Kitchen and Residential Design

Sherwin-Williams' 2011 color forecast, part three

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:37:00 +0000

What follows is the third of four color palettes Sherwin-Williams published recently as a forecast to what they see as emerging trends for next year. I profiled the first one on Tuesday, the second one on Wednesday, feel free to go back and review them.

Sherwin-Williams is calling this third palette Gentle Medley and here's the inspiration image that sums up the palette.

In Sherwin-Williams' own words:

Hard times call for soft colors: the hint of green in a spring leaf bud; the chalky blush of a seashell; the time-etched beauty of a vintage fabric or photograph. Fashion has turned a romantic, nostalgic corner, bringing pastels and parchment-pale neutrals back into the palette. The hues are innocent without being sweet — flirty, yet not feminine. They reflect not just a yearning for youthful innocence and gentler times, but also a refreshing honesty and lack of pretension that are thoroughly modern.

I'm calling this one the Apartment Therapy palette. It's not really a dig so much as it's an observation that this palette's aimed squarely at a youthful demographic that doesn't include me. There's a nostalgia at work here, a nostalgia for a time I remember from having experienced it first hand. As interesting as the 1970s were, they were troubled times and the unfortunate aesthetic sensibilities popular then make me wince when I remember them.

This palette takes the following cues Sherwin-Williams identified as ascendant trends.

Vintage florals
Dragonfly, butterfly and leaf motifs
Mismatched flea-market finds
Hand-tinted photos
Maps

I'm not seeing this one at all and it pains me to write that. I have a brand loyalty to Sherwin-Williams that won't quit and though this palette hasn't changed that in any way, I can't shake the sense that this is a palette I can't relate to.

Here are the colors. As with yesterday's palette, today's is split into primary and support colors. I'll start with the primaries.

SW 6121 Whole Wheat

SW 6086 Sand Dune

SW 6463 Breaktime

SW 0073 Chartreuse

SW 6353 Chivalry Copper

SW 6442 Supreme Green

And in a supporting role

SW 7743 Mountain Road

SW 7509 Tiki Hut

So, what do you guys make of this one? I'm trying to generate some enthusiasm but it's just not coming. I could see Tuesday's Bold Invention and yesterday's Purely Refined, even if they didn't resonate with me but this one's escaping me all together. I'm not questioning Sherwin-Williams' research and I don't doubt for a second that these colors are an identifiable trend. It's just that they leave me cold. Copper and minty green are an unsettling color combination regardless of time or trend. So who's with me or am I just out of touch?

Mercifully, tomorrow's palette is one I can get behind but I think this one strikes out. How does Sherwin-Williams' Gentle Medley forecast land with you?

Sherwin-Williams' 2011 color forecast, part two

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:51:00 +0000

As I mentioned yesterday, Sherwin-Williams just released its 2011 color forecast. That forecast is broken into four palettes. I profiled the first of the four yesterday and today I'm moving onto the second in the series. The color folks at Sherwin-Williams are calling this one Purely Refined. Here's the inspiration image.

Here's the description in Sherwin-Williams own words:

True luxury doesn't shout its presence with glitz, glamour and bling. It whispers, revealing its pedigree through clean, classic lines, exquisite tailoring and handcrafted heirloom quality. Pared down is the new upscale, and its color palette demonstrates similar restraint, filled with understated neutrals, yet with nuances and undertones that interact in intriguing ways. Layering organic textures and subtle detailing add to the natural elegance of the timeless look.

This looks to be an evolution of the elegant palettes that have evolved from the glam palettes of ten years go. It's almost as if it's a grown up version of yesterday's new palette, Bold Invention. It has a definite retro vibe, but I don't think that's coming from the palette so much as its coming from the inspiration image. I've been saying these inspiration images have been Mad Men-ed and I don't think I'm too far off. I suppose that if there has to be a nostalgic touchstone, at least Mad Men doesn't sugar coat anything.

According to Sherwin-Williams, the driving force behind this palette are the following trends they've identified.

Ombre-dyed fabrics
Textured linen
Concrete
Smooth pebble floors
Pleated detailing
Clean lines, oval shapes
One-of-a-kind, artisan-crafted pieces

I can see this more readily than yesterday's, but that might be a function of my not being 25. In any event, here are the colors themselves. They are broken into two sub-palettes, Primary and Supporting. The Primaries are:

SW 6242 Bracing Blue

SW 6164 Svelte Sage

SW 6414 Rice Paddy

SW 0055 Light French Gray

SW 0021 Queen Anne Lilac

SW 6239 Upward

SW 0050 Classic Light Buff

And in the Supporting role,

SW 0012 Empire Gold

SW 7674 Peppercorn

SW 6032 Dutch Cocoa

So what do you guys think? Yesterday's Bold Invention seemed like a hit or miss. How does this compare? How does this one do on its own? Are they onto something?

I'm of two minds with this one. I'm the saturated color guy so naturally I think it's avoiding making a statement. At the same time, I think it looks clean and new. What's the consensus on Sherwin-Williams' 2011 color forecast part two?

Sherwin-Williams' 2011 color forecast, part one

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:47:00 +0000

Sherwin-Williams just released its 2011 color forecast and this year, the forecast is broken into four palettes. I'll be highlighting the first of the four today. Sherwin-Williams titles this one Bold Invention.

In Sherwin-Williams' own words:

The city never sleeps. Neither do its colors. These high-energy hues vibrate with spontaneity and rebellion. Neon bright, graffiti bold and digitally enhanced to 3-D luminosity, they’re the colors of technology, of avant-garde art and of the entrepreneurial spirit that celebrates shaking off dull routine to do what you love. The eclectic global influences range from the Cynical Realism art movement of urban China to the carnaval spirit of Rio de Janeiro, host of the 2016 Summer Olympics. Anything goes, and self-expression is the new metropolitan mantra.

I'm fascinated by these annual color forecasts. They are not a prescription for the color schemes people are obligated to use or specify of course, but the trend research that goes into them is as exhaustive as it is impartial. This palette and the three that follow are a snapshot of contemporary life and a hedged bet about how things will look in six months.

