Carpeting that absorbs spills

Photo by Colorado Guy

Steve, our Colorado Guy, was staying with chums in Delta when he dropped his open soda can on this rug. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t find the wet spot in the midst of this mess.

Band on the runway

The House of Area Rugs is the repository of this animal print rug that completes a practice room “where you can let your funky side go wild”. Dazzling, boys. Pass the vomit bags.

Designs that cannot save Lauren’s heart (sigh)

Lauren’s feet, pictured here on the doctor’s waiting room carpet where she’s come for appointments for eight years, show the complete futility of office design consultants. She’s the author of Save Lauren’s Heart blog, and our hearts go out to her.

A sea of confusion

Photo by Zydecocruiser

The author of the Zydecocruiser blog took a fancy to this atrocity of a carpet installed on a Carnival Dream Ship. It’s enough to send the passengers out to the deck for a healthy yurp at the rail.

Don’t gamble on these designs

Photo by We Waste Time

I recently blogged about Chris Maluszynski’s Las Vegas Carpet revue, but it’s worth a second look if it will spare you a few hours at the slots. You’d think rugs like this would keep gamblers away. Don’t bet on it!

In fact, Schwartz has been called “gaming’s leading historian” by Global Gaming Business magazine. The casino carpet gallery at his Die Is Cast website  makes you reach for the barf bag.

Ugly rugs to die for

Photo by Die Is Cast

The Die is Cast image of the carpet at the Vegas Strip makes the blood rush to your feet and causes hundred-dollar bills to tumble from your pockets.

Flooring goes for broke

Photo by Die Is Cast

Schwartz, currently Director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of  Nevada Las Vegas,  claims that “casino carpet is known as an exercise in deliberate bad taste that  somehow encourages people to gamble.” Prime example: This carpet from the Bellagio. Read more about his research at U.S. Floors Direct (bottom of the page).

Ugly is the new ugly

Photo by Die is Cast on Hotel Chatter

The folks at Hotel Chatter have termed the casino trend as “Fugly Hotel Carpeting” and claims that hotels deliberately install “bewildering, dizzying, headache-inducing and downright scary carpeting in their public spaces (and sometimes in the rooms!) so as to distract guests from stains, spills and unsavory remnants of accidents, bodily or otherwise.

Get some help!

Yes, there’s even a Facebook support group page today for people who are smitten by ugly hotel rugs and carpets. Need to vent, or simply need to know you’re not alone, check out Facebook.

Green fly zone

I love the flying extensions on this unusually green home in Java. You’d think corrugated walls would look clunky, but these containers extend the living area with splashes of color. Have a look at the exterior shots at Home Luxury Ideas.

Be the first one on your blocks

The SG Blocks Container House recycles rainwater and runs on solar power. The glassy façade lends a spacious feel. Made of five recycled containers, this pre-fab home can be assembled in as little as five hours. Check it out at FresHome. Shucks, it’s taken me longer to put up a camping tent.

When only a Port-a-Bach will do

Photo by MSN

New Zealand architecture specialists have come up with fresh designs for their Port-a-Bach home, employing bunk beds, composting toilet, stainless-steel kitchen, and interior fabric screen that allows you to customize the interior space to make new room configurations on the fly. It sleeps two adults and two children with ease and costs around $55,000. When you go away, it folds completely into a safe, secure shell.

Off the grid and green

Photo by MSN

Want to really get away? Consider The Ecopod, a re-use container that features a floor made entirely of recycled car tires, a wall of double-paned insulating glass, and an electric winch that raises or lowers the deck door. Oh, and the walls include closed-cell soya foam insulation covered with stylish birch wood paneling. Lovely!

Photo by Yahoo

Eric Wasser is the French cabinet maker who created this home that’s modeled after the sundial. With a furniture design shop in Cosswiller (near Strasbourg), Wasser turned toward completing a macro project, using many of the design principles he employs in fine cabinets and tables. The result is a stunning example of green architecture.

Passively green, but nothing passive about its looks

Photo by Yahoo

It’s all about angles in this home the 50-year-old Wasser designed. The sundial aims its face toward the sun, presenting a surface that reflects hot summer rays. As the Earth moves through the seasons, the sun lowers on the horizon and streams through the windows, rendering the interiors warm and cozy. But it’s the craftsmanship of the interiors that really moves me. (View a slideshow of the home at Yahoo.)

