CHICAGO IS MY KINDA TOWN

DREAM HOME

The Merchandise Mart in Chicago is one huge building dedicated to the design industry. Right now, tucked in the back of the first floor is a series of rooms called the “DreamHome”. This is the seventh year the Merchandise Mart has transformed this part of their real estate into a dreamscape of nine rooms designed by regional interior designers and architects. The breadth of style and innovation covers the best Chicago has to offer. An entry donation helps the University of Chicago Cancer Research Foundation Women’s Board and for your donation you reciprocated with splendor.

The rooms wind like a maze through the first floor labyrinth of amazing ideas. The first threshold you cross leads you into the foyer designed by Julia Buckingham Edelmann of Buckingham Interiors. The intent was to create a well lived in Parisian apartment.  The international impact of the space is immediately felt.

The Tony Duquette center table takes your breath away with its serpentine form and silver leaf finish. It’s so dramatic you have to force your eye to take in the rest of the room, but you have to make sure you do or you’d miss a hundred more touches of perfection.

The foyer possesses that delicate balance between masculine and feminine from the leather walls by Lee Jofa to the cascading crystals of the Boyd lighting chandelier.

Michael Del Piero of Michael Del Piero Good Design pulled the feel of majestic horse country into the home office.

The wooden floors, the rustic metal table, the asymmetrical arrangement of the barrister bookcases, and the English riding saddle mirror from Michael Cleary make the room seem to smell of fresh hay and bluegrass.

The living room designed by Scott Himmel Architects is the most eclectic of the Dream rooms. The melding of the raw wooden walls with the trendy painting technique on the adjoining walls, the contrast of the contemporary art with the antique Asian rug unexpectedly draped over the coffee table,

the culture clash of the Tibetan carpet with the antique painted Swedish sideboard all blend into one satisfying space.

The Hollywood sophistication of a grey on grey palette bleeds luxury in Michael Abrams swank bedroom.

The breast-plated fireplace with the deco surround and stacked wood are especially effective in creating the allusion of Veronica Lake having once swooned against the mantle. The use of fabric wallcoverings by Donghia is a genius touch in soothing the soul and bringing serenity to the bedroom.

You walk through the bedroom and into the clean austerity of the dressing room designed by Luca Lanzetta. Mirrored sliding doors hide the Donna Karan, Michael Kors and Manolo Blahnik treasure trove on a unique system of lit shelves, lights that make finding and choosing the perfect outfit all the easier.

The smoky elegance of the dining room makes one lust for a five star gastronomic feast served on silver plates. The earthy mushroom tones of the limestone fireplace by Paris Ceramics and the flanking draperies by Summer Hill add to the comforting warmth of the room designed by Frank Ponterio.

The earthiness of the dining room elevates from shitake to truffle in the kitchen designed by Shawna Dillon for Snaidero Chicago. The combination of the Ashley grey paint on the walls from Benjamin Moore, the Calcutta gold marble countertops and backsplashes by Granite Innovations and the rich dark chocolate cabinetry make for a sleek contemporary kitchen ready to become the venue for creating a sumptuous repast.

Everything in this kitchen speaks to perfection in detail. It deserves a four-woof rating.

The media room is a hidden treasure in more ways than one. Crafted in a way where the ugly part of technology is verboten, hidden behind secret panels that open and close revealing nasty pleasures like “The Housewives of New Jersey” when no ones around or hidden behind automated back panels when the in-laws unexpectedly drop by. The casework is beautifully crafted in this room designed by Lauren Coburn with the ability to either entertain royalty or suffer the hoots and screams of the Monday Night Football crowd.

The last of the rooms transports you outdoors to a Zen retreat where meditation prayers can be said to the sounds of running water from the Gabion water feature. Designed by 1 Design Group, Inc the richness of the orient travels through the horizontal lines of the wall tiles, the red accents that give balance to the room and Cubic sofa, arm chairs, and ottoman from Brown Jordan.