While not a definitive look at culture, they are fascinating snap shot.

The central image that sums up Sherwin-Williams' Bold Invention is this:

After having read the description above, the image makes sense and definitely gets across the global, experimental nature of the culture shifts it summarizes.

As intriguing as the underpinnings of this trend are, the palette leaves me somewhat cold. Despite its claimed now-ness, it strikes me as a bit nostalgic. I think it's an attractive palette, I just can't see the futuristic nature of it. Here are the colors.

SW 7589 Habanero Chile

SW 6938 Synergy

SW 6947 Tempo Teal

SW 6711 Parakeet

SW 6445 Garden Grove

SW 6963 Sapphire

SW 6800 Something Blue

SW 6696 Quilt Gold

SW 7664 Steely Gray

SW 7036 Accessible Beige

What do you guys think? Am I missing something here? Now that I can see the colors in order I'm beginning to think that maybe it's the inspiration image that's throwing my eye. So, is Sherwin-Williams onto something with this palette from their 2011 color forecast?

Apple hobbled my iPhone 3G

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:49:00 +0000

On June 21st, Apple released its new iPhone operating system, the iOS 4. The new operating system coincided with the release of the iPhone 4. And an enthusiastic public enthused. Some of that public anyway.

I've been an iPhone fanatic since the first iPhone came out way back in 2007. From the start I couldn't believe that I'd finally found an electronic device that made good on every promise it made. In a very short time, that phone became much more than a phone, it was my connection to the world. So long as I had that phone with me, I could work from anywhere. I could manage everything in my life from a piece of electronic wizardry that lived up to the hype surrounding it.

When the 3G came out a year later, I upgraded to it immediately. 2008's 3G surpassed my first iPhone by every measure I could think of. If it were possible to love an electronic device, then that's what I would call what I felt for that phone.

In 2009, Apple released the iPhone 3GS. The 3GS had a video camera, an improved still camera, more memory and more storage. Since the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS used the same operating system, it made more sense to hold onto the year-old phone. I continued to love my 3G, and the operating system Apple developed for the 3GS made my 3G work even better than it did before. I thought that Apple was being forward thinking. Both their new model and their current model reaped the benefits of an operating system upgrade. Who needed a new handset? Mobile phones could improve every year with software upgrades alone. Brilliant.

On 21 June, Apple released the iPhone 4 and the new operating system, the iOS 4 at the same time. All iPhone owners were going to reap the rewards of this new software. Everybody on the train was going to get an improved phone. I still loved my 3G and since the operating system was going to make it even better, why buy a new phone and sign up for another two-year stint with AT&T?

It took three days to get my hands on the iOS 4 upgrade and when I managed to get hold of it, it took three hours to download and install. That was unusual, but it seemed like a small price to pay for all of the improvements I was sure to get.

When I finished the download and restarted my phone, something seemed odd. Most of my apps were missing and all of my photos were nowhere to be found. At first I thought that I had made some kind of a mistake when I followed the steps to run the upgrade. In iPhone speak, it was a restore not an installation. So I restarted my phone. When it came back to life, half of my missing apps reappeared. I restarted it again. This time, another handful of apps reappeared. I repeated the restart routine three more times. After five restarts, I had all my apps back, but my photos seem to have been lost for good.

I still thought that there was something I'd done wrong. After all, Apple surely couldn't have screwed up a software upgrade.

Whatever happened, my beloved iPhone 3G no longer worked with anything approaching the speed and efficiency it once did. I noticed that my battery life had been cut in half. It crashed regularly. It was enragingly slow. After a week I started asking around to see if anybody else was having the trouble I was having.

I was far from alone and my experiences were shared by many iPhone 3G users.

The more I dug, the more I learned that the new iOS 4 was never intended to be run on the the 3G. There was no warning anywhere on Apple's website before I "upgraded" my phone. Apple being Apple, there's no way I can go back and install the old operating system that made my phone work so well. It's almost as if I'm being pressured into buying a new iPhone and along with it, one of AT&T's onerous, new, tiered data plans.

It gets increasingly hard to think of this as a coincidence. Every time that I turn on my GPS and my phone checks my mail instead I start to question the train of planned obsolescence I've been riding since 2007. I used to think that Apple was one of the good guys. They represented value, sharp design and exclusivity. Now I'm beginning to see that I've been duped.

Whether this software problem was planned or accidental, I'm not happy and I'm not alone.

Maybe it's time to look at a Droid.

My friend Eric sent me this over the weekend.

As amusing as that video is, what's not in the least bit amusing is that Apple hobbled my iPhone 3G.

Relief! I just turned off comment moderation

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 12:57:00 +0000

I am just about back in circulation and I've turned off comment moderation. Feel free to move about the cabin and say what's on your mind.

That was the end of the reruns

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 11:23:00 +0000

I'll be back with fresh, compelling new content bright and early tomorrow morning. In the meantime, don't forget to watch the season premiere of Mad Men tonight. Woo-hoo!

Summer reruns: How do I explain a bidet to a four-year-old?

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:20:00 +0000

Lat but not least, no set of reruns would be complete without including what I believe to be my number one traffic generator of all time. It's from 29 March 2009 and here it is again.

Help! My husband, my son and I were over at my cousin's new house last weekend and while we were walking around the master bath and oohing and aahing over the size and decor it was hard not to notice that she had one of those things (I blush when I say the word) next to the toilet. I can't help it, every time I see one they just scream out to me "We have lots of s*x and don't shower afterwards." Anyhow, my four-year-old asked why they had two toilets in the bathroom. I was embarrassed and didn't know what to say, so I told him that there were two so that no one had to wait while the other one finished. He said "nasty" and didn't push it any further. But seriously, what do you tell the kids?

Mother of God woman! Part of me wants to be calm and reassuring but an even bigger part of me want to throttle you. I'm really floored by this. I mean really. What the hell kind of a question is that? Based on your description and your shame-based reaction to it, I'm going to assume what you're talking about is a bidet. There, I said it. Bidet. Repeat after me. Bi-day. See? Nothing happened. It's just a word.

