Who says you need a huge refrigerator?

I went to a dinner party last night at my old friend Keith's. Keith lives in a recently renovated 1930s bungalow in a historic part of Tampa. He did a masterful job with his home. Despite the fact that it's a historic structure, he stayed true to his modern/ eclectic tastes while still honoring the architecture he had to work with. He did everything perfectly. The scale is right, the aesthetics are right and his use of the existing structure is spot on. Bravo Keith.

When I walked into his kitchen for the first time tonight I saw immediately that he had a suite of appliances by Fisher & Paykel. Again, bravo. He used two separate drawer dishwashers, a 36" gas cooktop, an under cabinet hood, a wall oven and a refrigerator. The refrigerator was the last thing I noticed and I stopped talking when it sunk in what he'd bought.

This is the fridge. It's Fisher & Paykel's 17 cubic foot counter depth. It's width is 31-3/8" and it's height is 66-3/4" and by American standards, it's a small fridge. He enclosed that small fridge with cabinetry on both sides which makes him stuck with that size appliance for life.

I am hardwired to specify at least a 36" wide and 72" tall refrigerator in every kitchen I design. I buy the story that everybody needs a large refrigerator so thoroughly that even when I don't have a large refrigerator to work around, I leave room for one. I mean, doesn't everybody need at least 25 cubic feet?

So I asked him why he bought such a small fridge. He said, "Because that's all I needed."

Of course. You know, I don't think I've ever asked someone how big an appliance he needs. I automatically specify them to be as big as the space and the budget allow. Keith lives by himself in a small bungalow and his kitchen is a small galley. He grocery shops a couple times a week and he really doesn't need a big fridge.

I spend a lot of my working life helping people figure out the difference between their wants and their needs. Last night I learned that I have been blind to a whole category all this time. So really, how big an appliance to you need?

A microscopic look at some counter materials

Dartmouth College

Another great contact I've made through Twitter in the last few months is the Aspex Corporation in Pittsburgh, PA. Aspex has been in business since the early '90s and they have embraced social media with a savvy and confidence that makes them stand out. The Aspex Corporation makes Scanning Electron Microscopes among other things and that a company in a very technical field and a kitchen designer could strike up a casual acquaintance is a great example of the expansion and simultaneous contraction of the world made possible by social media.

A scanning electron microscope (or SEM) is an instrument for visualizing the surfaces of objects and materials not possible through ordinary optical microscopes. Rather than using a lens to magnify reflected light (an optical microscope) SEMs use a focused beam of electrons to scan a surface.

Aspex Corporation

The electrons bounce back to a detector and the detector generates an image. SEMs can only "see" a small section of an object at a time. So the object being examined is placed on a Sample Stage in the SEM and the stage makes small, incremental movements called rasters. The rasters are then compiled into a complete image and displayed on a screen. It's pretty cool stuff. Most people have seen SEM images of ant's heads or snowflakes and that's a quick explanation of how those images were made.

Well Aspex is running an offer to scan and analyze any sample that can fit inside the chamber of one of their SEMs for free so I took them up on their offer.

I enjoy cutting through marketing speak to an almost unhealthy degree and counter materials are a product category rife with it. For as long as they've been around, I've heard the claims made by quartz composite manufacturers that their products were "perfectly smooth and non-porous." Since this claim is always made during a comparison with the surface irregularities of granite my BS meter goes off.

Quartz composites are a perfectly fine material and I specify their use all the time. In my mind, they are an alternative to natural stone counters but not a substitute for them. They have a very unique look and there are specific times when their use is called for. At the same time, sometimes the over all look of a room calls for granite or soapstone or marble. These materials are not interchangeable and each one has its strengths and weaknesses.

So when Aspex Corporation made its offer to scan any sample I could fit into the chamber of one of their SEMs, I decided to put to the test the quartz composite claims of perfect smoothness and non porosity.

I took two samples that had been sitting on the end of my desk for years and shipped them off to Aspex.

The samples I sent were a piece of Santa Cecelia granite and Sienna Ridge by Silestone. This is by no means an accurate sampling of an entire industry's products. Rather, this is a test of two very specific and very well handled samples. The evidence presented here is anecdotal at best but I still there's something valid to be learned.

photo from Aspex Corp.