Furniture as a path through life

Photo by Eric Wasser

The French text on Wasser’s site translates to a light-hearted–but conscious–declaration that the designer is but a link in the long path that the tree takes on the way to become furniture.  His use of joinery and crossing struts, gleaned from making decades of great furniture, served Wasser well when he moved on to building his home.

Green, simple and elegant

Photo by Eric Wasser

You can see Wasser’s design preferences employed in this handsome table. He’s brilliant, playful, and spot-on when it comes to taste. I’d love to spend a summer in the Heliodome!

*By the way, Isover defines bioclimatic architecture as “a building that is in harmony with the natural features and resources surrounding the site, taking advantage of free available renewable resources, e.g., using sunlight through passive solar, and reducing the impact on energy demand for heating and cooling by appropriate orientation, lay out and compact shape of the building.”

Writers at The Dome Home in Big Bear credit German scientist Walter Bauersfeld with creating a dome shape upon which was cast the constellations –- making him the father of the planetarium. Back here in America, Buckminster Fuller patented a design for geodesic dome-shaped buildings in 1954.

A unique dome on the range

Photo by Natural Spaces Domes

Maggie and Larry built their Texas dome just outside Bulverde, with assistance from Natural Spaces Domes. The house is comprised of a middle dome with a 40′ diameter, and two smaller domes with 30′ diameters. It looks a little like London’s original Globe Theater.

Dome architecture you can buy

Photo by Yahoo Real Estate

Ouside of Taos, New Mexico realtors are offering this monolithic dome built from a kit. According to Realtor.com, the two-bed, two bath home can be yours for $225,000.

A model of “semipermanent durability”

Illustration from Dome House

According to Dome House, their structures built from expanded polystyrene contain antioxidants kneaded into the materials. The materials provide “ultra-thermal insulating”, are resistant to gales and earthquakes. Plus, they offer “semipermanent durability”, which the manufacturer chalks up to materials that resist rust, rot and termites.

Join the domicile community, fair Jedi

Photo from Designer Daily

I can imagine living among the dome people in my own unique home, even though it may resemble those of my neighbors. This particular American neighborhood bears an uncanny resemblance to Luke Skywalker’s childhood compound on Tatooine:

Image courtsey of Galactic Binder.

The battle has enjoined Fahey against the district attorney, who has charged Fahey with 14 criminal misdemeanor counts of code violations. Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, who represents the Antelope Valley, has declined comment. Antonovich built his political career on supporting the construction industry. The supervisor lives 46 miles away from Acton, an unincorporated part of Los Angeles where Fahey built his house on an open desert lot.

King of pastiche architecture

Fahey, a retired phone service technician, built Phonehenge West on 1.7 acres and concealed much of his house with junipers, pepper and eucalyptus trees. But he never sought a building permit.

Unique polish design

Today, the ‘green” house and supporting telephone poles protrude from the dwelling, but Fahey claims he’s received no complaints from the sparsely populated area. Read more about his saga at Home Design.

Fahey’s Facebook supporters

There’s a “Save Phonehendge” page on the Web, with bitter comments from more than 300 followers who rail against government bureaucracy and random enforcement politics. Read some of the remarks at Facebook.

Winter wonderland

Phonehenge doesn’t look the eyesore in winter, and isn’t crowding anyone. It was even used in glamor magazine shoots. According to the Los Angeles Times, Fahey is a political independent that stockpiles food and votes for “peace and freedom”.  He also carries a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his pocket. That won’t sit well with County Mayor Antonovich, who made his first bones as a junior college trustee firing an English teacher for reading “controversial poetry” during the Vietnam War.

The case has gone to trial.

(Thanks for the story tip to my sister, Linda, who keeps her keen eye on L.A. architecture.)

Uncannily, some of today’s prefab homes come with $100,000+ price tags, astounding architecture and with green designs beyond my wildest notions. Some come fully equipped with solar panels, green insulating materials and durable bamboo floors. You can pay between $6,000 for a 400 square-foot cottage all the way up to $500,000 for a 2,300 square-foot, three-bedroom home that can always be folded up and moved elsewhere. Take a look:

Bamboo for green living

Bamboo Living builds homes with green designs,starting from a 400-square-foot Bamboo Fijian (from $60k out of the box), made of durable materials with choices among “a few groovy colors”.  Hmm, I haven’t seen a few groovy colors since college.

A green method to design intelligence

Seattle’s Method Homes will ship a pre-fab home resistant to mold and other contaminants that meets LEED environmental standards. They’ll ship a custom, pre-fab cabin or full-sized home anywhere in the United States and Canada.