Similarly, a bidet is an object and as such it can't good or bad, it just is. Whatever discomfort you feel about bidets is coming from your own sick mind. Bidets don't scream anything. They can't because they're objects. Sex is another word that's just a word. You might have a better grip on what to tell your son if you could bring yourself to spell out the word sex in an e-mail to a stranger. Similarly, penis, vagina and anus are just words. As words they can't be anything but neutral. As body parts they can't be anything other than morally neutral either. What ever meaning or significance they have, their rightness or wrongness, comes from you. They are also the body parts that get washed in a bidet. See? Simple words describing simple, every day acts. No big deal. No cause for alarm. No sweeping statements about my character for the simple act of describing something.

Your skittishness about spelling out the word sex or even writing the word bidet speak of much larger issues you have about your body, other people's bodies and the biological functions those bodies perform. For the sake of your son, please talk to somebody about this stuff. You owe it to him and more importantly, you owe it to yourself. How can you expect to be an effective parent if you can't call things what they are?

So to answer your question, "what do you tell the kids?" The answer is the truth. Tell them the truth about this and about everything else. Rather than making up a lie and getting the response you got (which by the way is the seed of your neuroses taking root in a new generation --good job!), you could have told him something as simple as "some people wash themselves in a bidet." That way, you could have called a thing what it is and you could have told him the truth at the same time. If it led to more questions, then you could have answered them. Truthfully. Pretty simple stuff, really.

And while we're on the subject of the truth, people do use bidets to clean themselves. Really. That's all they're for. Having one doesn't say anything, because it can't. It's a thing if you remember, and things don't talk. So do me a favor if you haven't already stopped reading. The next time you're in the presence of a bidet, climb on board. The Pause that Refreshes will take on a whole new layer of meaning, believe me.

Summer rerun: Pottery Barn doesn't sell Wabi-Sabi

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 10:14:00 +0000

This post ran originally on 3 December 2008.

So last week those kids over at Apartment Therapy ran a piece hailing the arrival of what they were calling the Wabi Sabi style of decorating. Ugh. Here's the photo they used to illustrate this "new" style.

It looks sterile and affectedly rustic, sort of a pared down Scabby Chic. There's nothing Wabi Sabi about those photos.

So what's Wabi Sabi? Wabi Sabi is a Japanese philosophy, it's not a style. It's purposefully un-chic and anti-trendy. Wabi Sabi is a uniquely Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature. It accepts and appreciates the natural cycles of growth, decay and death. It's simple, slow, uncluttered and it reveres authenticity above all else. And THAT is not for sale in a catalog or at the mall.

Now that Feng Shui has run its course as an Asian idea that could be appropriated to sell candles and knick knacks, I suppose the tastemakers out there are hunting for a new one to take its place. Not so fast I say. Feng Shui, while it was an aesthetic school of thought, was also an animist belief system. Embracing Feng Shui makes sense to me if you are ethnically Chinese, but if it's not your culture then it's a pose --you'll always be an outsider looking in. Sorry.

Wabi Sabi presents a similar problem but even more so. Wabi Sabi is an outgrowth of Zen Buddhism and carries with it all of the cultural trappings of Japan. I find a lot about Japanese culture that's fascinating and worth looking at more closely. Reading about Zen, or Wabi Sabi for that matter is interesting because like a lot of Eastern Thought, it runs in diametric opposition to the ideas that undergird the West. I can read about it, I can think about it, I can bring parts of it into my life, but it can never be fully mine.

I love how Japanese pottery looks. Its rustic and imperfect finishes are an exercise in studied imperfection. I'm fascinated by it and when I look at a Japanese tea set I can appreciate its beauty. But I'll never fully grasp the cultural history behind it so I let it be an interesting and beautiful piece of pottery and leave it at that.

In many parts of the world, things that are American are cool. And sorry George Bush, it's not because they envy our "freedom." What they envy is the sophistication all things American represent. They may hate our bullying foreign policy, but they admire our pop culture. If you ever find yourself in a non-English speaking part of the world, pay attention to the T-shirts people wear.

I remember spending a couple of days poking around in Puerto Limon, Costa Rica some years ago. At one point, I was sitting alone in a cafe and watching Costa Rica reveal itself to me. The woman who waited on me was a Russian transplant who spoke Russian-accented Spanish which was wild. I'd never heard Spanish spoken quite the way she spoke it. Through a combination of my American-accented Spanish and her Russian version of it, we could understand one another. I wanted to hear how on earth she ended up in Puerto Limon, but she wasn't interested in talking about Russia or Costa Rica for that matter. It was kind of odd, but I'm flexible, I'd survive if I didn't hear her story. However, what I couldn't help but to notice was that she was wearing a T-shirt that read "Blonde Cool Bitch in Hollywood!" Now this woman didn't speak English and probably didn't know what her T-shirt said. But her point wasn't to have it make sense. Her point wasn't to call herself a blond bitch. The point she was trying to make was that she was westernized and sophisticated. But it was a pose.

No sophisticated westerner would be caught dead in something like that. The story of a Russian woman who emigrates to Costa Rica and waits on tables must be fascinating. I kept trying to pry it out of her, but she kept discounting her own experiences and instead wanted to talk about American TV shows. I gave up eventually. Adopting the cultural trappings of a culture you don't understand doesn't make any sense to me and it seems like a waste of energy. You also end up being a poseur, and that's never a good thing.

What's the point of all of this? Well the point is that finding an $1800 table with a distressed finish isn't Wabi Sabi despite what you may read in a magazine.

Try this if you want to get closer to the spirit of Wabi Sabi.

Not really, but it's a lot closer to the spirit of Wabi Sabi.

If you want to bring some Wabi Sabi influences into your home and life, running out and buying a bunch of crap isn't the way to do it. Instead, take care of the things you own and let them grow old under your care. The scratched up kitchen table your family's gathered around for 20 years has a story to tell, your story. Common sense and sentimentality will tell you to hold onto it and you should --you don't need an ill-informed decorating trend to tell you that. Should someone tell you that your old table is Wabi Sabi, you have my permission to call them a "Blonde Cool Bitch in Hollywood!"