Here are my samples upon arrival at Aspex.

photo from Aspex Corp.

Here they are relaxing in front of the PSEM eXpress, Aspex Corporation's bench top model.

The degree of magnification in the following examples is expressed with a scale in each image. The scale is in microns and a micron is another word for a micrometer. A micro meter is a millionth of a meter, put another way, a micron is 1/1000th of a millimeter. Microns are abbreviated as µm. To give you a little more perspective, a human air is 100µm wide and a red blood cell is 8µm in diameter. Salmonella bacteria are 2µm in length and 0.5µm wide.

So here's what my sample of Santa Cecilia looks like.

In this image, the scale at the top reads 200µm. So if you took two human hairs and set them side by side, they would be as wide as the scale.

In this image the scale reads 1000µm. So if you took ten human hairs and set they side by side, they would be as wide as the scale.

Here's another Santa Cecilia granite image at 1000µm.

Now it's quartz composite's turn.

Here's my quartz composite sample with a scale that reads 200µm.

Here is is at a higher magnification, 1000µm

And another shot of it at 1000µm.

Pretty cool, huh? Now, I will grant the quartz composite people an acknowledgement that this sample is smoother than this sample of granite, but I would hardly call it "perfectly smooth and non porous."

So what I take away from this is that I won't be swayed by claims that I should specify quartz composites over natural stone because they are smoother and non-porous (and more hygienic by implication) and I will continue to use composites where they would look best and natural stone where it would look best.

What do you think?

In the meantime, poke around on Aspex Corp's website. You can even send in something of your own with this form. They have a pretty cool contest every week where they invite people to guess what a scan is. Here's last week's:

Care to hazard a guess?

Why it's a Post-it note being pulled back from the pad of course.

Thanks Aspex!

A trip to New Ravenna

via Flickr

Across the Chesapeake Bay from Annapolis, MD sits the Delmarva Peninsula, so named for the three states that divide it. There's the whole of Delaware on the eastern side. It's flanked by Maryland to the west and the bottom 70 or so miles of that spit of land make up Virginia's Eastern Shore.

via Flickr

US 13 runs down the spine of the Eastern Shore and to drive south on it is to leave behind the pace and the hassles inherent in living in the rest of the northeastern US. The miles pass wide expanses of fertile fields dotted with pine and oak flatwoods. Ocassional, orderly towns come into view and there's a Spartan efficiency to them.

It's clear that for a lot of these towns, their best years are behind them. There's no real sense of loss that's readily apparent though. History runs very deep on the Eastern Shore, and that kind of history leaves a people with the steely resolve that even though the good times are in the past, they'll come back.

About two-thirds of the way down the peninsula sits the town of Exmore, VA; and in what was once an Arrow shirt factory, New Ravenna Mosaics and Stone creates some of the most beautiful work in glass and stone available anywhere.

New Ravenna Mosaics and Stone is the largest employer in Northhampton County. The 100 people who arrive at that old shirt factory every morning are artisans in every sense of the word and their workplace is an atelier much more than something that could be called a factory.

Sara Baldwin founded New Ravenna in 1991. She started as an artist with a passionate vision to bring beauty to the world through the medium of stone tesserae. That vision still burns as brightly as ever and her enthusiasm, her love, for the medium infuses everything about New Ravenna.

While it's true that New Ravenna utilizes an impressive assortment of water jets, tumblers and wet saws; at the end of the day they create their art the way mosaicists always have. Someone considers a piece of stone, cuts it into the shape she needs and then sets it in place. Repeat 10,000 times.

19 years ago, New Ravenna started out as a woman with a vision. 19 years later, New Ravenna is 100 people with a shared vision.

Look through their entire collection on their website and follow New Ravenna's latest developments through Sara Balwin's blog. Oh, and if you ever find yourself in Exmore, VA; stop in for a visit. If you can't make it to Exmore, you can find a bit of New Ravenna's Exmore at distributors far and wide.

Have you seen back-painted glass?

I had a conversation over the weekend with someone who couldn't decide on a back splash material. Her kitchen's beautiful, and modern. It's a symphony of horizontal planes and sleek surfaces. I love it. Despite my growing reputation as the mosaic guy, when I first saw the space a mosaic isn't what popped into my head. Instead of a mosaic, I suggested that she consider sheets of back-painted glass.

