•Urbana Design - founded by Derek Chen in 2001: Ultralight coffee table plays modern against natural materials
•Furni - a Montreal based design shop founded by Mike Giles and Devin Barette: The prices are low and the design is mod, woody and clean
•The Polder Sofa by Hella Jongerius: "...movable armrest contains sand for weight, unique buttons made of natural materials"
•The GMC PAD is "an urban loft with mobility": Which means it's basically a small apartment on wheels
•My Apple iWipe: How to build it from start to finish, at Instructables.com
•Martha Stewart's conviction upheld: Which means that she can't be an officer in her company as a convicted felon.
•The new PB Teen catalog gets rave reviews: "...some really great stuff. and, it's affordable!"
Writer's Almanac:
•It's the birthday of the American poet Robinson Jeffers
•POEM: "On My Own," by Philip Levine
Wow, great slinks today. The Furni website has a lot of cool, affordable stuff. Derek Chen's pieces rock. The Polder Sofa is a fantastic aspirational design-porn piece. All this, and M.Diddy too!
The Polder Sofa sang its siren song and lured me to the site. Don't know if the design or the colors in the photo drew me most. I expected it to be pricey, but at over $9000, well, it's more than most of my vehicles have cost me over the years. Out of my price range... ah, but to dream...
Re the new PB Teen catalog, I got it in the mail yesterday and personally didn't like much. I don't know - just seemed aimed even more at the not-yet-teen market and I didn't really see anything all that "new" plus too many materials seemed kind of cheap looking. Maybe I'm just too old and out of touch to be browsing that catalog to begin with? ;^ )
the pb teen catalog is appalling. not the content, necessarily, but it's very existence! that teenagers would have that kind of spending power... or that guardians would be willing to spend like that on redecorating a teenager's room... sheesh.
Minor nit: According to *the article you linked*, there's nothing stopping Martha Stewart from being an officer in her company other than the potential for bad PR. Since her name's on the masthead anyhow, I don't expect there'll be any changes.
My only pet peeve with Pottery Barn Teen is that their bedding only goes up to Full/Queen. I loves me their camouflage sheets in grey. But the fictional apartment in my head in which they would be perfect has a King bed, thank you very much.
But I DO love how they do indeed acknowledge the market for a masculine interior options. While the catalog isn't split 50/50 that way, it's closer than many others...
Seema--
From some of the MANY spoiled, overindulged and over-blinged teens I see in the city and at Short Hills Mall, I think Pottery Barn Teen is, sadly, at the low end of the indulgence scale... And personally, I vote for the larger-scale but less-frequent expenditure of money on an interior than, say, another pair of (f)Ugg boots...
I think that if you're going to spend what people spend making a nursery look like a storybook, then it's not a bad idea to encourage a kid to have a little pride in the way his room looks, and get him something he likes.
I think that the stuff in PB Teen falls into a couple of categories - the trendy stuff whose fashion lifespan and physical life span are similar, and the stuff that they just might be able to live with when they're at least in college, maybe longer.
By the way, although I kind of wish that camouflage and the whole war/violence wasn't so ubiquitous, there's so many other references that it holds that I have actually used it as an art supply, and done some things with it that I was pretty pleased with.
I think it's good that they market furniture choices specifically to young males (although it's in very sterotypical-looking ways), so they can at least learn to develop their own opinions of things, instead of having to just say, "The little woman takes care of that stuff," whether they're referring to a biological little woman or not.
Love the furni stuff too. They really are more than just great looking stuff. They are really cool people too. I did a little interview with them over at my website http://www.grassrootsmodern.com check it out. They have some cool stuff coming up in Feb too.