Summer rerun: From the land of the shoo-fly

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:11:00 +0000

This post ran originally on 29 November 2008.

I was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; and no, I'm not Amish. I've been away from those gently rolling hills for a long time but Thanksgiving makes me nostalgic. I may not be Amish, but it doesn't take an Amishman to appreciate pretty countryside and an urge to make things by hand.

Arguably, Lancaster County's signature dish is a little something called shoo-fly pie. Shoo-fly pie is one of those things that everybody's heard of but never encountered first hand. Shoo-fly pie is one of my favorite things to bake and it can't be the holidays in my house without it.

The first time I ever made one for a party, everyone thought it was so exotic and cosmopolitan. That is funny on so many levels at one time I can't stand it. Anyhow, here's my recipe for cosmopolitan and exotic shoo-fly pie.

Pie dough for a nine-inch pie
1 cup of all-purpose flour
2/3 cup of firmly packed, dark brown sugar
5 tablespoons of unsalted butter (softened)
1 cup light molasses
1 large egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup boiling water

Roll out pie dough and turn into a nine-inch pie plate. Trim and flute the edges. In a mixing bowl, combine flour, brown sugar and softened butter. Mash with a fork until it reaches a consistent, crumbly consistency. In a separate bowl, beat together the molasses, egg and baking soda with a large spoon until blended. Stir in the boiling water and mix thoroughly (this will begin to foam). Stir half the crumb mixture into the molasses mixture and pour into the crust. Sprinkle the remaining crumb mixture evenly over the top. Bake a 400 degrees, on the center rack, for 10 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350 degrees and bake until the pie filling has puffed around the sides and is firm in the center, about 20 to 30 minutes more. Cool on a rack.

Summer rerun: A whole new take on bathroom mosaics

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:08:00 +0000

This post ran originally on 25 November 2008.

Christoph Niemann is a former New Yorker and now Berlin-based artist who writes a blog for the New York Times. Niemann's Abstract City is always an interesting read. He talks a lot about his family and their transition to living in Germany. In a post he wrote in August, he talked about his bathroom renovation project.

According to Niemann, he'd always had a dream of doing abstract pixel drawings of masterworks using nothing but colored 4x4 ceramic tile. 4x4 is the default size for bath tile and it's something I chase people away from under normal circumstances. After having seen Niemann's handiwork, I doubt I'll be so quick to dismiss the stuff anymore.

Check this out. Here are two David Hockneys. And next to each is how Niemann interpreted them in 4x4s.

In some kind of a play for my sympathies, he took on a Rothko and it has me swooning.

Now, he's using layout software to draw a grid and then he's assigning each square a color from a palette. I'm really floored by what he did here. I mean, who could imagine taking boring old 4x4s and turning them into this? Certainly not I.

So after playing around for a while, he settled on a Warhol.

Using Andy Warhol, who was himself doing an homage, in a bathroom makes prefect sense and here's the shower stall he ended up with.

I have never seen anything like this. I'm used to looking forward at new stuff that's coming down the pike, I never think to stop and re-evaluate what's already here. These tiles are everywhere and he probably paid a dime apiece for them. I go through my normal working life thinking that wall tile that costs $35 a square foot is cheap. 4x4 ceramic is so far below my radar that I can't even see it. Pardon me, my paradigm just shifted.

So with the master bath done, Niemann turned his attention to the bathroom shared by his three sons. He relates that his sons are obsessed with the New York subway system, so he turned his interpreting skills to an MTA map.

His plan was to tile the entire bathroom, so he imported his layouts into a 3-D renderer.

So with his layout rendered, all that was left to do was install the tile. Check this out:

Mr. Niemann, I owe you a thank you. Several thank yous actually. I read the New York Times every day because I like to stay informed and I believe that the Times keeps my horizons expanded. Sometimes, and this is one of those times, they get expanded so far I don't recognize them anymore. Wow.

Summer rerun: A Bahamian Breakfast and a story

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:02:00 +0000

This post ran originally on 1 September 2008

Here's what I had for breakfast on Sunday morning with my new pal Kermit Rolle.

Kermit is the 74-year-old proprietor of Kermit's Airport Lounge in Exuma. I told Kermit that I wanted to eat like a Bahamian and that I had a some time to kill. So he pulled up a chair, got me some sheep's tongue souse and johnny cake and proceeded to tell me his life story. Sheep's tongue souse is incredible by the way and I'm looking everywhere for a recipe but alas I am striking out. Anyone? Anyone? I know it was made with the boiled entrails of either a sheep or a goat, lime juice, potatoes, onions, allspice and Bahamian Bird Peppers. Man, who knew boiled organ meats could taste so good?

But more than the food, Kermit Rolle is the best story-teller I've ever come across. He told stories of a life so distant from mine it was hard to believe. Experiences like Sunday morning's at Kermit's Airport Lounge are why I travel. An hour spent with that man had me bowled over with gratitude for how easy I've had it when I compare my life with someone in the developing world. And at the same time I was struck with a deep admiration that someone could have the life he's had and be so happy and grateful as he looks back on it and talks to strangers like me. His joy ought to be counted as an ingredient in the incredible sheep's tongue souse.

Now here's the story part:

On Monday, I wrote about a great Bahamian breakfast I had at Kermit's Airport Lounge in Exuma and the great conversation I had with the Lounge's proprietor, Kermit Rolle.

Kermit is a walking encyclopedia when it comes to the history of The Bahamas and he's a man who's very proud of his heritage. He has ample reason to be so, and a cursory Google search of his name shows that the Rolle clan is a pretty influential bunch in both The Bahamas and in the U.S. In addition to bringing us the likes of Esther Rolle and Estelle Evans, a number of Rolle descendants have risen to great heights in the world of professional sports. So much so that two years ago, Sports Illustrated ran a great feature on the Rolle family in the Bahamas and in the world of U.S. professional sports. SI sent a reporter to spend a day with my new pal Kermit and here's what he had to say:

WE ARE coming to the point where my father took me as a little boy," says Kermit Rolle, after the car, rolling along Queen's Highway on Exuma, has passed Jacob Rolle's Christian Academy, Rolle's Chat and Chew restaurant and nurse Lydia King Rolle's clinic and jounced through two bumpy detours around floods caused by Tropical Storm Noel. Sunlight blasts through the windshield. He motions the driver to slow. Kermit is 72 years old, but for a moment he is young again. The turquoise sea flashes through the trees. To understand anything about the Rolles, you must begin right here.