The Dream Home rooms will remain open until December 9, 2011. That means you still have seven months to get yourself to Chicago to walk the rooms. If design is your passion, these rooms are well worth a trip to the windy city.


THE GALLERY

Jack Delano

Union Station, Chicago, 1943

Represented by Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco

GALLERY NIGHT

THE INVITATION

FRIDAY NIGHT

Twice a year the Madison art crowd hosts an event they call gallery night. On a miserable Wisconsin winter night last year we had accidentally stumbled on the event. It’s an event where businesses and artists open up their stores and studios for Madisonians to tour. Our neighbor, Kevin Earley a furniture designer, stopped by last week trying to encourage us to open our doors for this spring’s gallery night. We’d missed the sign-up deadline but Kevin told us not to worry. We put out our shingle anyway and hoped for the best

That night the weather fell into that perfect range of not too hot and not too cold. The rain that had persisted for most of the week had held off. We set the porch with hors d’oeurves laid out on Dan Levy porcelain platters, and white wine and bubbly water iced in galvanized garden buckets. I'd fashioned a makeshift chandelier out of some old rusted hurricane shades we had brought with us from New York.

We struggled to get everything displayed; we gave up with struggling over getting everything priced. Sometimes you have to choose your battles and pricing lost out.

A techno wizard I am not. I had spent the last week working on creating a slide show of our projects and press. The creative process here was filled with temporary failure and laced with profanity. As hard as it may be for any of you to image my succeeding at this; to all of you I say, “bite my butt”. Possibly due to the profanity you can now come and spend 23 minutes and 36 seconds reveling in the video genius of my technical triumph.  I even got the thing to loop.

Our little bungalow, now design studio and retail store, consists of two rooms: a front room and a back room,  with a bathroom off of the front room and a basement hidden under a secret trap door. Very cool.

While both front and back rooms share retail and design responsibilities,  the front is a little more retail while the back is a little more design. We’re not even close to dealing with the outside but when we’re ready to open that part we’ll let you all know.

Leslie Watkins, a college friend, has helped us out smearing the black paint under her eyes and going after some guerilla marketing.  She persuaded her Friday-after-work cocktail group to show up for the event, plus every friend from her facebook page, which I think includes half of Madison. With some of Kevin’s group meandering over the turnout for the event was perfect. At the end of the night all that was left was half a bottle of white wine and three lonely boccancini. 

Thank you to all who were able to show up and for those of you who couldn’t make it I’m including some photos of the event and the space we now refer to as Pleasant Living. 

THE GALLERY

Weegee

The Critic, 1943

Represented by Hulton Getty

DON'T THROW IT, REPURPOSE IT

RECYCLED FURNITURE

We’ve been doing our version of before and after’s for a long time. We’ve had a passion for 30’s barkcloth and vintage French ticking way before Martha put them in her magazine.  We’re horrible when it comes to curbside finds and bargain furniture. With an eye to seeing beyond what it is to what it could be we’re not at all phased by our daughter’s mortification at stopping on the street and picking up a piece of discarded furniture. It’s the going through someone’s garbage she objects to, once the piece is back and we’ve nursed it into a showcase piece her mortification disappears and there's a glint of pride and envy in her eyes.

These stools were your garden variety box store unpainted furniture cheapies. What we did was paint the bases semi-gloss black, then added a cushion to the top and upholstered it with vintage French ticking. The little pleated skirts are dish towels we found at a kitchen store. We made six of them and they were never enough.

DeWayne Lumpkin began graphically reproducing British route signs onto fabric and then used the fabric to upholster furniture, cover pillows,  drape windows, or simply framed the fabric in big oversized frames. His company can be found at British Route Sign Designs. His ingeniously upholstered pieces are among my favorites and would make a strong statement in any green environment. 

