New York — Welcome to the bamboo boom. Forget forlorn images of pandas foraging for breakfast in the remote wilds of China. No one has to look far to find bamboo these days.
As one of nature’s fastest-growing plants, it’s a favorite in the renewable resource ratings, held to be beneficial to the environment. It’s so versatile its stalks can be pressed into boards for tough wooden flooring or crushed to produce fiber for super-comfy clothing, bedding and towels.
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It may have been an overexposure to early Frank Lloyd Wright, or perhaps too much time spent in boats, but when I was young, and until very recently, I was horrified by furniture. I always thought that a perfect domestic architecture would be heavy on the built-ins. Shelves, benches, various seats and berths—these were the things necessary to finish a space, to tune it for living, to show at least that the designer was not entirely ignorant of how and by whom a house would be used. Also to anchor it. An uncle of mine lived for many years in a very cool Anglo-built adobe in Taos, New Mexico. At the center of the main space was a large circular pit, dug out of the ground and contoured for sitting: a brutal sunken living room, it seemed so much more profound than the loose, impermanent wooden furniture orbiting all around it, sliding this way and that, imported things ready to take up any position, or be replaced. (more…)
IF YOU’VE EVER DAYDREAMED of appearing in your own fairytale, the reality isn’t that far away. You’ll need to supply your own Prince Charming or Sleeping Beauty, but the fantasy location is just a phone call or e-mail away. The five-star Enterkine Country House Hotel at Annbank has long been established as an elegant weekend break destination. However, its latest project takes getting away from it all to a different level.
In the mature grounds of the hotel, a small wooden structure is tucked away among the trees. From the outside it looks like something from a children’s storybook. The walls slope and the roof curves and you wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it grew legs and upped and walked away because you were staring at it. It’s quirky, cute and unique.
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Joy Kacik has had a lifelong love affair with older houses.
They’re lovely to look at, she says, but inevitably come with one of two problems: They cost too much to repair and maintain or, even worse, have had their architectural details and charm torn out by previous owners.
When the North Hills native decided to relocate in the early 1990s to the Avery’s Fields development in Cranberry, she found a way around that predicament: She built a new “old” house.
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The latest design trend has nothing to do with which colors are out or which styles are in. What’s new in the design world is a growing social conscience.
That phenomenon was nowhere more apparent than at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York, where any number of high-end firms displayed their efforts to connect first-world consumers with needy third-world artisans.
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