Sfeer is a Flemish design fair that closed last week.

I had a few hours to spare, so I decided to see if something exciting was happening..

the main hall consisted of nothing but spa’s, pools, sauna’s and other expensive ugly stuff, so the camera stayed tucked away…

there where some exciting things happening in the other halls, one of them was a design competition for a vertical garden. 6 people had submitted their ideas:

Vedere e Pecificare
seeing and relaxing (i hope I got the translation right..)

looking at this garden was a bit disturbing, you get the feeling that you are floating above the ground, but the planting was mostly vertical.

the designer attempts to magnify the limited horizontal space by using large tiles, the spherical water feature creates ‘movement’ and ‘coolness’ the remaining open space invites you to see and relax. (this text is my interpretation of the designers description)

Terasse Verticale

Not exactly my favorite, too High tech and few plants..
designed by Landscrapers (they have a much cooler looking picture on their site..)

the wall is built from metal gutters that functions as a huge water feature.. the floor is completely surrounded by water, and automation systems is connected to several lighting features to give the owner total control of the atmosphere of the garden.

City nature in cabinets
Bjoke Carron

big natural green surfaces, walls with climbers, honeysuckle, roses, winter jasmine, at the bottom wild flowers and flower balls. a tree on one side, a fashionable garden cabinet on the other. herbs, vegetables. everything is present it this garden.

Les Etages Verts
Brecht Catteeuw

this designer chose to create a model of his garden instead of building it for real.
I’m unsure about the materials, but the tone wall, the staircase that doubles a flowerpots and the planting on top (not very obvious on the picture..) all looked good to me..

Herbs 90 degrees
Bram Delfosse

Most definitely my favorite.. a cool way of having a extensive herbs collection.
the designer wanted to introduce a library concept.
Simplicity, personality, expandability

Projected
Bart De Boel

the large white square was used to project images on.
the design tests possibilities to project horizontal object onto a vertical surface, this way, the available space can be used for other functions without losing the green aspect.

sorry about the bad picture quality, not exactly my speciality…

Discovered this at Sfeer 2007, a Flemish design fair in Ghent

I was looking at it thinking what a nice piece of furniture it was, I didn’t even notice that it was a cradle until I checked the flyer.

their website is broken, I keep getting access denied errors..

The ring looks like it is made from Corian or something similar, it can be suspended from the ceiling or it can be placed on the floor using a stand..

Bozzolo

I have to review my point of view on chandeliers..

I used to hate them, all the ones i saw where the embodiment of extremely bad taste..

everytime i walk into a lighting shop, I’m amazed at the amount of ugly lighting fixtures there are, really, i think that 90% of the don’t deserve to exist. still, they must be popular, why else would they be there..

Taste is personal they say, but how in the world can anyone even consider such a draconian monster??
Not for the light output, because there isn’t any. Not for its convenience, I don’t want to dust something like this..

No, I’ m more of a contemporary guy, until now I stayed miles away from chandeliers, and limited myself to cool, modern fixtures for the wall.. And I’m happy with that.

but some time ago I saw this one:

It’s a chandelier, but not as we know it..
It’s fresh, powerful, modern… it’s everything i look for in design objects…
this particular one is from a dutch firm Brand Van Egmond, and is one of many in a series that is called Nightwatch.. And i want one!

only problem is, where to put it?? I don’t have very high ceilings, apart from my hallway, but that is more or less finished..

moving on to the next item on the site:

even better, the same appearance, but this time a table model.. plenty of those in our house

after researching the Internet some more, I found some more of these ‘new classical’ designs:
Wever & Ducré for example have released a similar concept, the octonom

Created from plexi, it reminds a bit of the LOUIS 5D lamp from Ligne Roset, not exactly suitable for a regular house, but impressive nonetheless..

or the Anastacha, designed by Bruno Rainaldi for Terzani

one advantage of the above: it takes only one 37W bulb… better for the environment.

another idea to get the modern look is to buy a chandelier of eBay, try to find a more or less neutral design (not like the one in the first image..) , and paint it in any color you like, can I suggest black, white or else something very contrasting like the above green or orange..
if it happens to have crystals attached, paint them in the same color, this should also provide a modern contemporary effect.

some more examples i found:

Medusa, designed my Nigel Coates for the Italian company Slamp

or fiorella, same designer, same company:

this is a nice one:

its made of paper (!) by Studio Job

you have to look hard, because you wont find these in a run off the mill lighting store.
most of them are rather expensive too..

the Aquatub, not coincidentally a dutch company

same material, same concept,
less attractive, and, at 3250€, less expensive..
than the similar dutchtub

but still, way out of my reach at the moment..