Last week when the weather once again refused to let go of winter we decided it was time for a little road trip. It was too wet to plow and too cold to mow the lawn. We’d driven to Milwaukee more times than we could count and every time right outside of Madison we’d pass a sign for a little resort town, Waterloo, and the Antique Mall of Waterloo. We decided a drive to Waterloo was the best alternative we could come up with to shake off the late winter bluest. It was worth the trip.

We discovered a designer and upholsterer combo with a unique perspective on how to reclaim abandoned furniture with vintage fabrics from blankets to patio cloths to quilts. The thing I like best is the unexpected pairing of the Rococo furniture styles or French Empire curves of the aristocracy with textiles you wouldn’t expect.  Gone are the silks and damasks and instead here are the cottons and canvases originally found on the shelves of early twentieth century mercantiles. The loveseat is a perfect New York size. I'd do a one-eighty from the obvious country cottage look and pair this loveseat with a Saarinen chair and Warhol painting in a funky Tribeca loft.

The Hudson Bay blanket ottomans and the quilt upholstered chair would be a welcome change from the ubiquitous burlap plaids seen in way too many cabins by the lake. 

And the patio cloth chair has moved out of the grimy kitchen and into the sexy bedroom. There’s a real freshness to the cheery motifs of fifties cloths usually used to protect picnic food from the dew off of summer grass. We're really high on these designs.










LIGHTING THAT DIDN'T START OUT THAT WAY

Boys will be boys and sometimes it’s hard for a boy to give up his toys. At Modern Anthology you can find your old Tonka crane, the one with the red bucket now transformed and turned into a table lamp perfect for the man cave.  I’ve got an old Howdy Doody doll I’d like to try this technique on.

 

At the other end of the chic spectrum you’ll find this Marie Coquine chandelier for Baccarat designed by Philippe Starck. In case a major storm brews up your light’s prepared. It’s a very practical use of light and reflection. The up lighting of the chandelier arms is bounced right back down from the reflective cover of the white umbrella. Who wouldn’t want to be seated at the dining table under the light cast by this brilliant adaptive use of an ordinary umbrella? It might be a great idea for a DIY project.


THE GALLERY

Andrew Moore

Palace Theater, Gary Indiana, 2008

Represented by Yancey Richardson, New York City

IN HONOR OF ROYAL WEDDINGS

LET THEM EAT CAKE

It’s the weekend we’ve all been waiting for. The invitations are all out there. The Salahis have boarded their plane to London and Kate has lost another couple of pounds putting her one pound away from anorexia. In honor of the royal wedding and as a helpful hint to all those skinny bitches out there, I think it’s time to fatten these broads up with a little cake talk.

The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton may have been heralded as the tastiest wedding of the century but since we have only tiptoed into the century I find it pretty unfathomable to think we can count out the next ninety years and award this event such an awesome accolade. Before we rush to judgment lets cut into some of the confectionary highlights of the past and whip up some ideas for the future. Towering concoctions of iced gaunache and frosting fantasies have been molded from the imaginations of some of the most famous pastry chefs of centuries gone by. My most recent research has centered round those chefs of the last half century with a particular interest in those who had a secret desire to highlight their architectural aspirations creating cakes that were more structural than eatable.

Lets start in the fifties with the 1955 cake cutting for King Hussein and Queen Dina. It seems like risky business to begin cutting a slice out of an eighteen-foot high ode to Moorish architecture from the bottom tier. You’ve got to think the cutting was totally ceremonial or the cake might have tumbled in much the same way their short two year sixty-seven day marriage crumbled into divorce.

The following year a wedding that ended up being a true love story produced a wedding cake that clearly drew the line between beauty to behold and gateau to devour. Created by the renowned pastry chefs at Monte-Carlo’s famed Hotel de Paris, the six-tier cake came complete with a two-tier birdcage containing a pair of real turtledoves and a music box playing Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” while a miniature ceramic prince and princess twirled atop. Pretty – yes, eatable – well I don’t know about you but two pooping turtledoves on the top of someone’s wedding cake would be enough to keep me off the dessert line. By the look on the bridesmaid’s face I think I might not be the only one harboring that thought.

