Luxuriously Green- Stephanie Odegard and California Homes Magazine at Design San Francisco 2010

A panel discussion featuring Stephanie Odegard, President of Odegard,
 Barbara Beckmann, President of Barbara Beckmann Designs and Sylvia Kwan, AIA and Principal, Kwan-Henmi of Architecture and Planning, moderated by California Homes Magazine.

Join nationally acclaimed experts as they discuss sustainable and environmentally responsible design and how incorporating lasting craftsmanship with eco-friendly approaches in building and product design is redefining today's luxury market.

Other speakers include topics from The Basics of Building your Brand, LED: New Energy Efficent Technology, Organic Materials in Modern Design to Green and Bold:Sustaining a Vision of the Future for the Bay Area

This event is part of Design San Francisco 2010, at the SFDC Showplace Building. A celebration of creativity, Design San Francisco will inspire you with a stimulating mix of speakers, discussions and showrooms filled with new ideas.

Recycled Glass Tile: Luxurious & Sustainable for a Modern Estate

In all the Bathrooms in this Modern Estate in Montecito we tried to use glass tile that was at least 50% content of recycled or post industrial glass tile.  The result was modernist elegance in every room.

The entire room is tiled in glass. Floors and Walls. The pattern is an offset running bond pattern installed vertically. The glass tiles are a mixture of sizes and vary from matte, to glossy. The floor is a 1" grid of matte glass mosaic and we used a 1/4" x 6" "pencil glass rectangular tile to finish the edges between the wall and the floor, like a tiny lining border. This room has a serene modernist and timeless quality to it.

This mosaic tile in the Pool House Bath is a mixture of stone and glass tiles. The colors were chosen to reflect the surrounding colors of the landscape and ocean beyond.

Modern Powder Room. We used very thin Glass Mosaic tile in conjunction with a counter to ceiling mirror simply applied to the drywall and tiled right up to the mirror. The Dornbract Faucets were plumbed to come through the mirror. Farrow and Ball Wallpaper is on the adjacent walls.

Copper and Wine colored Glass mosaic tiles on softly arched ceiling and illuminated from the sides above the wine racks was the perfect accent for the wine cellar.  Oceanside Tile is a great resource that we specify all the time for recycled content glass products. Here's a link to Oceanside's Sustainability page.

2010 NICHE Awards are announced by Niche Magazine

2010 NICHE Awards

Celebrating Excellence and Innovation in American and Canadian Fine Craft

Lotus by Lilach Lotan from Nanaimo, BC ...Category Lamps and Lighting

Until Next Year by James Sagui, West Palm Beach, Fl...Category Furniture

Niche Magazine is the exclusive trade publication for retailers of American Craft and Canadian Craft. For the 2010 NICHE Awards program, jurors selected 161 finalists out of nearly 1000 entries in 36 categories. Here's a link to the Complete List.

Holiday Decorations: The Aluminum Christmas Tree and My eBay Remorse!

Here's a Link for this Cool Book "Seasons Gleamings the Art of the The Aluminum Christmas Tree"

The story is this. Gregg and I live in a Modernist House in Montecito, Ca. We have decorated this home with all collectable modernist furnishings and art from galleries ranging from Paris, New York,  Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Palm Springs,  and Santa Barbara. All of the furniture is collectable mid-century modern furniture. Sooo, I got a bug this year to get a vintage "Silver" christmas tree with rotating color wheel et all. Honestly, because I really don't have the energy or vibe to decorate a 10' tree this year, plus I'm a Mad Men freak which is spilling over into my design cravings. I go to check it out on ebay and sure enough some gal had just bought a vintage aluminum tree with a real authentic color wheel from 1960, it was in perfect condition. She stated in comments on ebay that she had purchased it earlier that day at an estate sale (garage sale) somewhere in Ohio. She was selling it on ebay because her husband was harassing her about it so she was willing to to "give it away" for $250.00, just to shut her husband up. She stated it was too late for her to list it with the BUY IT NOW option. I bit her bate and put in a bid just below $250. There was only 20 minutes left the auction, so I brought my laptop to the dinner table.....big mistake. Evidently the bidding was non-existent until I put a bid in, needless to say, while I ate a beautifully prepared, um, whatever it was, with my nose in the bidding war that ensued, I turned to Gregg, who had the made the beautiful prepared dinner, whatever it was, as asked him if I should go over $425...he said I should do is just go away. It sold for $423 and not to me. This was a total cart before the horse scenario for me, I was into buying this on instinct based on this gals story (which I totally believed) and my instinct that this color wheel was rare. Subsequently I have done a bunch more research and boy, were my instincts correct. I'm sure some hipster in Palm Springs is going to be very  happy with his Gleaming Pink, Blue and Green Tree!

Homeward from Hawaii not exactly Luxury Travel

Image Credit Plan 59  Check out this site for great quality and inexpensive prints to decorate fun spaces with.

Also check out Dark Roasted Blend for "Weird and Wonderful Things".

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Hawaiiana and Vintage Hawaiian Art

Vintage Hawaiian Art is one of our favorite things to source here in Honolulu when decorating our Honolulu period era properties in a traditional Hawaiiana Style. Here is a link to a site that has an amazing amount of Hawaiian "stuff" or 'Hawaiiana' as it is known by in. This site has inexpensive and reproduction goods mostly, but it is a fantastic gift source, or can give you decorating ideas from a Kid's Room to a 1960's style Basement Rec Room...to get you through the cold winter days. Of course we like the real stuff, vintage and authentic but it is much harder to find in good condition. This link to Hawaiian Days will give you huge inventory to choose from, ranging from prints to furniture and lamps.   Plus its a great idea site if you don't know what's available.  Its all here. We'll be doing an "Art"  post on each of these Hawaiian artists later.  

John Kelly

Eugene Savage

Gill

Frank Macintosh

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Vintage Hawaiiana Up Next off to Hawaii Today!

We're off to Honolulu today to work on two Vintage 1930's Hawaiian homes we have there. Rental Seasons is upon us and we have some work to do. We will be posting this week about Hawaiiana and Hawaii, favorite places, hikes, shopping. Aloha and Mahalo!

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I'm a Tubehead

I always try to avoid seeing any components that drive the media in any room. In this Family Room / Theater. We used two 65" Panasonic Professional Plasma monitors, the same used by NASA! Tucked away in the "Media Closet" is a stack of equipment to run Cox HD Digital Cable, DVD, and Apple T.V. Two Monitors works great whether you watching the game on one monitor and a Sleepless in Seattle just downloaded from the internet. With Apple T.V. you can edit and create great slide shows. The parallel activity not only looks cool, it is a fantastic way to expand the functionality of this room. By the way the lighting and Drapery are controlled from the Phillips Pronto Universal Remote Control.

In this Master Bedroom we created a custom installation for the Panasonic Profesional Plasma Monitor and installed it behind a specialized mirror and created a custom silver leaf frame around the whole ensemble over walls that are upholstered with Calvin Fabrics linen. The mirror glass is very expensive as were the custom picture frames..so yes, we installed two mirrors, one for the T.V. and the other mirror simply to match because of the symmetrical arrangement of the dressers.

We did the same installation in a sitting room off the Master Bath.

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