Kermit was nine or 10 that day. His father took him to this spot in Steventon to retrace the route of a slave named Pompey, one of hundreds working five settlements owned by an Englishman, Lord John Rolle. In 1829 the physically imposing Pompey led a protest against a plan to move a group of Rolle's slaves from Exuma to another island in the Bahamas . Pompey and others seized a boat and took it to Nassau to plead their case with the colonial governor. They were caught and whipped, after which Pompey escaped and famously ran five miles to Rolleville to warn other slaves that British soldiers were coming to seize them. The slaves "put hell" on the soldiers, Kermit says, laughing. "Pompey knocked them down left, right and center."

Pompey's rebellion earned him a place in history; he is credited with sparking the Bahamian antislavery movement. For the Rolles, who in the custom of the day took the name of their owner, Pompey is an icon of resistance: He didn't take servitude passively; he stood up and fought. A document from the time tells how soldiers were constantly being called out to quell the Rolle plantation workers. "They were always troublesome," says Gail Saunders, a historian and former director of the Bahamas ' national archives. "They wanted their freedom."

"Maybe that's how we get some of the strong players in the U.S. today," Kermit says. "My father always said of someone who's big and strong and healthy and runs fast: 'That could be one of Pompey's.'" Kermit, a restaurateur and businessman, is one of Rolleville's most prominent figures, a living repository of history. His great-grandmother, the daughter of a slave, told him that Lord John's overseers whipped any slave they caught trying to read and that some slaves risked their skins to secretly teach each other the alphabet.

During that walk with his dad on Pompey's route, Kermit also learned about the source of the Rolles' distinctive pride: Lord John's benevolent deed. Legend has it that, instead of selling off his land after the British fully ended slavery in the Bahamas in 1838, John Rolle willed the 5,000 acres in perpetuity to his freed slaves. Not one clod of that prime Caribbean waterfront land could be bought or sold. It could only be handed down to other Rolles.

This alone, Kermit says, makes Rolles different from other Bahamian blacks, not to mention their counterparts in the U.S. Kermit worked for 14 years in the postwar U.S. , shuttling in and out of the Bahamas on the Contract, and never understood the acceptance of second-class citizenship by many African-Americans. "John, Lord Rolle, was a perfect man," Kermit says. "That's why we ask God to bless him: His mind was so clear that after emancipation, all the lands he had he willed back to his people. That made us the most happiest people, because he treated us as human beings. He set you up in such a way that you can be proud, and there's still that proudness. The other slave owners? They just turned those people loose. [The freed slaves] didn't know where to go. They don't know where they are. But my father showed me the boundaries—and within those boundaries, the land belonged to our people."

A vast simplification? Perhaps. But Kermit is right about the psychological heft a prize such as Lord Rolle's can provide. In a recent essay, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. cited lack of property as a key reason for the growing wealth gap between poor and middle-class African-Americans. Studying 20 successful African-Americans, Gates found that 15 are descended from families that obtained property before 1920. By then, the Rolles on Exuma had been in possession of their land for more than 80 years. "People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society," Gates wrote. "They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not."

In the Rolles' case, the slave owner's gesture imbued its recipients with a sense of grace. "I heard that story about Lord John Rolle," says Florida State 's Myron Rolle, who was born and raised in the U.S. "Something like that just makes life more fulfilling. It makes you feel more connected with who you are, knowing where you came from and the people who came before you."

Amen Kermit.

Follow this link to read the rest of this article.

Summer reruns: A faux re-education.

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:57:00 +0000

This post appeared originally on 3 October 2008.

I had a conversation about faux painting with a client the other day. She wanted me to refer her to a painter who could paint some columns in her entry way so that they looked like they were made from marble.

Now a year ago I would have done everything in my power to dissuade her from this faux marble idea. There was a time when I couldn't separate the idea of faux painting with its most obvious and bad expressions. All too often, people take a page from HGTV and attempt to faux paint (poorly) things that have no business being faux painted. Stuff like this:

I mean really, what are the odds of a contemporary house having walls made from entire slabs of identical marble? The first test these kinds of techniques have to pass is a logical one. Ask yourself, does this application make sense? In the case above, the answer is a resounding no.

But in the hands of a professional artist, a faux marble or trompe l'oeil effect can be cool as well as a compliment to the structure of a room. That said, well-done work of this kind is the exception rather than the rule. Unless you have a fine arts background, do not attempt this on your own or you'll end up with something that looks like this:

Man! That burns my eyes.

The idea of faux marble and trompe l'oeil painting got its start in Ancient Rome believe it or not. I had to see it first hand to believe it and here are some photos of what I saw. Some friends and I were treated to a walk through the excavation of the Villa San Marco in Castellmare di Stabia a couple of months ago. The Villa San Marco was a 28,000 square foot (that's not a typo!) Roman villa on the shores of the Bay of Naples. The Villa San Marco was the home of wealthy Roman family and it was buried by ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. The villa is an amazement and to walk through it today is to get a real feel for the people who lived in it.

The Roman empire had a leisure class, probably the first such leisure class in human history. This leisure class had enough time and enough money to develop the idea of decorative art for their homes. It makes my heart beat faster to think about people two thousand years ago living lives that had an awful lot in common with mine. Now, I don't live in 28,000 square feet of house but I do like a nice paint job. Besides, so much of our cultural stuff --from birthday parties to wedding rings, from exchanging presents in late December to the Superbowl --we got from them.

This is a detail of a trompe l'oeil fresco on a wall in a bedroom in the Villa San Marco. It wasn't until I saw this with my own eyes that I realized that the Romans had mastered perspective. Perspective disappeared from western art for over a thousand years after the collapse of Rome.

