I bought more tile!

I went to Miami Beach for the weekend (because I'll be in Buffalo for most of the next month, and I'm so sick of the cold). While I was there, I went to Cuban Tropical Tile and bought encaustic tile for the little hallway outside my bathroom.

The hallway is 32" x 76", and five doorways open into it, from the bathroom, the bedroom, the dining balcony, the linen closet, and the clothes closet. You can see it in the distance from the living room, and I want it to catch the eye with a little glimpse of something special. It's the one place where the original wood floor cannot be saved, so since I have to replace it anyway, I'm replacing it with tile.

This is the tile I bought:

The picture shows four 8x8 tiles. Here's (roughly) what they'll look like in my hall:

Buying them was a real adventure. We navigated our way out to a little concrete building in the industrial outskirts of Miami - next door to a junkyard. The "showroom" was a little office carved out of the dusty warehouse. Once I picked out my tile, the guy brought out boxes and opened them, and allowed me to go through them tile by tile to pick out 40 perfect tiles. Because they ordinarily only ship by freight carrier (which is incredibly expensive - about 3x the cost of the tiles themselves for such a small order) we decided to carry some home in our luggage, and send the rest via USPS. (The tile guy believed - in error, as it turned out - that the boxes of tile would fit in the USPS $10.75 flat rate boxes, which would have been a real bargain, but alas, they were 1/4 inch too big). Hopefully they'll get here intact next week.

Fantasy sofa

If a totally spare $5000 wandered into my life (and it won't, quite the opposite) this is the sofa I would buy -

It's called "Ondo", made by Artifort, designed by Rene Holten.

I love how it floats - how it looks so comfortable for stretching out and reading - and how it's so ethereally blue.

Oh well. Other things are blue. The sky is blue, when it's not snowing or about to snow.

This sofa, at Macy's for a smidgen of the price, comes in a lovely blue and other colors too, in velvet or leather.

("Chloe" in velvet; "Claudia" in leather.)

I'm thinking (escapism really since I'm nowhere near furnishing) that the living room should have two sofas, or two loveseats, or a sofa and a loveseat. I need a comfy guest bed of some sort, but I'm thinking of a convertible ottoman (maybe from Castro Convertibles, which is back from the dead) rather than a big kludgy sleeper couch.

My Turkish rug has blue and orange and tan in it.

More cabinet hardware ...

Went to Gracious Home today and saw a few things I liked.

This one's really pretty in person, but it seems to sit too close to the door (awkward to get my fingers behind it) ...

This one's better in the hand ...

Cabinet hardware

I've gone and looked at lots more hardware. The limiting factor, for me, is that I need appliance pulls (the fridge and dishwasher are trim panel), and so many appliance pulls are really ugly. The cabinets and tile have turned French provincial, but I don't want anything too rustic - the pitted (sometimes rusty) cast-iron look is much nicer online than in person.

I'm smitten with something kind of fussy - it feels lovely my hand, and it seems vaguely handcrafted and organic while still smooth and finished. What do you think?

There are coordinating knobs but I'm not sure I like them -

I'd prefer something simpler and geometric (from the same company and in the same finish, of course), e.g.

The bathroom floor

The bathroom wall tile is pale peach iridescent -

And the look is modern (see the bathroom posts here and here). I've been agonizing over the floor - marble, glass, porcelain? cream, brown, green? - without finding anything that jumped out at me. Until today.

Meet the Grunions -

Or a Matisse-like flower -

They're encaustic cement tiles - called Cuban tiles in Florida, and Moroccan tiles on HGTV, though they were actually invented in medieval Europe. (We have them on the hearth in my mother's living room.) Instead of a traditional or cutesy-sailboat design, however, these are modern, designed by an architect named Jeff Shelton in Santa Barbara (lots more of his wonderful designs here). The tiles are 12x12, and they're custom made - you choose your own colors from a yummy palette (here and here).


