbracht now has coordinating Air Switch buttons for their free standing faucets and you can even integrate one into their Universal and Preparing Water Zones.

Good job Dornbracht, it's great to see them blazing yet another trail.

The transcript from last night's Interior Designer Chat is now live

Photo by Steven D. Krause

If you missed it last night or are interested to see what a dedicated Twitter chat looks like, you can follow this link to a transcript to last night's Interior Design Chat.

There were 188 participants and 1800 Tweets sent out. If you wade into the transcript and don't understand Twitter, the transcript won't help!

Taste sensations from the land of my birth

I love Melody McFarland. Melody's a regular commenter around here and a dear, dear friend of mine. Melody and I grew up in impossibly small towns in rural Pennsylvania though I never met her until around five years ago. When we met she lived in Japan and I lived in Florida. We bonded over our shared roots in the rolling farmland of Lancaster County, PA.

Well as fate would have it, Melody and her husband moved back to Lancaster last year after having spent the previous 20 years of their lives living all over the world. Hearing her tales of culture shock have been amusing but in re-experiencing my home town through her eyes I've come to see that it's really not such a bad place after all. After all, Melody's finding it to be a great place to launch her photography empire.

Lancaster's only 60 miles from Philadelphia but in a lot of ways is separated by time rather than distance. One of the apparent examples of this is the continued existence of mom and pop snack factories. It's an odd  but  remarkable thing to go down a snack aisle anywhere in eastern Pennsylvania and find that small, local brands of things like chips and pretzels outnumber the national brands.

Well in a gesture I'll remember for the rest of my life, Melody raided one of those snack aisles and sent me a box of mom and pop junk food yesterday.

I grew up in a household that had a chip can in it and potato chips were something that we had delivered the same way we had milk delivered. There was nothing unusual about it then but in looking back, it's unusual.

The chips we had delivered every week were Good's Red Label. My parents weren't natives and the Blue Label must have spooked them. I'll explain the difference in a moment.

So in the box of wonders Melody sent yesterday, there was a bag of Good's Red Label and a bag of Good's Blue Label. Blue Label Good's are cooked in lard, Reds are cooked in vegetable shortening. And now you know the difference between the two. As I was saying earlier, Lancaster County, PA is separated by time rather than distance from the rest of the Eastern Seaboard. There's no stigma to cooking with lard there.

Until you've eaten a potato chip that's been cooked in lard you are not allowed to judge. Lard gives them a crunch that's not possible to achieve in any other way. Trust me.

As if to drive home that point ever further, Melody sent me a bag of King's chips. King's are only available in the lard-cooked variety. Second only to my love of Good's was my love of King's. Melody has no idea what she's done for my soul here.

But the best was yet to come. Also in that magical box were two bags of Hammond Pretzels. People outside of Pennsylvania really don't eat pretzels, let alone handmade, hand-baked ones. If Lancaster, PA had an ounce of pretension, Hammond Pretzels would be sold at ten times their price and they'd be called artisanal pretzels. But there is no pretension, so they're just plain old Hammond's.

There are few things as sublime as a real pretzel and I am now in heaven. From the bottom of heart Melody, thank you.

Guest hosting Interior Design Chat on Twitter

Twitter has changed my life in ways I never could have imagined it would when I was fumbling around with it in the spring of '09. I remember thinking that it reminded me of radio static. It was noise and snippets of out of context conversations. "What's the point?!" I remember asking everybody who was telling me was an amazing thing it was. I kept at it because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

By the beginning of that summer I could see what all the fuss was about and then some. In a matter of months I went from being an outspoken doubter to an evangelist. Every great career opportunity that's come my way since last summer has come my way through Twitter. Someone very wise once said that Facebook reconnects me to my past, Twitter introduces me to my future.

And so it was on that note that the great Nick Lovelady asked me to host Interior Designer Chat tonight from 6pm to 7pm EST. Interior Design Chat is an hour-long discussion on a specific topic and it's attended by hundreds of design pros from all over the world. It's run by Nick and Barbara Segal. Nick's a kitchen and bath designer in Alabama and Barbara's an interior designer who lives in Newport, RI and who works in Chicago and LA. Nick Tweets as @cupboards and Barbara Tweets as @NoirBlancDesign.

Group chats on Twitter use dedicated tags to separate chat-specific tweets from the rest of the Twitter Stream. Everyone who participates in Interior Designer Chat tags his or her messages with the hash tag #IntDesignerChat and the conversation just flows.

A guest host's job is to introduce five questions at regular intervals to lead the conversation and my topic tonight is color. I submitted my questions last Friday to the Interior Design Chat website and everybody who participates knows to check the site prior to the Tuesday night conversation.

The questions (with accompanying photos) I submitted are as follows:

1. Gloss paint finishes are enjoying a resurgence in the design press. Do you like this trend? What sheens to you usually specify for interior paints?

2. Pantone's 15-559 Turquoise was named 2010's Color of the Year by Pantone. Has turquoise figured into your work this year? Why do you think they picked turquoise?

3. When there's a hot color out there, turquoise for example, are you more prone to acessorize with it or would you use on things that can't be changed easily (or cheaply) like a sofa? What role do color trends play in your work and why?

4. Sherwin-Williams recently issued four palette forecasts for 2011. I wrote about them on my blog here. http://www.kitchenandresidentialdesign.com/2010/07/sherwin-williams-2011-color-forecast_30.html The palettes look like this:

Do you see these color combinations taking shape in your work? Is Sherwin-Williams onto something or have they missed the boat? What color combinations do you find yourself coming back to time and again? How do trends influence that?

5. What message do you wish you could send to the people who decide which colors are used or ignored (in any product category) in a given year?

So if you're a design professional, no matter where you are, please join us tonight when I host Interior Design Chat at 6pm EST. If none of this makes any sense to you, get thee to Twitter and meet your future.

Back to basics: how to measure a kitchen

Every once in a while it hits me that I'm straying too far from my niche. I am after all, a kitchen and bath designer. AS much as I enjoy my regular forays far and wide; the name of this blog after all is Kitchen and Residential Design.

I get asked questions constantly about how to start a renovation project. Everybody it seems, has an opinion about what they should look like when they're done, but few people know where to start.

How do you get from something that looks like this,

photo via Luxurbist

to something that looks like this?

photo via Medallion Cabinetry

Well, everything starts with a good set of measurements.

Measuring a kitchen is a bit more complicated that figuring out the square feet of a room or even the length of the walls. Because nearly everything that goes into a kitchen is built in, accurate measurements are vital, and know how to measure things like windows, doorways and plumbing stacks is very important.

While any professional you meet with with measure your room him or herself, there's nothing stopping you from measuring everything now so you can start planning even before you call in pros.

AK Renovations is an Atlanta design and build firm that was started in 1995 by Ed Choflin and Ed's somebody I've come to know through Twitter. Ed and the entire team at AK Renovations are consummate professionals and highly skilled tradespeople. They do great work in Atlanta and they put together a terrific website. It's chock full of great information and advice and about a week ago, they published one of the best How To Measure Your own Kitchen Guides I've ever seen.

You can download AK Renovations' .pdfs here and I encourage you to go to the site for the download if you're going to attempt this on your own. The resolution as .pdfs is far better than the reduced version of them here.

AK Renovations' guide will take you through the whole process is a systematic and painless way. In less than an hour you'll know exactly how big your kitchen is and you'll know exactly where the windows and other obstacles are.

See? Going back to basics isn't so hard. Many, many thanks to the gang at AK Renovations.