Here's a detail from a similar fresco.

This is another fresco from the same room. Now bear in mind that this fresco is around 2000 years old and survived the explosion of a nearby volcano. My mind reels when I think about how this must have looked when it was new.

I thought my head was going to explode when I stood in front of this wall. My photo doesn't begin to do it justice. The room itself was small, probably twelve feet wide by ten feet deep. But even after all those years, this fresco made the walls disappear. If you ever find yourself anywhere near Naples in southern Italy, you owe it to yourself to track down a guide who will get you into the Villa San Marco.

Just inside the main entry and in the peristyle courtyard of the Villa San Marco the the shrine to the household gods of the family who owned the villa. It's made from cast concrete and I was amazed that so much of its original paint job had survived the years.

When I looked closer though I realized that the whole thing had been faux painted. The marble that this faux marble is imitating is all over Italy on ancient as well as in contemporary structures.

Here's an even tighter close up. Un-be-liev-a-ble.

So seeing those Roman paint effects was really something. I learned that the faux marble I'd always mocked had a real history and I started warming up to the idea of it. Ditto trompe l'oeil painting. So I decided to get over my biases and just accept it as another decorative art. So long as it's done well that is. Done well by a master like what I saw at the Villa San Marco.

Well about a week later I was in Rome and I was walking down the Corso d'Italia at 7:30 on a rainy Sunday morning. As I now know, rainy Sunday mornings are about the only time when Rome's streets are quiet. I heard a church bell and decided to go to mass. I mean, when in Rome, right? So I ducked into the first church I came to, the San Carlo di Corso. It's also one of the largest churches in Rome. It was built in the early 1600s and it is massive. The entire interior seemed to have been made from marble and granite with a whole lot of gilt for good measure.

So about 20 Italian senior citizens, me and a handful of pilgrims from the world over sat through mass and despite the fact that it was in Italian, I surprised myself with how well I could participate in it. Even after all these years, a mass is a mass regardless of the language it's said in. So I followed along between major bouts of distraction by the incredible building I was sitting in that is. Then, after mass, I couldn't restrain myself any longer and I walked over to the side of the church to get a good look at the stone work.

Wouldn't you know it, every inch of marble and granite on those 400-year-old walls was faux painted.

Summer reruns for the rest of the week

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:53:00 +0000

Sorry kids, but I have a couple of days ahead of me that will test my character to say the least. But once that's over I'm out of here until next Monday. So between now and next Sunday, I'll be running some re-runs from deep in my archives. Back when I was first starting out as a blogger I was every bit as prolific as I am now, the only difference then was that no one read me. That's just as well. When I look back most of that reads as the meanderings of someone trying to find his voice. Oh well, I'll pick interesting ones. I promise.

I turned on comment moderation for the time being too. I'm not going to be able to intercept the lunatics and spammers they way I do ordinarily. I'll turn it off again when I get back.

Karim Rashid takes on appliance design for Gorenje

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:35:00 +0000

Karim Rashid is a 50-year-old, Egyptian-born, Canadian-raised, Italian-educated force of nature. He's an industrial designer whose Manhattan design practice seems to touch every product category in existence. A year ago he designed a line of appliances for the Slovenian manufacturer Gorenje.

Gorenje isn't distributed in North America unfortunately, but looking over this collection is almost enough to make me want to import them myself.

Distinctive doesn't begin to describe the eye and hand of Mr. Rashid and I have to say that I've never felt the urge to describe an induction cooktop as ethereal until I saw this.

That same design is available in either induction or radiant electric. Amazing.

Here's his version of a wall oven.

That same wall oven is available in a variety of colors and what's interesting about them is that the color comes from LEDs hidden in the recessed handle.

Dear Gorenje, please enter the North American market. Please.

Fibonacci sequences for the kitchen

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:37:00 +0000

Fibonacci sequences make me lose control. My logo is based on a Fibonacci spiral and I still get woozy when I look at it. A Fibonacci sequence is an example of a divisibility sequence. That sounds more complicated than it is. As numerals, the first ten places in a Fibonacci sequence are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 and 55. Starting with 0 and one, each subsequent number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two. It's that simple-looking sequence that describes the proportional relationship of things as diverse as the pattern of scales on a pine cone, the florets in a head of broccoli, the arrangement of branches of a tree and the whorls of a nautilus shell. It's the math that describes life.

Many thanks to the brilliant David Nolan who sent me a link to a set of Fibonacci knives. Yes, Fibonacci knives. Although the designer, Belgium-based Mia Schmallenbach calls them Nesting Knives.

"Meeting is a set of kitchen knives: paring knife, carving knife, chef's knife, filleting knife and a block. They all appear to be sculpted from a single piece of stainless steel. The proportions are determined by the Fibonacci sequence using the average width of a human hand as its base. "

Made in France by Deglon.

Oh look, an adorable and homemade teddy bear

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 10:55:00 +0000

Oh it's homemade alright, I can't think how anything could be more homemade. It looks like it's made from some kind of leather right? Not so fast.

Apartment Therapy picked up a story from Inhabitots that explains what this is and how it was made. You'll never guess. Seriously. Never in a million years will you guess how this is made. Can't handle the mystery anymore? Check out Inhabitots' Five Fun Things You Can Do with Your Baby's Placenta.

Ask before you pick up somebody's teddy bear, you never know where its been.

Is this Italian style?

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 10:27:00 +0000

When I think of Italian design and Italian style, especially when it comes to kitchen designs, my mind goes to rooms that look like this beauty from Snaidero.

However, I have a feeling that Snaidero is showing me Italian style for export. Oh it's authentically Italian, it's just that it's on a scale that I suspect wouldn't work in Italy. Most Italians don't live in homes large enough to accommodate something this size for starters.

My firsthand experiences with Italian kitchens, though limited, are pretty far removed from the Snaidero room above.

I can remember seeing a kitchen showroom in Rome and wondering what my work life would look like if I were to ply my trade in Italy rather than in the US. I suspect that it would look more like the following kitchens from Acquario-Ceramiche in Padua.