The Grunions (above) are my favorite, of course - I'd do them in shades of green and salmon - but is this all getting too zoomorphic? Everything I like has little eyes - the birds in the kitchen, these sea monsters in the bathroom (though in real life grunions turn out to be squiggly little fish, seven inches long, with odd mating rituals). Also I'm a little worried that it might be too big a pattern for my tiny bathroom, which is why I was looking at the smaller Matisse-like pattern too. People do use Cuban tile in the bathroom - I've seen it in magazines and on websites - and it's probably no more slippery than anything else.

In a funny way, I'm looping back to the tile I fell in love with first for the bathroom floor (but couldn't have because it's $100/sq. ft.) - a serpentine pattern that links from tile to tile.

The kitchen comes together

So I've finally settled on tile! Hooray! (And I can't change my mind again, because I own it.)

I'm using hand painted Portuguese azulejos - birds and flowers. Here are some of them (click to make them bigger):

(I put sticky notes on them because I was counting how many of each bird I had, before I packed them away.)

The field tile will be butter yellow subway tiles - Florida Tile (made in the USA!) "mellow gold". There's also a cobalt color in that tile, which may come in handy for trim. Here's a picture of my tile and the field tile together (taken surreptitiously in a local tile store with my cameraphone):

The cabinet doors are this design  but in maple with a light honey stain

The granite looks like this (but much more beautiful in person):

For cabinet/appliance pulls, I'm thinking maybe these

Or else birdcage -

What do you think?

Or maybe a clear glass sink

 

31-1/2" L x 22" W x 11"H

Clear Glass Rectangular Wall Hung Sink with Mirror 

27-1/2" W x 21" D x 17" H

Clear Glass Wall Hung Sink with Mirror

Going to the bathroom ...

The bathroom choices are almost all made now - the tile is bought. (If only they could start already!)

The theme for the bathroom is playful modern - circles and silver.

Here's the bathroom floorplan (from one of my expensive architect's drawings!) -

This is the wall tile (peachy-beige iridescent) -

 The bathroom floor's still up in the air. Greenish glass would be supercool if it weren't too slippery. Marble with pink streaks is another option.

This is the sink (wall-hung, because it makes the room look bigger; fabulously round with a towel bar)
The faucet is a less expensive, but virtually identical, version of this (the water flows out like a ribbon) -

The mirror over the sink

The toilet (Toto Aquia)

The tub (Sanijet - with jets! - if they approve it) -

Because the tub's a little shorter, I'm hoping we can box it in with glass: a fixed short panel at the head end, and trackless sliding doors along the long side. Slide them both away from the window in ordinary time so that there's some elbow room on the loo - and toward the window for a tub bath, because the head of the tub's toward the door.


My contractor talked me into sconce(s) rather than a dropped ceiling with hi-hats and/or a chandelier. Cost, for one thing, and the risk that the upstairs plumbing will explode and ruin my ceiling treatment, for another.


So how's this for a sconce? Comes 24" or 36" long. It'll go where the floorplan says "towel bar" (in error), only higher up.

Committed!

I spent three hours with my contractor yet, and made real decisions about the kitchen. It's not what I expected, but I love it.

First, the layout - with a corner sink!

The window is getting a few inches shorter - with a shortened sash and a new sill - to accomodate the cabinet in front of it. (The opening can't change, of course, so there will be a blind panel below the sill, facing the neighbors across the alley.)

I don't have the elevation plan, but here's how it looks, reading clockwise from the left of the window:

Small bookcase in the corner (facing the sink - you'll see a deco panel), to hold the toaster oven and cookbooks. 30" wide drawers below (silverware in the top, pots etc. below)

Crown molding over the window (and over all the cabinets too). No soffit or space - the cabinets go up to the molding which goes up to the ceiling.

Under the sink there's a door (with a garbage bin attached to the inside, and mostly useless pipe space beyond). Then comes a cute spice/oil pullout rack. Then the dishwasher (trim panel), then the stove (I bought the Fisher & Paykel stove after all, overstock-inventory, not as amazing a deal as the fridge but close). Then a little stack of 12" wide drawers for utensils, potholders, etc. Then the built-in fridge.

The top cabinets on the opposite wall are 42" tall, and they go wood, glass, glass, wood, microwave, wood, fridge, from window to door. (Not quite the way they're labeled on the diagram.)