Did you ever notice royalty never seem to be able to find a regular knife to cut their cakes? Although there always seems to be an ancestral saber available to slice into their eatable architectural monuments commemorating their extravagant nuptials. King Abdullah and Queen Rania were no exception. In 1993 they stabbed another tier on another filigreed frosted skyscraper of sugar based culinary magic.

One more thing I noticed was the apparent status of a royal could be directly correlated to the size of their cake. So far, the cakes of distinction have all commanded exceedingly high ceilings in order to make their entry but if the bridal party didn’t include a king or king in waiting with no possible chance of sitting on the throne the height of their cake seemed commensurate to their position in the peeking order of their plight. Take Captain Mark Phillips and Princess Anne’s pathetically diminutive little three-tier version. Had Anne been an only child or found a way to do away with all those brothers she might have commanded a bit bigger piece of the royal spotlight.

If all this cake talk or the ostentatiousness of royalty has thrown you into a sugar stupor and your stomach has started to feel a little queasy, I found one Brit who figured out the perfect solution to our malaise. Pass the bag; I think I need it too.




TERMINOLOGY NEEDING NO DEFINITION

Wedding-cake Style

A style of architecture popular in the nineteenth century where architects got out their professional decorating tools and applied the architectural equivalent of rosettes and curlycues on every square inch of their metal and concrete slices of the architectural pie. The term can also be applied to any structure that appears to be built in graduating tiers similar to the tiers on a wedding cake.

Thanks to an old zoning law in New York City, many skyscrapers dating from the early twentieth century were required to have a certain amount of setbacks to reduce the amount of shade the building might cast at street level. Given the amount of frosting dripping from the surfaces of these usually ornate structures you’d think a little shade might be what you’d want to keep all those doo-dahs from melting.

Now the Americans didn’t have a monopoly on this over abundance of decadent decoration…no.

The European’s were on board and in fact they were more than likely the ringleaders here. Christopher Wren was to wedding cake architecture what Patty was to just plain cake

and the Italians were never slouches when it came to piling on the ornamentation

THE GALLERY

Photographer: Annonymous

And I’d like to keep it that way

ANTHROPOMORPHISM, TRANSFORMATIONS & AVANT-GARDE

SHOULD I WEAR IT OR SHOULD I SIT ON IT?

Sometimes the line between what we put on a hanger and where we hang the hanger can be a little blurry. Like little foxes we interior designers steal from the fashion world and sometimes the fashion world pays us back with the compliment of finding us interesting enough to steal from us.

Last week I got a press release from our former office manager, Scott Perkins. Scott is now the Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1956 the Price Tower is Wright’s only built skyscraper. The concept for the building was to combine office space with retail space and apartment living. As with all of Frank’s designs not a single detail was left up to the client. Every light fixture, every piece of molding, every drape, every nail if not designed by him had to acquire his stamp of approval before it could assume its rightful place in one of his designs. The Price Tower is no exception; every detail is pure Frank Lloyd Wright. 

Now designer, Lauren Dreiling from Hopestone Studio Designs has reproduced a textile designed by Frank in 1954 and come up with this amazing jacket. The pattern and color palette are what Frank had designed for the drapery treatments in the tower. Now like Scarlet O’Hara, you can rip those drapes off their rods and wear them with your head held high.

The designer, Jean-Paul Gaultier, has taken his fashion obsession and made his living environment model and wear his designs. You walk on it, sit on it and it pads the walls. For many this may represent the insanity of a mental hospital, for others it may lull them into a serene sense of total bliss. 

Like the beautiful jersey tee Jean-Paul wears with its horizontal stripes and contrasting white yolk, the stretched fabric covering the settee make you smile with its humor inviting you to contemplate jumping up and down on it like a trampoline and bouncing off the walls.