I have a feeling that those kitchens from Acquario-Ceramiche come a lot closer to authentic Italian kitchens than a lot of what passes for "Italian" in the US.

Maybe one of my Italian readers will weigh in on this pressing question. Do contemporary Italians look to kitchens that look like the ones shown by Acquario-Ceramiche as something to be emulated? Is this Italian style?

This house is a Candle in the Wind

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:48:00 +0000

This photograph of Marilyn Monroe was taken about a month before she died. Allen Grant took the photo for Life magazine and in it she's kicking back in her Brentwood home. On the surface she looks like she doesn't have a care in the world. I think that's what made her an actress.

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The home Marilyn Monroe lived in at the end of her life was on 5th Helena Drive in Brentwood. 12305 5th Helena Drive to be exact. How do I know? Someone sent me the listing for the house. Here's the link. It's on the market for three and a half million dollars and compared to the listing I wrote about earlier this week, that's a bargain. According to the listing agent, it's a four bedroom, three bath 1929 hacienda on one of the most desirable streets in Brentwood. I don't know enough about LA real estate to judge that so maybe somebody from LA will chime in.

The room where Marilyn's sitting in the photo above is in the photos that follow. Anybody want to guess which one?

It's a lovely home. Really. I like the scale of the rooms and how bright everything seems. It needs some work on the furnishings department but maybe not. I think the lack of really fine furnishings in it adds to the relaxed air it gives off.

It's a curious thing now that I think about it. Would you ever buy a home that once belonged to a now dead movie star? Would Candle in the Wind take on a whole new significance?

Get the ax murderer look for less

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:16:00 +0000

So last week I found this shower fixture from Bagno Sasso. Hilarity ensued. Here's the link to the story. We'll wait while you go read it because today's post will lean on it heavily.

OK, everybody back? Excellent, let's proceed.

Now, I spend a lot of time with my clients talking about how to recreate what they really want for a budget they can really afford. There's an art to finding a good knock off and a lot of times it can be useful to take a step back and think about what it is about the spendy original that's so appealing. A lot of times, it's not so much the object, it's the feeling it invokes. I find that selecting the right knock off is a matter of tuning into that feeling.

So if you have your heart set on that many thousand dollar man in the shower from Bagno Sasso, there's a $28 shower curtain from Urban Outfitters that brings up some of the feeling invoked by that original. Here it is.

Many thanks to the terrific Raina Cox, whose If The Lampshade Fits is a daily read. Make it one of yours too.

If you can't live on the Las Vegas Strip, bring the Las Vegas Strip to you

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 10:50:00 +0000

Anne Samowitz is a regular, dedicated reader of this blog and the other day she mailed me an MLS listing for a property on the market in long Island, New York. The house is a nightmare of ostentation and bad taste and it can be yours for a very reasonable $17.5 million.

The listing agent calls it the antithisis of fine living in the listing. Hmmmm. Antithesis means opposite and let me get Dictionary.com's official definition before we go a step further.

an·tith·e·sis [an-tith-uh-sis]
–noun, plural -ses [-seez]

opposition; contrast: the antithesis of right and wrong.

the direct opposite (usually fol. by of or to ): Her behavior was the very antithesis of cowardly.

Rhetoric

the placing of a sentence or one of its parts against another to which it is opposed to form a balanced contrast of ideas, as in “Give me liberty or give me death.”

the second sentence or part thus set in opposition, as “or give me death.”

So either the listing agent is being clever or she needs a vocabulary refresher. There's a life lesson here though kids, don't use words you don't understand.

OK, onward. Let's take a stroll through the wonders that await the rapper/ professional athlete/ lottery winner/ Celine Dion in this once in a lifetime listing. The Celine Dion crack was Anne's and it's perfect.

Don't you love the human scale of this room? It just invites you to curl up on the sofa and read a book.

This kitchen's listed as a Custom Peacock Kitchen and I'll bet Mr. Peacock would be surprised to receive credit for that room up there. Wasn't it clever of them to make the ceiling so unrelated to anything going on in the room under it. That seems to be a recurring theme in this house. Context? We don't need no stinkin' context!

Nothing says "You've made it" like his 'n hers Skee Ball.

Again, why just admire The Bellagio when you can live in it full time?

The photo above seems to be the "lobby" of the home theater.

This is the box office. Note the two movie posters. To the left we have 1996's Striptease starring Demi Moore. Striptease made Showgirls look like Gone with the Wind. If you don't remember it you're not missing much. To the right hangs a poster for 1997's Titanic. I will never understand the appeal of that awful movie. Never. But it seems were just in time for a screening of 1991's What About Bob? Based on the movie mentions, I'd say the current owner had a career that peaked at some point in the '90s. Jean-Claude Van Damme? No, then the posters would be for Cyborg and Kickboxer. Hmmm. I wonder wonder wonder.

Here's the inside of the theater. If this home doesn't come with a resident company of Phantom or Riverdance, it needs one.

It has boxes. Two of them. For visiting royalty.

I don't have $17.5 million laying around to spend on a house. If I did however, I think I could do better than to recreate the Las Vegas Strip. What do you guys think?

Beginning this August, IKEA will start phasing out incandescent light bulbs

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:24:00 +0000

On August 1, 2010 IKEA stores in North America will being phasing out the sale of incandescent light bulbs and by January 1st, 2011 IKEA will stop selling them all together. Here's the link to IKEA's press release.

IKEA's move makes it the first US retailer to end its sale of incandescents and it's doing so a year ahead of the federally mandated timeline to begin. As I understand it, the mandated timeline in the US is a phase out that starts in 2012 and ends the sale of incandescents all together in 2014 and please correct me if I'm wrong.

Frankly I applaud them just as I applaud the move away from incandescents in general. I made the switch several years ago and the difference in my electric bill was as obvious as it was instantaneous. Then again, I don't have any light fixtures that feature exposed, decorative bulbs.

Have you guys given any thought to this scheduled phase out? Do you plan to make the switch or do you plan to stockpile incandescents before they're gone for good? Is this news?

