Who doesn’t love a good throne? I wasn’t expecting to encounter three fabulous hot-pink throne chairs when I visited the Summer Fancy Food Show in June, but there they were, presiding over the Diva Delights‘ booth like the seating area of a very glamorous destination.
This cookie brand went all-in on its diva theme, creating a sleek black-and-gold booth complete with crystal drop lighting fixtures, a dramatic gold-and-black logo backdrop, a jeweled-pen giveaway and these spectacular Pink-and-Gold High-Back Throne Chairs. The cookies stepped aside for a moment: I absolutely had to take a picture of these chairs! Continue reading Pink Thing of the Day: Pink Throne Chairs Fit for a Diva→
Imagine carrying a plank out of a collapsed Ohio barn that still smelled faintly of hay and rain from a storm that hit before your were born. That board, rough and silvered by decades of weather, ends up as the top of a desk. Every guest who sits at it since runs a hand along the grain before they say a word. Reclaimed wood does that to people.
That reaction is the whole reason this material keeps showing up in homes, studios, and offices when trend cycles would normally have burned through it twice. It’s not about a rustic look you can order from a catalog, but about working with wood that’s already earned its scars, then giving it a second life. If your home office is a spare bedroom, a converted garage, or a corner of a loft with brick walls you refuse to paint, a steel wood deskis a strong candidate for the centerpiece of that space. Continue reading Why Reclaimed Wood Office Furniture Never Goes Out of Style→
Furniture is sometimes at its best design-wise when it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Case in point: Alan Siegel’s irreverent Tongue Chair, designed in 1981. With its seat transformed into a wide-open mouth and a bright pink tongue playfully poking out, the chair turns an everyday piece of furniture into a a little piece of surrealist theater. The chair’s ‘face illusion’ is completed by a back support that forms a human nose, while two eyes can be seen along the curved upper back and armrest that continues to form the chairs front legs. Continue reading Eye On Design: Alan Siegel’s Tongue Chair→
A smart home works best when technology supports everyday routines without dominating the rooms where they happen. That requires more than choosing connected devices. Lighting, heating, security, connectivity, and physical controls need to function as one considered system.
Good smart home design starts early, ideally alongside the electrical and interior plans. This gives homeowners, designers, and technology specialists time to agree on how the property should look, feel, and respond before walls are closed and finishes are installed. Continue reading Digital Transformation in the Home: The Smart Design Approach→
Stan Winston Studio created this complex animatronic for Steven Spielberg‘s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (USA, 2001), a haunting story of a robotic child longing to be a real boy. Teddy, a loyal sidekick to David (played by Hayley Joel Osment) and likewise a robot has fifty points of motion and required at least five people to operate. In comparison, Winston Studios enormous T-Rex animatronic for the 1993 Jurassic Park has 10 fewer points of motion than this tiny bear. Computer graphics and Jack Angel‘s voice acting enhanced Teddy‘s convincing performance. The toy’s unending devotion starkly contrast with the actions of the humans in the film, who all abandon David.