UK designer, Hussein-Chalayan, twice named British designer of the year has completely blurred the line between fashion and furniture. With this collection, shown at Design Museum in London, Hussein has made fashion that also doubles as furniture. Here the model is wearing a table that doubles as a skirt. It’s not very good for dancing close but if the dance hall is crowded you need not worry about finding your owns table.

We also got into the act with the introduction of the Shaver/Melahn furniture line. Rick’s ingenuity brought with it the line of Emmy furniture available with or without little pleated skirts made from the customer’s choice of fabrics. The most popular skirted item was the Emmy cigarette table, perhaps because of its slender legs and curvaceous drum modesty forced the addition of the hiked up schoolgirl skirt. It was flirtatious and whimsical and juts a little naughty. 

SHOULD I LET IT SING "LA BOHEME" OR STORE MY VICTORIA SECRET DELICATES IN ITS CEDAR LINED DRAWERS?

We had seats, first row center in the balcony, for Disney’s initial entry into the field of the Broadway musical. It was our daughter’s first time at a live production and her eyes grew to the size of saucers as the curtain rose. She must have been all of five, she had been to movie theaters before but she’d never seen the three-dimensionality of live theater. I have to admit that the opening scene of Belle’s little hamlet in “Beauty and the Beast” with its brilliantly oversaturated sunrise is a breathtaking moment for anyone’s first glimpse at the magic of Broadway and the perfection of Disney. As if that wasn’t enough, our daughter’s mouth formed a perfect “O” when the prince was magically transformed into the Beast and that was only the beginning of the anthropomorphic transformations in this musical. So to carry out the theme of this week’s posting I’d like to move past Lumiere, Cogsworth and Mrs.Potts and pay homage to my favorite transformation, from opera singer to wardrobe, it’s Madame de la Grande Bouche. Actually Madame is more a combination of a chiffonier and a chifforobe than a wardrobe. La Grande Bouche’s face is where you’d find a mirror on a chiffonier but since a real chiffonier is a very thin chest frequently used for lingerie Madame’s body wouldn’t quit fit in it, thus the chifforobe body double with a place to hang wardrobe on one side and an abundance of drawers on the other. We all cheered at both the movie and Broadway versions of Madame de la Grande Bouche, falling in love with tartly painted veneers and coquettish hardware knobs.

THE GALLERY

On a blustery evening on January 23 in 1931 a long line of luxury automobiles had pulled up to the canopied entrance of the Hotel Astor on 44^th Street in New York City. It was the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects annual costume ball. Most of the well-to-do of the city’s social registry were dressed in their interpretation of the, “Fete Moderne” theme. Advertised in the New York Times as “modernistic, futuristic, cubistic, altruistic, mystic, architistic and feministic” the ball had become a diversion from the economic depression facing the world and a competition of avant-garde outrageousness. The festivities didn’t begin until late into the evening where revelers danced to the unconventional sounds of an orchestra made up of pneumatic riveting machines, live steam pipes, ocean liner whistles and sledgehammers. A group of prominent architects had collectively decided to come attired as their most recognizable buildings. Ely Kahn came as the Squibb Building, A. Stewart Walker was completely hidden underneath his Full Building, the spire of the Empire State Building rose from the head of William Lamb but the most flamboyant was William Van Alen who not only wore the helmet replica of his Chrysler building but wore a cloak and space-age boots made of patent leather with the same exotic wood inlays used in the elevators at the Chrysler Building. Gargoyles fashioned after those that protrude from the building’s 61^st floor grew from his shoulders daring the rest of his competition to challenge his costume supremacy.

Although all of the costumes have since deteriorated and become lost to our architectural history, the image of these self-confident architects remains in an amazing photograph, an image that has inspired later cultures to revive the tradition at their own Beaux-Arts Balls.

Photographer unknowm