Pre-fab and off the grid

The Cusabo Island House stands on steel feet above the Carolina Flood Plain. Built as a showpiece for EcoSteel, the Cusabo house exceeds FEMA flood zone requirements because residents live beyond the reach of emergency crews.  The 3,888 square-foot home fosters a healthy, efficient and sustainable living space.

The clean and green housing machine

The JoT House blends modernist architecture with sustainability. They produce homes and cabins in standard or custom models. Looking for a guest house, pool cabana, artist’s studio or day room? Try the Mini JoT, a 250 square-foot pre-fab with natural interior finishes and high-performance insulation. Priced from $45,000, delivered. Or pop it on wheels and go places. You can take it with you.

I’m impressed by the new pre-fabs, and I stand corrected right down to the hair of my chinny-chin chin.

Architecture that goes whee!

I’m not saying that I never went head-first from an upper floor to the lower one. I’m just saying I never did it on a slide. Look at this and other interiors that include designs for slides at High Gloss Blue.

Glee for your chi

Recently, Yahoo featured a slide show (imagine that!) of a home in Tokyo’s Nakameguro district that features a slide that descends over three stories, emptying out in a first-floor library.

What goes up, must come down

I may like the use of glass in this design, but I love the idea of taking the stairs on the way up and sliding my way back down. I even might climb the slide, hands, elbows and knees, to the second floor.

Newtonian interiors

Here’s another home borrowing from the contrary actions principle. I’d love use it to test out the laws of inertia, wearing a tux for a wedding and cradling a teeming fish bowl.

Boomerang theory in architecture

This home in Indonesia employs a concrete slide that exits the home on the second floor children’s bedroom and has its re-entry in the kitchen. I was going to say the Jakarta slide had a re-entry “downstairs”, but why bother with the stairs? See additional views at Dezeen Magazine. Here’s another look:

Just remember: the more you slide the less you have to hide. (I just made that up.)

That doesn’t mean that architecture is without risk. I remember growing up in Los Angeles, where homes propped on stilts would topple into deep canyons when the torrents of spring did their worst. Unique architecture designs like these here are so gallant that I’d sleep without fear in these palaces.

Architecture, suspended

The Berman House was built in 1999 in Joadja, Australia to dangle its particles over virgin countryside. It cost the Bermans $5.9 million and is considered fireproof. Check out the lines:

Hanging out in Italy

This unique design from the Italian architecture firm Natkevicus creates its own covered carport. It graces the countryside in Utrai, Italy. Read more about it at Dornob.

Aussie hangout

The Cape Shank House in Victoria, Australia, looks like it plunged into a hillside after orbiting the Earth for a few days. The only thing the architecture lacks is a zip line from the balcony to the woods below.

Floating world

Yahoo featured this floating house in the Berkshires this week. No, this is not the floating world of the pleasure-seeking lifestyle of 17^th Century Japanese. It’s the floating world of the vacation house built by Boston architect Warren Schwartz. It’s suspended 14 feet off of terra firma.

Do you believe?

Still, people tend to lose sanity and, sometimes, all control of their emotions when they come home to a tattered couch or spotted carpet. That may very well be the purpose behind The Humane Society of the United States’ creation of a web page instructing pet owners in “Removing Pet Stains and Odors”.  Their writer says, “You clean and clean, but you can’t get rid of that smell.”

The Pee Tardy

Your dog may say, “Who, Me?” but the photographic evidence, courtesy of  The Dry Steam, says that your pet has be upgrading the decorating. Remedies, according to The Humane Society, start with renting with an extractor or wet vac to remove all the stains and odors. The lingering odor only encourages your pets to return to the scene of the crime with a full bladder. So when the stain is out, use a high-quality pet odor neutralizer to remove any biological sirens that call to your pet.

Hey, I Shrunk the Heirloom

All signs point to behavioral disorders when the pooch takes that heirloom doll for a magical ride around the house. Time to do a web search on pet trainers in your neighborhood.

Snackin’ on the Sofa

You may want to keep the pet outside while awaiting a seat at the doggy classroom. Meanwhile, you can repair damage to your couch through a furniture repairer nearby or order up a remedy from Pet Damage Repair Kits.

Patience and Tolerance

The Internet Movie Database reports that Turner and Hooch grossed $71 million at the box office. Take a deep breath and imagine monetizing your holy terror.