Manolo for the Home

Atlanta has never seemed farther away than it does right now. If it was closer, I’d probably be at Lee Kleinhelter’s Pieces right now, poking through wonderful things like vintage wicker beach chairs, turquoise foo dogs, gilt mirrors, and cube club chairs. The closest thing we have in my beachy little town is the used furniture store where occasional gems can be found. It’s never hit or miss at Pieces…provided your tastes run parallel to my own.

Money helps, too. Pieces from Pieces aren’t exactly a bargain — the lamps above cost $1,500, which should give you an idea of the prices. But since all I can do is window shop right now, I figured I might as well window shop well above my price range. What’s the point of being sensible when the only money changing hands is imaginary?

The plumber is here and the pipe that’s leaking is a big one — basically, it is the main pathway water takes when leaving our home. I’m going to guess that this is going to cost us a pretty penny. Ah, the joys of home ownership! To take my mind off of the coming bill, I’ve been window shopping for a bed to put in the upstairs guest room once we’ve actually renovated the upstairs. I’ve narrowed it down to three:

I’ve always loved daybeds, as impractical as they are for grownup people like myself. If I could get a giant version of this bed from Sachi Organics, I’d be happy.

Felt upholstery and thick seams make this bed (available at Design Public) feel more like a big comfy pillow…or so the theory goes. I like it because it’s blue.

This last one — from The Kids Window — pretty much speaks for itself.

Can you guess which one The Beard prefers?

I love niche blogs. Back when Manolo for the Home was just getting off the ground, I posted about a blog devoted entirely to faux bois and another that concerns itself with nothing but Ikea hacking. I just recently came across another such blog — this one a tribute to ugly mailboxes.

Where I live, no one keeps a roadside mailbox. All of ours are attached to houses or porches, and some people even have slots in their front doors, as I’m led to believe is quite common in England. My father, mother, and grandparents all receive their mail in regulation-height boxes located on the very edge of their properties so the mail person needn’t get out of their truck. Now and then, jerky teens with driver’s licenses whiz by with bats and knock them over. Perhaps this is simply one of the perils of suburban living?

A certain Tim Morris wrote about suburban mailboxes, and I found his description of the average specimens to be apropos.

I began to look at everyone else’s mailbox on my walks. Were they as nice as mine? Did they have the E-Z Up construction? How did the neighbors manage to attach those foot-thick oblong cedar braces with the provided “Self-Tapping Wood Screws”? I certainly hadn’t been able to do that. Mailboxes were worth another look.

There are two kinds of mailbox: the ugly, and the hideous. Ugly mailboxes consist of a rounded steel box mounted on a plain length of pipe. Hideous mailboxes try to look like they are not mailboxes. Or rather, they try to look like mailboxes that are attractively shaped unlike mailboxes. No one wants to camouflage a mailbox so well that they hide its purpose completely. In this respect, mailboxes are like lamps. You know the lamps that purport to be coffee grinders, clocks, Chevrolets, Elvises, objets d’art, cigar boxes, stumps of petrified wood . . . each one with a lightbulb coming brazenly out of the top of it. So it is with hideous mailboxes. They flaunt their obvious disguise of their own obviousness.

The mailboxes I like least are the ones embedded in the chests of half-sized concrete manatees. It’s a Florida thing, I think. What did the ugliest mailbox you’ve ever seen look like?

We’ve all looked at something in a shop or in a magazine and thought to ourselves, “I could do that!” In fact, I think so highly of my crafty skills and home improvement chops that it’s rare for me to look at a project and think, “I couldn’t do that.” But when illustrator Christoph Niemann decided it was time to renovate the bathrooms in his Berlin home he and his wife Lisa threw themselves into the project in a way I have neither the time nor the patience to match.

The couple began by breaking down images they liked into mosaic form to find the inspiration they needed. They tried a lot of combos before settling on Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box for the shower, Judith Samen’s Die Fettecke for the tub, and a NYC subway theme for the kids’ bath.

Sound like a lot of work? All is not lost! There are plenty of places that sell colored tiles — like Amazon, of all places — and you needn’t create a perfect masterpiece of art and practicality. Let’s say you’d optimally like to mosaic-ify a beach scene in your bathroom. Instead of knocking yourself out trying to recreate your favorite vacation pics, grab a bunch of tiles in colors that strike you as beachy, like so:

And put together a casual, abstract design using either whole or broken tiles. That’s the nice thing about DIY — it doesn’t have to be perfect to be perfect, if you catch my drift. Trust me when I say that while you may always see the one off-kilter tile, the people in your life will almost always see the 99 tiles that are placed just right.

If you’re in the market for some place to put down roots and you have a little scratch to toss around, you have a couple of choices. For example, you can buy an existing house or buy a plot of land and have someone build a fresh house to your specs. When you want to make sure you’re as abso-posi-lutely eco-friendly as possible, it’s time to take a pause. After all, it’s not about living in a geodesic dome or digging out an earth house anymore! Today’s “green” homes — the ones that use less energy, are built using fewer resources, and contain a lower volume of nasty chemicals — look just like their neighbors.

Well, most of the time. This eco-house in the Cambridgeshire countryside is pretty unique, inside and out.