I'm very fond of the warm-tone CFLs I use and if enough people would find it useful, I'll start rerunning my earlier material about how to buy a warm CFL. On second thought, here's a breakdown of lumens, footcandles and degrees Kelvin.

In the meantime though, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is IKEA's phase out too soon or is the rest of the country's too late?

A question for the ages: do highly styled rooms help or hurt?

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:08:00 +0000

I look over many, many room photographs as part of my job. As a designer, I look at these photos with a different eye. Usually, I want to see how things fit together both structurally and aesthetically. I find cleverly styled rooms to be distracting. A big glass bowl of Froot Loops on a bed makes me roll my eyes and wonder what someone was thinking.

But that's me. What about you guys?

modern home design

Does seeing a line up of Campbell's Tomato Soup cans make you think of Andy Warhol and pine for some pop art? or do things like that come across as literal ideas?

kitchen design

Do abnormally well-organized pantries inspire you to get more organized or make you feel inferior? Does it come across that the subjects of these photos are fantasies?

modern home design

How about that big glass bowl of Froot Loops? Interesting because it's an interesting shape, color and texture? I'm I being too literal in not being able to see it out of its Froot Loopy context? How about that ladder? Think it's there all the time or was it popped up there just for this shoot?

traditional dining room design

Please don't invite me to dinner if this is the centerpiece. I'm kidding of course. Sort of.

eclectic dining room design

Do dead and spray painted starfish add interest or are they unappetizing?

eclectic living room design

Do stacked, old children's books, a DIY lampshade and a Russian nesting doll make a nightstand complete?

Do you find cleverly styled rooms to be helpful or distracting? I'm curious.

I am testing my blog by phone feature

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:19:00 +0000

If this works, I will be happy. Blogger lets me phone in blog posts and this is my first attempt to do so.

A backstage tour of St. Petersburg's Chihuly Collection

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 10:31:00 +0000

The Chihuly Collection in St. Petersburg opens officially today and I was fortunate to attend a preview for the press yesterday. Chihuly himself was scheduled to lead the press tour but unfortunately, his health prevented him from being there. In his place, the tour was lead by Chihuly's friend and project architect Alberto Alfonso.

The Chihuly Collection in St. Petersburg is presented by The Morean Arts Center and it's the world's first permanent Chihuly installation, and Alfonso's brilliantly, thoughtfully designed space reflects the fact that this collection is here for keeps. The facility and the art interact perfectly and the impact of both is magnified exponentially.

Chihuly's best known for his work in glass, but he works on paper and neon as well. There are installations in all three of his media in the collection and the combination of the three in one space fleshes out he vision and talent of an artist who practically invented the studio glass movement.

Because I attended a press preview, the collection staff hadn't erected all of the barriers and velvet ropes that will protect Chihuly's work when the public are welcomed in today. I was granted a once in a lifetime opportunity to see this work close up, barrier-free. It bordered on the unsettling to walk around ten feet tall, suspended chandeliers with a value I'd be afraid to calculate. What a thrill!

The collection starts in the street with a Chihuly sculpture that pays homage to the iconic tower of The Vinoy Hotel in the background.

In no real order, here are some of the works on display.

St. Petersburg's Chihuly Collection opens today and you can find out about operating hours, ticket prices and information about how to get here and where to stay on The Chihuly Collection's website.

Dale Chihuly sets up shop down the street

saintpetepaul@gmail.com (Paul Anater) — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 10:02:00 +0000

All photos of the 2004 Chihuly exhibit at the

Fine Arts Museum in St. Petersburg, FL from Dale Chihuly.

In 2004, glass artist Dale Chihuly brought a huge exhibition to St. Petersburg's Museum of Fine Arts. Unlike most of the visiting exhibits in that museum, Chihuly's work wasn't contained in a single gallery. Instead, his work was integrated into the rest of the museum and seeing his fantastical glass work in the context of other art forms allowed me to see it as art for the first time.

On its own, blown glass as art never spoke to me before. I found the graceful shapes and bright colors to be distracting, I couldn't see the artist through the work. It didn't dampen my appreciation for it as a beautiful thing, but I saw it differently than I do a compelling painting or sculpture. However, seeing a pile of Chihuly's orange glass sitting next to a Georgia O'Keefe poppy brought the whole endeavor into sharp focus for me.

Chihuly's work is studied and it does fit into the long, glorious narrative of art history. Chihuly's work above pays respectful homage to the Georgia O'Keefe behind it, but it lacks the morbid and menacing core of the O'Keefe painting. Chihuly is pure exuberance at this point.

A lot of art critics tend to keep his work at arms length, probably because blown glass is such an accessible medium. Blown glass can be beauty for beauty's sake and it's that same beauty for beauty's sake that endears his work to so many non-art patrons. Say what you will, but the man is everywhere and it's due to his efforts that American art glass is an art form reborn. Chuck Boux (a local glass artist whose work I own) and every other working glass artist out there owes their career viability to Dale Chihuly.

So it's with a great deal of fanfare that St. Petersburg's Morean Art Center is opening the Dale Chihuly collection this weekend. The Dale Chihuly collection is the world's only permanently housed Dale Chihuly collection, it's a single artist museum for all intents and purposes. Part of the collection is a working Chihuly glass studio and hot shop. At the hot shop, regular people can see fine art glass being made before their eyes and people who want a bit more intense experience can take a glass blowing class.

The new Chihuly Collection is housed in a space designed by architect Alberto Alfonso and as luck would have it, I've been invited to the press preview later today. I'll meet the architect and get a guided tour of the collection led by Chihuly himself. He'll have a Q&A after the tour and if I think of something pithy I'll ask it.

I'm looking forward to this preview of the latest addition to the art scene here in the 'burg. I'm fortunate to live in a small city of 250,000 people and to be surrounded by such an embarrassment of cultural riches. Dale Chihuly has a new museum five blocks down the street from me. How many people can say that?

If you're local to me or if you find yourself on the coast of west Florida, check out the Morean Arts Center's Chihuly Collection.