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Designer Dips into Nostalgia |
Brett Beldock, a Manhattan interior designer, was thinking about El Morocco and the Monkey Bar when she designed the interiors of a new assisted living facility, the Lodge at Otter Creek, in Middlebury, Vt. "That was their heyday," Ms. Beldock said, referring to the facilitys intended residents. She also was imagining a preppy New England vernacular, with framed botanicals, woodland creatures and the like. These nostalgic touchstones collide in oversize, graphic imagery meant to soothe and elate the inhabitants.
Ms. Beldock designed five wallpapers, made by Stark (which will now produce them for sale), including a huge tropical print embedded with monkeys for the Great Room, top right. In the dining room, she covered the walls with Lucite printed with lace that she had photocopied and enlarged; the library, below right, has glowing bookshelves like those on an ocean liner.
In June, when the residents moved in, Ms. Beldock received her first reviews, all pretty good. The wallpaper installer, she said, had overheard two women assessing their new home. "Even the furniture is sexy," one told the other approvingly. And when Ms. Beldock was hanging paintings in the Alzheimers wing (a k a the Haven Memory Care Center), a man who had been uncommunicative in his last home, according to the staff, took a great interest in her work. "He tried to buy the paintings with his checkers," she said. "And when I left, he leaned over and told me quietly, You can call me Moishe. " |
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For the seasoned chef or anyone who thinks a regular kitchen sink isn't enough, Kohler has introduced the Crevasse rinsing sink. 33 inches long and just eight inches wide, it is intended to make food preparation and cleanup more efficient: one button next to the sink triggers a cold water rinse, and a second activates a more forceful wash of water once preparations are done, simultaneously running the garbage disposal. (The sink doesn't come with a disposal, but it accommodates a standard size one.) A silicon baffle device helps waste slide easily into the disposal, eliminating the need to push scraps down the drain with a fork or, worse, a finger. |
When Jeremy Cole, a London designer, was last interviewed in this section, he had just introduced a gold version of his Aloe lamps.
"Love it, we’ll take two!" was not this reporter’s first reaction.
His new lamp, the Cymbidium, is a ceramic orchid suspended inside a 23 inch glass cylinder. It is to be introduced in August at Property, in SoHo, where it will sell for $1,950, making it a relative bargain.
What happened, he was asked in a cozy long-distance chat. Couldn’t he move the gold?
"The gold sells, trust me," Mr. Cole said. "It actually created other problems in terms of gold prices, but it moves all the time. Even in places like Denmark. The Scandinavian Nordic has always been about neutral white interiors. It’s a great piece in my collections."
Mr. Cole’s inspiration for the orchid lamp was, if you can believe it, orchids. He always had a few in his studio, he said, although he never managed to keep them alive for very long.
To make the fragile-looking porcelain flower for his lamp, which is lighted from the base, he created his own ceramic compound, mixing recycled porcelain from botched lamps ("you’d call them seconds," he said) with nylon.
The flower, which hangs by its stem inside the open glass cylinder, is actually quite tough, Mr. Cole said.
To dust the lamp, you just remove the orchid by its stem and wipe out the cylinder. The orchid, he said, can be vacuumed or swished in water. |
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