Smart Design

Above: Lineground bedroom collection

Furniture designer Jacob Marks is “dedicated to redefining American Craft in the context of modern design.” A self-taught furniture builder and designer and the man behind Skram Furniture, Marks can be called materials-obsessed and draws from a very specific palette of woods: Cherry, German Beech, White Oak, White Ash, and Black Walnut.

Though the austere and precise lines of Skram pieces suggest Scandinavian or Japanese lineage, the company is actually based in Hillsborough, North Carolina; they produce seating, tables, beds, mirrors, storage pieces, and sundry housewares from their 17,000-square-foot facility. read more

This year’s Greener by Design conference in San Francisco marked the beginning of a new journey for heaps of tired retired tires. Re-Tread proudly presented a revolutionary upcycling solution called Tire Logs, which are used as exceptionally structural building material. The logs are super versatile, and aside from making up buildings of all sorts, they have a number of specific uses like retaining walls, highway noise barriers, erosion control structures, and security barricades. read more

Single-speed, mountain, road, cruiser, bmx, tandem, or fixed—they all require pedaling, and if you can work a mean pedal, you’re in for some real results, besides those shapely calves. Pedaling wheels is a powerful motion that delivers a steady source of kinetic energy that can be instantly converted to power anything that seeks an outlet. Rock the Bike, a bike culture advocacy and innovation workshop in Berkeley, is dedicated to squeezing every ounce of potential from these humble 2-wheeled wonders. While the overall message promotes biking as a choice mode of transportation to get from A to B, a bunch of crazy inventions, events, and adventures certainly don’t hurt when you want people to gather ‘round. read more

Charging a dead or dying phone battery via the go-to outlet method begets the burning of ye olde dinosaurs, not to mention the guilt and inconvenience that come along for the ride. Companies like Gotwind want to help us to stop drinking the proverbial fossil fuel Kool-Aid by offering more planet-friendly ways to juice up. Since 2006, Gotwind has invented devices that offer perks like instant charge gratification and outlet emancipation, and harness all the energy they need from the wind or non-lazy people. read more

Amidst the hundreds of exhibitors at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York, there was one that absolutely stood out in that they had something no other company did, and in a wide variety. That company was Italian manufacturer Clei, whose philosophy is to “multiply the value of the space.” To that end, all of their furniture transforms, sometimes in jaw-dropping ways, into something else: Desks and workstations disappear, rolling and folding into themselves; couches flip out into bunkbeds; freestanding cabinets rotate and unfurl into queen-sized beds.

If you think you’ve seen this kind of thing before, think again; Clei’s stuff is miles away from your standard Murphy Bed or the futon that clumsily folds into a couch. Clei’s R&D department produces and patents mechanisms marked by their ease-of-use and (largely invisible) sophistication of engineering, and the design department adds an Italian design elegance unmatched in other space-saving furniture we’ve seen.

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On exciting water and Kohler related fun ~ Kohler totally called my bluff and sent over the Karbon Faucet i was gushing over and curious about for years ~ which meant, it was time to redo my kitchen! A feat that i have never attempted before now (and yes, i did get contractors and help, but even THEN! it’s a big undertaking!). Basically we took the sink/counter of my small mid 1930’s kitchen, gutted the tile, sink, and faucet, and turned it into absolute black granite counters with the smart divide sink and the karbon faucet.

To jump to the conclusion before i show you a quick walk through of the remod ~ now that i’ve been playing with it for a month or so ~ i know it sounds pretty silly, but doing dishes is way more FUN with the Karbon and Smart Divide combo!!! It really does reach and twist and turn just about anywhere, and combined with the sink set up, and i can have water really low into the sink for minimal splashing all over (perhaps this even helps me save some water being more precise with my washing?)… and i totally find myself wandering past the kitchen and re-posing it into some new sculptural position.

So without further ado ~ see some pics of the remodel on the next page!
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Paper yarn carpets, sounds disposable but it’s not. Woodnotes carpets are indeed made from paper but are so dense and durable that no dust or dirt can penetrate, making them allergen-free as well as robust. Created by Finnish designer Ritva Puotila, inspired by Finland’s rugged nature, Woodnotes is a company that combines advanced technologies and Finnish raw materials: wood and paper. It’s amazing to me what can be made from paper, these products are elegant, contemporary and in no way betray their modest origins. It started with carpets in 1987… today they make not only contemporary carpets, but blinds and partitions, furniture and a range of accessories including slippers and towels out of paper yarn.

Here are just a few examples:

My and Roo lounge chairs, winner of an Interior Innovation Award at IMM Cologne in February 2009. “Soft but sturdy, the lounge chairs are designed for casual, relaxed seating. Both are designed by Ulla Koskinen.”

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Bees. The word alone makes me wince with haunting hallucinations of ominous buzzing and a world of hurt. But I’m reconsidering the pointy-butted buggers (while keeping my epi-pen close, of course) because they can be of extreme value to all flower and food gardens worth their dirt. Without bee pollination, our produce counters and farmer’s markets would be noticeably leaner, having left the birds, butterflies, and the wind to pick up all the slack. Bumble bees are some of nature’s most prolific pollinators and they promote flourishing flora wherever they reside, commonly in underground hives just below the soil’s surface.

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One of the most apparent themes of this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair was sustainable design. In the space of five short years I’ve seen the proportion of designers and manufacturers showing/talking responsible design grow from a handful at this show to more than a third (at least of everyone I spoke with). Almost everyone had a green story of some sort to tell. Unfortunately much of that sustainable product was pricey, reflecting the still nascent sustainable materials industry and the fact that much of what was presented was handmade. One notable exception was Chun-wei Liao’s Transformer collection. Transformer is a modular cardboard system that, true to its name, can be made into anything from a pendant light to sit down furniture.

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In our apartments or houses we’ve all got beds, couches, tables and chairs, and our choices of these is what gives our places their style. There are a myriad of designers producing thousands of varieties of furniture. But one item in our homes we probably never give much thought to is the doors we use to pass from room to room.

Perhaps in future years, designers and companies will realize that in neglecting doors, they’ve been squandering a prime opportunity to design a significant part of the home experience; after all, we pass through doors dozens of times a day.

One company that is paying attention to portals is Italian home furnishings company Albed. Their new line of Karim-Rashid designed doors are striking and unusual, to say the least–when I first saw the photos it wasn’t obvious to me that I was looking at doors at all. “Where the heck’s the knob?” I thought. read more