The door style is this but in maple with a medium-light honey stain and no dark contrast lines:

I know, not what I thought I wanted at all. But I decided that it's more important to go with a really good cabinet company than to have custom doors. The cabinets are Luxor, made in Canada (there are pictures on the website of Canadians operating well-guarded machinery). My cousins in Staten Island all have them (same contractor) and they've been thrilled with them for years. Everything seems very high quality - all real wood, dovetails, self-closing hinges and drawers, etc.

I also decided that I'd rather have traditional cabinets - which will still look traditional in ten or twenty years - than modern euro slab cabinets which will look dated (and which kind of bore me, and then I'd need those modern bar handles, but the only ones I saw that I like are $150+ a pop.)

The drawers will be a slightly different style - it's a companion style really; where the doors have raised panels in the center, the drawers will have recessed panels, but all the other millwork is the same. Raised panels with handles look too busy on shallow drawers, of which I'll have several. (That's one of the things I like about my contractor - he's always thinking about details like that.)

I'm going with maple because 1) I like it, 2) everyone has cherry, and 3) I've got my grandmother's 1940's dining room set now, and it's maple.

And then there's the stone.

I went to a granite and marble place a few weeks ago, and didn't like anything. Well, I liked the white marbles okay, but I also like tomatoes, lemons, soy sauce, and vinegar, and I want to use my kitchen. (Although, as my contractor says, the Europeans use marble all the time and they cook too.) I ended up falling in love with a slab of pressed recycled glass, which is in fact how I fell into the ultramodern euro slab cabinet tangent for a few weeks. (Stop a minute and click on that link - it's the most stunning otherworldly stuff.) It's made in Italy, and it's supposed to be durable and impervious and great for countertops. It may be all that - but yesterday I showed my sample to my contractor's fabricator (more on that in a minute), and he said "I know this stuff, it's shit to work with".

The fabricator's shop is right behind my contractor's office (at the industrial end of Park Slope, Brooklyn). He's a real old Italian marble guy, third or fourth generation. His shop is a skylit barn with huge ancient equipment. He was working on an ornate tombstone, the most incredible room-high slabs and ornate cornices of pink and white onyx for someone's bathroom, and an inlaid compass medallion bigger than my entire kitchen. Scraps of slabs were arrayed in racks. Curious, I dusted off the corner of one and - what's this? A marble? No, a granite. A white granite with regular, feathery greenish and brownish veining. I have no idea what it's called or where it's from. All I know is that it's left over from one of the prettiest kitchens I saw in my contractor's book of snapshots, that it's a scrap just big enough for my little kitchen, and that it's mine. I tried to take a picture but it didn't really come out:

The maple will go beautifully (we walked the stain samples over to it and looked at them in sunlight to pick), the celery-colored backsplash that I see when I close my eyes and think of my kitchen will be perfect ...

So after all that fuss and research and obsession, I found exactly what I wanted (and didn't know I did) in a couple of hours yesterday morning.

More later on tile etc.

Wallpaper fantasies

I know it's not time yet - decorating is still months away - but look! "Bespoke" wallpaper, from a Korean designer in London, website here:

What marvels there are in this world!

Another idea - more in my price range - from the Winterthur collection - 9' high and 15' wide, in seven panels (there's also an above-the-chair-rail version):

I'm thinking of papering my dining nook - which really has very little wall, it's mostly doors - to set it off (while drawing in colors from the kitchen and living room of course). Neither of these would work there, but there are other walls. 

I love hanging wallpaper. It's one of those things - like decorating cakes - that's much easier to do than people who don't know how to do it think it is, so you get extra credit for cleverness. And pretty walls.

Of course there's a piece of me that's always wanted to paper the ceiling over my bed, like so -

... though I'm not sure how you paper a ceiling, exactly - do you have to set up two ladders with planking between them, and lie on your back, like Michelangelo did with the Sistine Ceiling? Or can you just sort of stand on one ladder and reach and stretch, with a friend strategically positioned on another ladder a few feet away?