• new materials for kitchen and bath

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    While most of these lend themselves more to a modern kitchen or bath, it's certainly possible to take advantage of advances in materials science in a more traditional remodel as well. For example, I've seen several new Craftsman kitchens using pre-cast and cast-on-site concrete for countertops, and what looks industrial in a modern setting can look warm and complementary in a classic wooden kitchen. Further, now that dyes and inclusions can be added to concrete to give it a bit more character, it's a much more flexible product than it was when it first became popular as a countertop material several years ago.

    Recycled glass and wood, blocks of pressed fibers, resins and other manufactured materials and even more arcane products are being repurposed as countertop, tile, flooring and more. Take a look at a few products and manufacturers I've discovered in the last few months:

    tile / glass / stone

    • Una Terra sells interesting, unique tiles made all over the world – from Italian specialty glass mosaics to American-made stone, they've got some really neat stuff (as well as high-resolution PDFs so you can see the tile up close, something I wish more vendors offered).
    • Marazzi sells porcelain, glass, ceramic and metal-glaz tiles in a small range of basic shades and tones.
    • Bisazza is the American vendor for a large Italian glass and porcelain mosaic tilemaker.
    • Hakatai are my favorite American tilemakers & sellers. Based in Oregon, they produce hundreds of mosaic tiles in glass and other materials for pools, walls, counters, floors, murals and any other flat surface you can imagine. Well, almost.
    • Sonoma Cast Stone sells concrete, kitchen and bath surrounds, tiles & pavers and other items and materials in a wide array of colors.
    • Concrete Network is not a seller, but rather a sourcing site for folks looking for a concrete contractor. The website also includes a big gallery of photos of concrete in use – as countertops, fireplace surrounds, flooring, furniture, sinks and more.
    • IceStone is made from recycled glass and concrete, and comes in a 24-standard color palette with an infinite number of custom options.

    wood

    • Ebony & Co sell hardwood, antique / salvaged, old-growth pine and bespoke wooden parquetry floors in a huge range of woods and finishes. They are also one of the few wood floring vendors who sell specific grades to be used in conjunction with underfloor heating installations.
    • Bamboo Hardwoods has sold sheets of pressed bamboo lumber for flooring, furniture and other products since 1995. They also have a line of custom bamboo cabinetry for kitchen & bath.
    • Teragren sells bamboo flooring, panels designed for cabinetry and furniture, and veneers.
    • Windfall Lumber sells "sustainably harvested wood products," including flooring, mouldings, countertops, decking and whole timbers.
    • New York City's Habitus sells tile, stone, cement, Japanese stucco, porcelain and more, but what they are known for are their cork products: mosaic tiles, floor and wall panels, fabrics, and more. High resolution PDFs are available for download.
    • Treefrog makes and sells exotic wood laminates in interesting patterns and textures
    • Plyboo is a flexible plywood made from bamboo, and is often used for cabinetry and furnituremaking.

    other stuff

    • Yemm & Hart makes decorative polyethylene sheeting and flooring made from recycled tires, just like the stuff that was under the monkey bars when you were a kid – but colorful, stronger, and it won't break up and track all over the place.
    • Lumicor seems all over the news lately. The product is essentially a type of architectural resin which is strong enough to be used as structural material and interesting enough to be decorative. It can be cast thick or thin, and is sometimes used for countertop and tabletop material. It is often cast with various types of fibers embedded, and can be made in an enormous range of colors, textures and opacities. Their portfolio shows several dozen different uses – in homes, retail settings, office space and elsewhere.
    • Paperstone is what it sounds like: a solid surface material, great for countertops, made from recycled paper that has been transformed under enormous pressure.
    • Richlite is another popular product made from a paper fiber-based composite. It was originally distributed as a surface for commercial kitchens and baths in the 1950s, but is enjoying a resurgence as a domestic surface. It is also used for skateboard parks, of all things! It's generally considered a green alternative to Corian and manufactured granite, as it can very closely resemble those materials.
    • Brooklyn's Bettencourt Green Building Supplies sells many of these items, including Richlite, Paperstone, Plyboo bamboo butcherblock, Durapalm coconut flooring, cork, Kirei board, wheatboard and lots more.

    Additionally, Green Home Guide, which can usually be counted on for good and unbiased advice on building materials, has a guide to choosing countertop material; they also have a buyers' guide to green flooring materials, which should give you some general budget information.

    Finally, don't discount the reliable standbys: Corian kitchen worktops are affordable, last forever, quick to fab and install, and look absolutely fantastic. Many contractors are happy to use something tried and true, rather than playing with new materials they've never encountered before. In the UK, we strongly recommend Unique Fabrications in Milton Keynes, who can take on any job, from complex industrial and commercial spaces to residential kitchens and baths.

    cc-licensed image by sierravalleygirl

  • design, context & politics – could the Arts & Crafts Movement save us?