I was snooping around on eBay some time ago and stumbled upon a few paintings.. unfortunately I can’t seem to find them anymore.. Oh, here they are!

anyway, i liked it so much, that i decided to try and paint them myself.
so went to a hobby store, bought three pieces of canvas (already framed) and started of with oil paint we had lying around here. pretty soon i discovered that I suck at mixing colors..
plan B:
go to the local paint store with a sample of the colors i want and let the mix water based paint…
the guys at the store were very helpful, originally i wanted to go for latex paint, but they advised against it, instead the recommended a special outdoor paint that remains flexible.

so I came home with three pots of paint and got painting again.
much better.. as you can see in the pictures.

a closeup, you can see the brush strikes trough it, makes it look more like a real painting instead of the prints on eBay.

and to give you an idea of their location

my hallway, which is gradually being destroyed by my attic renovation project..(which will be featured when the rough building is complete, and interior design is beginning)

another Dutch design company..
I discovered about this on ModernSelf.com

It’s an outdoor pool that heats the water using a wood furnace.
the design is ingenious in it’s simplicity..

the pool is made from polyester, the furnace is a spiral made of steel tubing

this definitely has DIY potential, and considering the price tag of 5000€, it will probably be the only means of getting me one.

I will probably never build one though, the garden is not big enough., but maybe there is a free spot on my roof? nah maybe later…
I’m sure I’ve seen other pools using the same technique somewhere, but they were made of wood, and didn’t look as good, Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find pictures of them

either way, it surely beats those hideous spa /whirlpool things you can buy these days, you know what I’m talking about.

dutchtub

It’s becoming a serious hype, outdoor showers.. every design and lifestyle magazine has at least featured one of these…
I always figured that this is useless in our climate… but it looks like it is changing anyway, so it might be a good idea after all.

there are a lot of beautiful outdoor showers available, designerzeit has some great , probably exclusive and expensive pieces..

you can probably build your own with off the shelf products from, for example, Gardena but I never quite liked the grey/orange color scheme…
Another possibility is to find some tubing, and bend it in such a way that it looks more or less like a shower, then attach gardena stuff to have a means of attaching the garden hose.. something like this:

Extremis Serpentine
and do just like Dacks, charge 480€ for it, sorry but, this is just a pipe with a few bends in it, this takes me an hour to build myself.. .

Or you can combine wood, to have a warmer look. no pictures of wood, I couldn’t find an example that didn’t look horrendous..

but they all have one major flaw.. the are intrusive in you garden, I don’t want a metal or wooden shower poking out of the ground and trough the plants.. it is too small to be a garden feature, and too big to be unnoticed.. in short, it is ugly to have one of these in the garden…

but then I found out about this ingenious design:

there is no pole, there is only a connection for a garden hose, when you step on the white round plateau, water sprays up and then gently falls down on your body, the bunny shows what I mean:

eh, nice bunny, is she

this design is by Danny Venlet and is produced by viteo outdoors in Austria. Apparently it has been nominated for the red dot design award 2007 which will happen in June. it surely looks like a winner to me…

it looks so good that I really want to have one of these, but as always, it is expensive… 700€.
I wonder how difficult it is to design it yourself?

to be continued, maybe.

But I liked it so much, that I started to design it myself, together with a bigger wall unit to hide a garden hose, the garbage bin etc..
materials have already been bought, could’nt find the time yet to actually build it…
instead of the medium quality meranti wood I opted for high quality teak, a lot more stable in our humid environment..
OK, the wood costed me about a 1000€ (it has been milled to size) but i can build two cases with it.

so, in progress..

Inbox is a coffee table designed by Jacques Ducru for Ligne-roset

The minute I saw this table I knew I had to have it. Only downside… the price.
just around 800€ is just too much for my wallet.

the table is constructed from MDF and laminated with vegetable fibers (God knows what that means??)

I decided to build it myself..using MDF and instead of vegetable fibers I used glass fibers and polyester. I had already worked with polyester, so this would not pose a problem…
I think it came out OK… The color is not showing too good on the pictures, in reality it looks darker, closer to the original….

I had to buy three MDF panels of 18mm thick, again, the DIY shop cut them to the correct size for free.
after playing around with wood glue and these little buggers:

(does anybody know what this is called in English??)
anyway, usin a lot of these resulted in a sturdy and very heavy table..
MDF is heavy, combining three panels into a 1 by 1 m coffeetable resulted is about 80 kg.
this coffeetable is not going anywhere…

after letting it set to dry, I applied glass fibers and polyester resin to get that rough look, it was important to make it not too rough so my Martini would hav a stable surface to stand on.

a few coats of paint later we had it standing in our living room, while I was nipping a Martini.

price?
MDF was 60€
I had to buy some stuff to work with the little thingies (I’m not including that in the budget, the little thingies have been used in other projects too..)
polyester was about 80€
and high quality paint ( a coffee table needs to be able to withstand a lot of abuse) also 80€

so a total of 240€, not cheap, but a lot cheaper that the original one..