SIX OF Canada’s noted TV design personalities translated their talents for decor from the small screen into a live showcase, crafting personalized spaces celebrating the latest in trends, ideas and products in interior design.
Brian Gluckstein, The Designer Guys (Allen Chan, Matt Davis, Anwar Mukhayesh), Sarah Richardson and Lynda Reeves were each tasked with creating distinctive living spaces measuring around 70 square metres backing onto a common courtyard.
Their creations were featured at last week’s Toronto’s Interior Design Show.
“I took the challenge as being something that would in some way reach out to the viewers, reach out to the public, and be an expression of who we are,” said Richardson, host of HGTV Canada’s Design Inc., and Sarah’s House. (more…)
The story of Laurentian University’s Living with Lakes Centre will be the story of Greater Sudbury’s celebrated re-greening efforts.
The future home of Laurentian’s Cooperative Freshwater Ecology Unit is one of many highly energy efficient LEED buildings taking shape on the Sudbury campus.
When finished sometime in 2009, the $12-million project will be only the second LEED platinum building in Canada.
Rainwater splashing against the two-story research building’s white pine exterior will be treated by a lime coating applied to the wood before collecting into a bio-swale ditch of gravel and plants where impurities are filtered out. It then drains into a specially-constructed wetland.
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Three floors of the Bard Graduate Center, at 18 West 86th Street in Manhattan, are filled with curvy, modern, bent and laminated beech easy chairs and chaise longues with woven, webbed seating — perfect for any beach house. There are daybeds with adjustable reading stands and companion floor-level book “cribs,” armchairs with rotating bases and elliptical blond dining tables with spindly legs that seem to float above the floor. A film on one wall depicts a glass house in a forest by the sea.
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Much of contemporary art finds itself preoccupied with the discrepancies that exist between humans and the lightning-fast changes going on in their living space. Such changes come from technology, quick-flashing bits of media spectacle (in the paper, on television, and now on the Web) and other elements of modernity with which, for better or worse, we must coexist. The artists of our time synthesize these elements and react to them, pessimistically or optimistically.
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Home decorating trends for 2007 continue to be off the “a la carte” menu, says Davis Remignanti, lead design consultant at Furniture.com.
“Well-designed rooms are about finding the ‘wow factor’ in combining seemingly disparate styles, materials and textures in new ways,” notes Remignanti. “No matter what the overall style goal — from the most formally traditional through ultra modern — the surest way to have a room that looks ’so 20th Century’ is to rely on overly matched and overly symmetrical interiors.”
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