    I know – "get a blog." Well, I have one, and this is it. For the most part, I try to keep the content here useful and interesting to everyone with tastes in art and design similar to my own. Now, though, I’m going to use it as a place to think a little bit, and I welcome your own opinions on this, and responses to my not-very-well articulated questions.

    As a born-and-raised Californian, most of my contact with Arts & Crafts architecture and design has been with two specific variants of the style: the western (and specifically Latin and Italian inspired) Revival styles – with plenty of rough-hewn beams and natural stone – and the very strongly Japanese-influenced Craftsman forms so popular in portions of Southern California, with their emphasis on fine-grained dark wood, lustrous copper and ceramic tile.

    My father’s house in Berkeley is a very simple Western Stick variant, one of the area’s numerous brown shingles, and he’s furnished it with Japanese tansu and prints. My mother’s house, a traditional Mission Revival one-story stucco bungalow, is also decorated with a lot of Asian art and craft. After visiting their homes recently I was thinking about how well these two styles complement their location, how they complement and maybe even, to some extent, help define the lives of their occupants.

    Certainly part of the reason is the philosophical similarity of the Movement and its precursors. Arts & Crafts in the United States – especially the revival of the style in the Western US – takes a lot from Japanese and Chinese carpentry and woodwork both stylistically and philosophically. It tries hard to be as honest as possible about who / how / where it was conceived and built. The mark of the craftsman is everywhere, unlike in a contemporary tract home, which usually shows absolutely no mark of its designers or builders (although I suppose you could say that the substandard materials and poor technique used to construct most of today’s overpriced McMansions are a designer’s mark of a sort). Toolmarks, human scale and a more ergonomic design are central to both the Arts & Crafts movement and traditional craftsmanship in Japan and other parts of Asia.

    The situation of a structure within its landscape is also important, as the Greene brothers learned at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Architects in Northern California had several unique environments to work within, and some of them gave rise to really unique and interesting styles – the coastal bluffs of Big Sur, for instance, and the redwood and oak forests of the Bay Area hills were each perfect incubators for a specific and very unique style of home.

    But at what point does style stop being an organic reflection of the outside world and a synthesis of social and aesthetic philosophy, and start being a pretty picture (or a not-so-pretty picture) without any content? If you took one of these pretty Maybeck homes and rebuilt it with new materials in a flat suburban lot, would it still be pretty, or would it be an abomination? Can art or meaningful design exist without its context? What do you think? And how unhealthy is it for your spirit to live in a place where that context is divorced from the thing itself? I’m not sure how long I’d last in a pretty, clean, fancy, pricey suburban mansion. Obviously I can’t afford it, but if I could, I wonder what it would do to me, how it would change the way I see the outside world. Would I be so insulated that my politics and ethics would change?

    It’s an enormous simplification (and not even 100% correct) to say that our self-exile from the natural is the cause for our national malady – the fact that we disagree so strongly, that we can’t see eye to eye, that we hate so many for so little – but perhaps it’s part of the cause, and one of the symptoms. I’m not sure.

  • EcoTop: a truly green countertop material that you can afford

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    Regular readers know that I’m not a fan of modern architecture, but that I love modern materials – especially those that aren’t visibly avant-garde and can work in old homes just as well as new. That is, green materials – not just greenwashed products, but truly enviro-neutral or -friendly materials. One of my pet peeves is building materials that are recycled or recyclable – one or the other – but not both; many of these materials are lauded in the popular press for being "ecological," but aren’t really.

    Joel Klippert, a young man living just outside of Seattle, has really turned this specific market around. With a little help from some very talented research chemists and materials scientists, he’s created the very  first recycled, renewable and fully-recyclable countertop material. EcoTop, a successor to his extremely successful PaperStone product, is 50% pulped bamboo paper fiber and 50% recycled wood – sometimes called "urban timber," the structural wood salvaged from demolished buildings. He’s worked for years to find a non-petroleum resin that was UV resistant, so that he could avoid using only dark colors (the resin used in earlier materials had to be dark to avoid the yellowish cast that would develop over years of sun exposure). Now that he’s found that and reliable sources for his two structural ingredients, EcoTop can hit the market – in a range of colors ranging from white to black, with an enormous range of shades of green, tan, red, brown and gray in between. In fact, Joel says he can match any PMS (Pantone Matching System) shade that a client can specify, if the order is large enough.