But back to the topic at hand! I know I’ve heard a lot of people say that it’s better for the environment to drive a well-maintained used car than to buy a new hybrid, though I don’t know how valid that is. I’ve been trying to figure out whether that same maxim applies to houses as well. Is it better for the environment to buy an older house that’s already been built and then do what you can to retrofit it for eco-friendliness, or is it better to start from zero (either knocking down an extant house or buying a piece of land) with a new house that meets every criteria for greenitude right from the start?

On one hand, there are plenty of things you can do to greenify your home without having to build a new one. On the other hand, there are plenty of sustainable building materials you might use to create a home that is unobtrusive within its environment. The overall expense aside, how does using a previously untouched piece of land fit into the equation?

I’d love to hear your take on this because I haven’t come to any real conclusion yet and my (admittedly spotty) research hasn’t gotten me very far!

It’s fun to see how much house I can buy in other parts of the country with the $300,000 I spent on my own. Sometimes, I cringe knowing that I could have had a big ol’ farmhouse with a nice bit of land in middle America somewhere. Then there are other times when I have to laugh because my chunk of change buys a mere 250 to 350 square feet of living space!

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a piece about the apartments in The Cubix Yerba Buena building in SoMa. The Building is filled with “micro-units,” which are essentially tiny little studio apartments that are smaller than the finished half of my basement.

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I always wondered what first motivates rats in experiments to push that magical lever that delivers a delicious morsel of kibble, cheese, or crack cocaine.

Now I can finally find out! Chococlock is a clock that delivers a treat every hour on the hour…if, that is, you are deft enough to grab it within thirty seconds. Too slow? The shutters close, and you’re out of luck for another sixty minutes. Well, there’s always the cheat button.

For the weak-willed amongst you the Chococlock features a naughty but nice cheat button that will deliver a treat whenever you press it. Yes, that does rather defeat the whole ‘good things come to those who wait’ ethos, but don’t worry, we won’t tell.

The young Lindsay Lohan clone in the pic above seems pretty jazzed about Chococlock. I’d suggest modding it for more excitement — perhaps by affixing pointy spikes to the shutters so the whole thirty-second rule takes on a new diabolical twist. Maybe you could rig it so it delivers a hallucinogenic chocolate 15% of the time, or just take a cue from the lab rats, toss the chocky altogether, and fill that bad boy up with some science-grade crack cocaine.

In the wake of the mild complaint I made about home decor magazines the other day, I thought of something else I don’t like about rags like Elle Decor. Too many make the assumption that I have a main house, a guest house, a pool house, an oversized shed with a studio in it, an outdoor kitchen, a three-car garage that’s been converted into a home gym, and a summer home to round it all off.

That’s why, I think, a Slate essay by Timothy Noah struck a particularly strong chord with me. Noah, you see, is much like me in that he also has no summer home.

I do not own a summer house. The summer house I don’t own has not been in the family for three generations. It’s a simple, shingled affair, weathered and dear, with fishnets not hanging from the ceiling, duck decoys not arrayed on the shelves, and a large, yellowing map of the area, festooned with incomprehensible nautical markings, not stuck to the wall with pushpins not manufactured in 1954. I love the scent it doesn’t give off of mothballs mingled with mold.

Imagine—air-conditioning here! Open a window, for God’s sake! We finally didn’t put in window units a few years ago, but only because of the kids. They’re also the reason we didn’t break down a few years ago and put in a small pool. Though I must admit I’ve come to prefer not taking my morning laps there to not walking out every morning to the shore and not diving into that bracing cold water.

Now Labor Day’s coming. I’ll not shut the house up for winter, and not drain and cover up the pool, and not remind the caretaker to not keep an eye on the place until June, when we don’t start returning on weekends. What a lovely, languid ritual it is that I don’t engage in. I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t not have a summer place. Just like the one I don’t have.

All kidding aside, even my beloved Cottage Living has changed. When I first began reading it years ago on the treadmill at my local Y — long before I even considered buying a home — I delighted in its chic solutions for small spaces. Nowadays, the “cottages” that one tends to see in its pages are far larger than the plenty spacious house I grew up in! You say the economic forecast is bleak? Someone tell that to the editors.

Not having something doesn’t mean one can’t imagine oneself having it, of course. I will very likely end up with an inherited summertime pied-à-terre in Central America sometime in the very distant future. But it is nice — after surrounding myself with images of the prosperous leisure class — to know that I’m not alone in not having access to the finer things in life at this time in my life.

Negative space becomes a positive feature when glass (and Lucite) artists start turning the world upside down. Forms take shape in the air — we see them only when we are actively looking.

Jon Russell’s Ghost Candelabra finds its roots in 19th-century design — glass cups sit in a Lucite base that folds flat for storage. Compare it to the Abra Candelabras created by Alberto Mantilla and Anthony Baxter. Candles are suspended in midair in candlesticks that don’t actually exist. Alissia Melka Teichroew’s Inside Out Champagne Glasses and Inside Out Martini Glasses only reveal their secrets when filled with libations.

I like the subtle sneakiness of these pieces, which makes their down-to-earth usefulness all the nicer.

Getting knocked up means a lot of things. It means buying a whole lot of those plastic outlet covers. A future of furtive nookie reminiscent of one’s high school days. Learning to tolerate the smell of strained peas. It also means no more thinking seriously about buying a Smart Car convertible.

But wait — It’s not all spit up and self-sacrifice! Here’s a convertible that parents-to-be can get excited about. Okay, maybe not. But it sure beats buying a crib, a toddler bed, a big-kid bed, and a guest bed to replace that old twin bed your kid will take to his or her first studio apartment.