I’ve been trying to decide on what chair to buy for our downstairs living room desk. The cabinet style desk is mostly used to sit at when we’re sorting through paperwork or paying bills so the chair will likely be pushed off to the side rather directly at the desk most of the time. My hope was that we could find something that would work both as as comfortable and functional working chair but also to integrate nicely with the rest of our furniture without looking out of place in the living room.

After dozens of searches on the web and visits to several furniture stores I came to the conclusion that there was really only one chair that I felt worked — the Eames Management Chair by Herman Miller. I loved the look of the shiny aluminum frame and the sleek lines of the leather back. However I was less in love with the price, at around $1500. I set out to find to the chair at a more affordable price and with a little time on the web, I was able to stumble across a great looking replica called The Premier Leather Office chair from Zuo Modern at Exclusivelyhome.com. Although slightly different, it was certainly a well made tribute to the original Eames design. Plus, unlike many of the other replicas I saw, it not only featured an aluminum frame but had an Italian Leather seat as an added bonus. I am putting my order in on it tonight already waiting with great anticipation for its arrival.

The officially licensed Herman Miller Eames Group Management Chair.

The Replica version I found on Exclusivelyhome.com cost about 1/3 of the officially licensed one.

Having neglected our home office, beyond placing the computers in the room and a random table table we have owned for years, nothing had really been done. Stacy was doing her work with piles of paperwork on the floor next to her desk and digging through boxes still stored in the garage to get to things she needed whenever they were in high demand. So, After having experienced several months of this (honestly where does the time go) we decided to spruce up the workspace a little.

We started off by examining (and re-examining) the layout of the office to try and optimize the space to its fullest potential. We decided on using to long L-shaped desks and a center storage unit to divide them. We found a fairly well priced little storage unit (called the ASPVIK —that name just rolls off the tongue) at IKEA,with a roll top style door that would help to hide some of the clutter. Along with that Stacy picked up a few sets of legs that we decided to affix to a desk that I constructed out of some leftover plywood flooring. The desks took a little longer to build then I had hoped but once they were together and in place, they were well worth it. The old table we had been using was narrow and didn’t utilize the rooms depth. At the same time, it was so deep that it pushed us so far away from the windows (which were strategically placed to allow for a very private but peaceful view of our wooded side yards) that we could barely see out of them. Now we just need to straighten up a little, add some artwork and we can really start to enjoy the great light and energy that this space has.

The office was functional but completely unorganized, crowded and a poor use of space.

The simple storage unit from IKEA along with two well positioned desks, built from leftover plywood, made the space a lot more functional and organized.

When we moved into our house just after Christmas our bathrooms were in working order. There were of course a few details that had to be filled in as we went but for some reason (maybe the 10,000 other things we had going on) it seemed these space were not getting the needed attention to complete them. So this past week I took a little time and finished up a couple of really easy things that finally made these spaces complete. In the boys bathroom we had a left a large cut in the stair well roughly about 5 feet of the ground and about 4 feet wide. This was a clever idea our architect Michael Huber had used to introduce natural light into a room that was without an exterior window. The window was to be filled with a piece of Polygal (dual wall polycarbonate) to obscure views in while allowing the light to enter.

I’ve had the polycarbonate cut and ready to go for a good 3 months now but for some reason had not taken the time to cut down the aluminum channel and fit it into place. After taking an hour of my time to measure, measure again, then cut the aluminum channel and pre-drill holes to fasten it into place. I was very pleased with the result. It is certainly industrial but fits perfectly with the rubberized flooring and metal garage style door we used to hide away the boys mess. In our bathroom we had originally planned to use a wood front on the tub surround. However from the moment it went in both Stacy and I new it wasn’t the right material. The wood interrupted the flow of the concrete floors and really didn’t fit in with the wonderfully sophisticated look of the zebrawood cabinets. So with a couple of left over pieces of concrete board I replaced the wood front and brought the whole room back into harmony.

I was feeling so good about the bathroom, like it was finally complete. Then after taking a shower before work I pulled on the handle of the faucet of the shower fixture as I turned it off. Apparently, it hadn’t been tighten too well during the install or worked itself free a bit over time because the handle came off. The Toto fixtures are very heavy duty, high quality, fixtures so the handle had some serious weight to it. my first instinct was to try and break its fall with my foot but thought better of that just before impact and slid my foot out of the way. Fortunately or unfortunately for me the handle did not hit me but instead struck the floor. Putting the handle back on was easy and I was able to tighten it enough that it will not come off again unless needed. However the weight of the impact of the handle shattered one of the 1″ tiles at the floor of the tub. Just when I thought I had completed that room and could take it off my to-do list, I had one more little project to take on.

The boys bathroom has an industrial feel while still being whimsical with the marsh mellow sinks and apple green accents

The polycarbonate window finished the room and worked to allow natural daylight in.

Pardon the horrible picture but this was the best I could do to show how the polycarb. obscures the view of the room but still lets light travel through the space.

The beautiful materials of the master bathroom weren’t working with the tub surround.

By changing out the wood tub front to a cement one it integrated better into the entire look of the bathroom.