Back-painted glass is exactly what it sounds like it would be. It's a sheet of 1/4", 3/8", 1/2" or 3/4" thick clear glass. The back of the glass is painted and then baked on. As a result, you look through a layer of clear glass at a color in the back. It's a terrific effect, the color appears to float.

Glass comes in 130" x 84" sheets so it's very possible to cover whole areas with seamless glass. Sometimes, back-painted glass gets installed as smaller panels, but that's almost always an aesthetic call.

The photos scattered across this post are from Soda Glass, a northern California coated glass manufacturer. They have retailers in San Francisco and in Sacramento. Other manufacturers and suppliers across the US, Canada and Europe are plentiful. Nothing else looks or behaves like this material. I cannot for the life of me imagine it in anything but a really minimalist setting. Am I wrong?

You'll never think of glass tile the same way again

The other day I received a link from the great Laura Aiken and her linked directed me to Tom and Saundra Synder's Designer Glass Mosaics. Tom and Saundra have a Charlotte, NC- based glass studio and together, they produce commissioned glass work work like nothing I have ever seen.

The Snyders do a lot with fused glass. Fused glass is the technique of layering cut and powdered glass and then putting it into a kiln so the layers can melt and fuse together. The result is a glass with dimension and intense color saturation. Many of their pieces take on the feel and depth of a carved relief.

I've seen fused glass used in art pieces, but the Syders are pioneering a whole new direction in fused glass. They make tile with it for starters and they also make mosaics using these fused glass tiles. Their work is arrestingly distinctive. Their floral and scenic mosaics take on an impressionist air without stooping to mimicry. This is clearly 21st century art and the point of view is definitely the Snyders.

On first glance, this back splash appears to be a painting.

But up close you can see how it's made. It's remarkable. These works are the product of two minds of rare vision and skill. This has been made in sections, panels the Snyders call them, and then fit together on site and then grouted into place.

These poppies just jump off the wall here.

The way that the glass has been layered and melted makes it appear to have been painted with a brush.

Believe it or not, this is a curved, glass tile wall. These individual tiles come together to make this mural and the key word is that they are individual tiles. Each piece has a job to do as they come together to make up these dogwood blossoms.

These dogwood blossoms also show off the relief possible with their technique. Keep in mind that these are installed as individual tiles, this not a wall with a relief applied to it.

The detail shot above shows the individual pieces of the wall more clearly than the panoramic photo. Notice the variation of the flowers.

This is an individual accent tile. I swear, that water seems to be moving.

And here's a cluster of four, smaller accent tiles. Fantastic!

The Snyders make fused glass panels, mosaic tile, furniture, lighting, fine art and vases. The vases are Tom's handiwork primarily and they are made from thousands of individual mosaic tiles. Tom's a mathematician and the math embodied in his vases proves my theory that art and science (or math in this case) aren't in opposition at all. In fact, I say they're the same thing.

I am in awe of the mind that figured out how to make these. Think about it, these are squares and rectangles that wrap and interlock perfectly over a curving shape. When the curve widens, the pieces have to get larger. When the curve narrows, so do the tiles. Pulling this off in a solid color would be daunting enough. Using a complex pattern and then executing it perfectly is awe inspiring. Wow Tom. Wow.

The Snyders' website, Designer Glass Mosaics is filled with wonders beyond what I'm showing you here. Please go over there and look around. You'll be amazed.

New Ravenna's Beau Monde

New Ravenna Mosaics fabricates the newly expanded Beau Monde line for Ann Sacks. The great Sara Baldwin, who is the heart and soul of New Ravenna, has a run-through of the collection on her blog, Sara Baldwin Design. Reading Sara's stories behind the patterns and getting a glimpse of her motives and inspirations adds a significant dimension to this work. These patterns harness the vocabulary of natural stone and make it sing.

Look over New Ravenna's entire collection on their website, they are in a class apart. No one can make stone and glass look like this. After you look over their collections, read Sara's blog. I always learn something about both the designs and the woman behind them and that's a welcome thing indeed.