    EcoTop is not only a beautiful, extremely durable and truly green material – right at home in any kitchen or bath, new or old – it’s also really affordable and easy to install, competitive with natural stone and significantly less expensive than concrete installations. If anything, I think that materials like this are even more apropos in an Arts & Crafts home than stone or tile: their makers take their responsibility to the outside environment just as seriously as their responsibility to the inside of your home, something that is much more in line with the tenets of the movement than nonrecyclable materials which, no matter how green their production process, end up filling a landfill when you (or, in the case of something like EcoTop, which will last generations, when some far off future owners of your home) are done with them.

    Note that this material is also available as an exterior cladding for large residential and commercial / industrial applications.

  • Mendota Mantels in St. Paul, Minnesota

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    Each Mendota mantel – made from antique reclaimed old-growth timbers and "rescued wood" – is unique, and uniquely beautiful. The wood has been salvaged from old barns, mills and warehouses, most built from the mid 19th to early 20th century, and each piece is sculpted with hand tools. Custom carving – like this piece by Jock Holman, on a rescued beam from a Norwegian ship – is available, although much of their work simply celebrates the natural grain and shape of the wood without any additional decoration. They describe the provenance of their materials thus:

    Antique Reclaimed timber mantels are recycled beams that have
    been salvaged from old buildings. They have an estimated age of 300 to
    800+ years. They are antiques. They grew from old growth forests that
    flourished in America through the 1930’s – forests that are now mostly
    gone.

    Our reclaimed timbers were milled into beams in the
    late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to become mills,
    factories, warehouses, and barns – buildings now being demolished.

    Unlike water-salvaged timbers, our Reclaimed timbers have been air-aging for over 100 years. This slow air-drying enhances color, beauty and character.

    Most importantly, air-dried timbers are more stable and much less
    likely to twist or check (crack). Reclaimed antique timbers are a
    limited resource.

    Our ‘Rescued’
    timber mantels are milled from present day trees that have been
    discarded. They are most often logs from urban tree services, storm
    blown trees, or ‘ends’ from logging operations.

    The artisans at Mendota are comfortable working in the Craftsman / Mission Revival style, as in this piece by Dan Guion, just as much as doing much more contemporary-styled work like this backlit mantel made from heart pine reclaimed from Wabasha’s Big Jo Flour Mill. Check out a gallery of their work.

  • Squak Mountain Stone: recycled fibrous-concrete countertops

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    There are several different commercial formulations of concrete on the market for countertops, flooring and other interior architectural uses. Some are aerated or mixed by varying but mostly-similar techniques, some are molded or installed in different ways, and some are aerated, or treated with dyes or special sealants. But one in particular is as attractive as real stone, is made in a range of mineral shades and has a natural texture from inclusions such as recycled paper, glass and coal fly-ash.

    Squak Mountain Stone’s fibrous-cement material is beautiful and just as visually appealing as real stone – but it’s a truly environmentally-friendly countertop that makes great (re)use of some otherwise-ignored ingredients. It is available both in slabs and as tiles, and the maker is happy to work with clients on custom applications and mixtures. In that respect, it’s even more appealing than real or manufactured stone!

    According to developer and owner Ameé Quiriconi, the ingredients list reads like a how-to book for those interested in establishing a truly green, environmentally-friendly business:

    • Fly-ash is generated at a Washington-state coal-fired electrical generation facility. It’s collected and bagged for sale in Seattle.
    • The mixed waste paper comes from a small home-based document destruction business staffed by four young women with developmental disabilities (with the help of a job coach and the women’s parents.)This business is located in Issaquah, WA.
    • The recycled glass is mainly waste from local window manufacturers that is collected and processed by a local glass recycling company.

    We’ve put together a whole Flickr album of high-res images showing the product in use – if you are planning a kitchen or bath remodel, you really should take a look at this material before you finalize your countertop material plans.

    It is available from retailers up and down the west coast, including Green Sacramento, Ecohome Improvement in Berkeley, Greenspace in Santa Cruz, Eco Design Resources in San Carlos as well as EcoSpaces in Telluride, Colorado.

  • 3 easy-to-install green insulation options

    GreenHomeGuide, one of the best general information sites for folks trying to maintain, restore or remodel their home in an environmentally conscious way, has a great article on three safe and renewable insulation products.

    If you’ve ever struggled with huge, unwieldy bats of fiberglass
    insulation or forced your way through a crawlspace, wrestling with a
    hose and trying to blow fluffy white fibers into every corner — all the
    while wondering what those toxic chemicals and shards of fiberglass are
    doing to your body — you’ll be relieved to know that there are green
    alternatives.
    Here are three of our favorites for do-it-yourselfers.