Window covering are one of those things that are so often times an after thought in a room’s design but can make or break the over-all design. This is especially true in modern design where sophisticated, minimalism is the calling card of a good design. Do something to detailed and it can look out of place, do to little and the space looks unfinished and your neighbors get a new uncensored reality show. The challenge lies in striking a balance between the functional elements of a good window treatment while maintaining the design integrity of the space.   Certainly there are some beautiful fabrics on the market today that can lend themselves to the sleek and sophisticated feel of modern design.  In our case we wanted something that would block out most of the sunlight yet not totally impede our view of our surroundings. This meant that heavy curtains were out of the question, and light weight sheer materials were probably not all that practical. On top of that we didn’t want something that was visually detracting to the lines of our windows, after the extensive search we put in to find just the right windows to give us that floor to ceiling storefront look. Narrowing down our design wants and functional needs we decided that in our case commercial-style roller blinds were the best option for our main living spaces. They rolled up and out of the main sight lines of the widows, stowed away in a tightly compact cylinder at the top of the window frames. Additionally we were able to get a color match for the frames so they would draw even less attention to the covering. But maybe the best feature was the micro-weave which allowed us to still see out the windows while they blocked 80% of the sunlight and obscured almost completely anyone from seeing in.  Once we had agreed on what we wanted and needed, Stacy did the majority of research on where we could get quality roller blinds. Obviously there were some local big box retailers who carried custom options that would work but we ended up finding an online resource (selectblinds.com.) that offered a really high quality blind, at about 1/3 of the cost of the other retailers. We order some color swatch samples a few weeks back, made our selections and placed our order. The new blinds arrived today and although I haven’t put them up yet, it they certainly look like they’re well made with easy to install pieces. I was pleased that not only did the material match the color of our window frames but the additional hardware was painted to match the blinds, a nice little detail.Â

Polycarbonates are a material that is relatively familiar to anyone who has ever been inside a green house. this super strong light weight material has been used in green houses for years but has become popular recently with architects as a substrate. The growing popularity of the material has resulted in a variety of companies offering designer version of the material in different patterns and colors.

I had expressed a great deal of interest in the material to our architect (Michael Huber) during our initial meetings and he delivered some opportunities where we could use it in our house. Although there is certainly a design detail to the product there is also a really great benefit as well. Because the materials comes in varying degrees of opacity it can be used as a room divider while still allowing natural light from other areas of the house to enter the room. Since both the boys bathroom and bedrooms in our house were located on the north side of the house and the majority of our windows gather sunlight on the south side there seemed to be an opportunity to use some of the polycarbonate to bring daylight into those rooms, diminishing our need to turn on extra lights during the day. Michael’s plan called for creating two openings in the stairwell one in a bedroom and one in the bathroom along with sheeting one entire wall with polycarbonate. This allowed light that naturally filled some of the larger southern facing spaces to spill over into the northern facing portions of the house.

We found dozens of reps from various manufacturers of the material, but our biggest challenge proved to be finding a vendor who stocked the item or had a sheet of it available on site. Because most of the distributors didn’t stock it that meant they would require a crating fee that would easily exceed the cost of the material. Finally Stacy tracked down a sheet of Ploygal available in St. Paul at Cope Plastics where they were able to cut it down to size for use. Then using some readily available pieces of aluminum channel we found at the local home improvement store we installed the first piece in the wall that divides the entry to the boys room. To the boys delight not only did the polycarbonate allow the light to enter the room but at night the LED night lights we purchased for their rooms, provided a beautiful light show as the light transmitted through the wall and into the living room outside of their bedrooms. It’s just one of the small details in our house that has made our house a truly unique and cool place to live.

The polycarbonate that works as a wall divider between our boys room. has been both a functional piece as well as a aesthetic portion of our homes design.

A few years back we renovated the kitchen in our 1916 Craftsman home and for the first time in my life I had granite countertops. Uba Tuba was the name of the granite we selected, a beautiful green and black speckled combination that worked well with the slightly red tones of the wood that ran throughout our house. The granite was a beautiful material and gave the entire kitchen a wonderful rich warm feel. However, as we quickly learned, granite also had it’s drawbacks. The edges were susceptible to chipping, glassware shattered into a thousand little pieces when dropped from the shortest of distance and every little hand and finger print showed up as a smudge on the surface.

When we decided to build this house we made the decision to put the majority of our budget into making the house as energy efficient as possible. This meant that we would needed to be open and resourceful when it came to the finish materials. Automatically we both knew that we would be OK with going with less expensive materials like laminates for countertops. Not only was this a place to save some money but granite and many of the other solid surfaces felt a bit out of place with the modern design. To our surprise the options in laminates we far from what we had remembered or even imagined. Instead of the faux granite, or busy patterns with a 50’s nuclear age twist there were now a great range of options. We were also pleased to hear that not only were these laminates better looking then those of years past but they’re also more durable as well only helping to validate our decision.
Solid colors, semi-transparents, and even some based from recycled scraps are now options for countertop materials. Companies like Abet (an Italian manufacturer) offers some great looking options in the semi-transparent laminates with their Diafos line and another truly green friendly line called Tefor which is made from processing scraps. Although some of these new options are still a bit pricey. For us however, we were looking for simple flat colors with low sheen and there were tons of options in those. Formica a Canadian company whose name is almost interchangeable with the word laminate and Nevemar a US company based on the east cost, seemed to offer some of the better range of colors in simple matte finish products. We found a couple really nice gray’s in both lines that will work for both the kitchen and boys bathroom. While in the master bath and powder room we’ve decided to use a completely recycled, low cost material that we found at the local home improvement center — HDPE. I hope to have some images to show of these next week when the cabinets and countertops are installed, a really exciting step in the process.