Elephants on Bicycles

I was thrilled to receive my new cats cradle base for my brown upholstered Eames Arm Shell chair. I think it will make a great addition to the collection. I was a little surprised that it didn’t have more of a rear-ward tilt to it but it is good looking and comfortable none-the-less. The chair itself came from the flea market and I managed to find a re-manufacturer of the cats cradle base on Ebay. Take a look:

Next project is to build a sideboard. I think I’ve got the inital design down, now it is a matter of drawing out the actual scale plans and sourcing the materials. I think I want to do a metal stand for it using 1.5″ square stock but it has been a while since I’ve done any welding – may be time to hit up a friend for a favor. Anyhow, like with the cabinets I’ve built in the past I’ll document the process and share it with you out here. Don’t expect anything until about April though as I’ve got several other things to clear off my plate first.

The Herman Miller Factory Store aka The Company Store is full of scratch and dent items along with bits and pieces of the furniture building process. This includes an amazing selection of industrial quality upholstery fabric at “get this stuff out of here” prices. Don’t pass up an opportunity to stop by here if you ever find yourself in Zeeland Michigan.

When Tina, Sophie, my mom and I popped in there it was strictly to take a look. I’ve been a huge fan of Herman Miller and, in particular, the Eames designs they manufacture for years now. I thought it would be fun to see what they had on offering but I assumed that we wouldn’t actually make any purchases. I assumed that even their scratch and dent pricing wouldn’t fit my wallet. This mostly held true but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have affordable items nor that the pricing wasn’t fair. They had a lot of LCM chairs priced at $250/ea plus 35% off – those sell new for $400+ each. Now, had there been an LCW for that price I might have had to break out the plastic.

If you have a need for a work surface they sell 8 foot sections for $5 – yep, can’t go wrong with that. What ended up hooking us though was the industrial quality upholstery. We walked out with 6 bolts, ranging in size from 7 yards to 39 yards (I think the total yardage was like 60+) for a grand total of $27! Even cheap ugly fabric at JoAnns would’ve been way more than that.

Tina and I have salvaged a couple chairs and ottoman’s that we just don’t use because we have to re upholster them and I’ve got some furniture designs I’ve drawn up that I’d like to try out as well. Now that we’ve got some (lots) of raw materials it is time to get cracking. I can’t wait to enjoy the sweet chair I garbage picked downtown last year once I restore it.

Yep, I’ve brought a few things home on the back of my bicycle – it’s just my way.

So, besides having a really nice visit with my family including a much needed afternoon swimming in Lake Michigan I would say we had a very successful visit to the Herman Miller store. Whether or not you are looking for something specific I would definitely suggest stopping by the store and taking a look around, you might be surprised what you find!

A couple weeks ago a contact of mine at the Columbus Dispatch touched base with me to ask about contacts with midcentury modern furnishings throughout thier homes. I had two contacts come to mind immediately, one of which being my father-in-law. Writer Kevin Joy did a fantastic job with the article and managed to extract a very serious and introspective comment out of Ted who tends to be most often interested in poking fun these days. His insight is inspiring and I wanted to share the article with you who may also be interested in this furniture and period in design history.

Simply stylish
‘Midcentury modern’ makes a comeback among furniture fanciers
By Kevin Joy
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

All the hype is a bit lost on Ted Granzow.

The Dayton native has been a fan since his days as an architect in New York in the 1950s, when Granzow worked on projects featuring bold interiors with Knoll furniture.

The adoration never faltered.

His Grandview Heights condo is stocked with brightly colored Bertoia chairs, an Eames lounger and a sleek dining room set, while his Downtown office is stocked with Brno chairs by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

For Granzow, the collection has always evoked emotion.

“This is an architectural approach — it’s timeless,” said Granzow, 75. “It makes you feel good.

“This is my life and blood and soul. It all goes with the furniture.”

{READ FULL ARTICLE HERE}

Here’s a summary of the weekend events so far – and it’s only Sunday morning so there’s still more to come! Friday after work I came across an interesting chair next to a dumpster in Pearl Alley. I thought it might be a Saarinen because I couldn’t remember exactly what the Executive chair looked like; either way though I thought after a re-upholstery job it would make a nice chair so on the bicycle rack it went. This is the second chair to grace the back of my bicycle although this one was definitely more of a challenge.

This chair is very well made, solid wood frame construction. The upholstery on it is hideous but also in terrible condition, no matter as I’ll put something different on it. I’m thinking perhaps a slightly deeper brown finish with a neutral red or a lime green fabric. Either way it’ll have to wait until I’ve got my workshop setup so for the time being it is sitting next to my last shell chair acquisition that also needs refinished. Bringing home a fiberglass shell chair is comparatively easy on a bicycle thanks to the substantial weight difference. I was honestly worried about bending my frame or wheel carrying home this newest chair. I’ll take some better fotos of it because I could use some help identifying the chair’s designer.

Saturday was the Ohioana Book Festival at the State Library. Normally I try to avoid my place of work on the weekends but this was a worthy exception. Jeff (urbaninfill) and I met up there to learn more about copyright law and publishing but also found that Harvey Pekar was in attendance and would be speaking at the end of the day. I sent Tina a message and she brought Sophie down along with my copy of Harvey Pekar’s History of the SDS which is an interesting read. Harvey was nice enough to let us have a photo and sign my book. His talk was very enjoyable and I ran into my friend Miles and his roommate as well. There was an attendee who was asking Harvey all sorts of questions about who Harvey is – the questioner obviously had never heard of Harvey Pekar or American Splendor and it made me wonder why you wouldn’t just listen instead of taking up the author’s time asking such basic questions.

Tina and I (although mostly Tina) got a chance to get some more yard work done in the afternoon and Sophie and I were able to do some playing which is always fun (right now she’s fetching plastic easter eggs for me which is also fun). In the evening I had the opportunity to visit with a friend and make a few new friends at his Martini Party (I enjoyed some Grape Soda myself). As for today I’d like to wish my Mom, Grandma’s, Sister, Mother-in-Law and especially my Wife a Happy Mother’s Day!

I’m no fan of the very 80’s/90’s art furniture (think art-cars for the home) that many artists were involved in but this new twist on things is very interesting in deed. If you haven’t heard of Ikea hacks then you should check them out; basically different ways of combining pieces of Ikea furniture to build something unique and more customized to your specific room. Well, this artist has gone one step further and taken the ubiquitous Ikea packaging and instructions, along with the furniture itself, and created a really interesting sculptural piece. Have a look and let me know what you think!

These two chair designs have me feeling very inspired at the moment. It’s easy to feel sometimes like there is nothing new under the sun but thankfully you can always be proven wrong.

*Update* Here are the related websites for the designers.

Ulo Chair by Embryo Designs – they’ve got some really inventive and excellent products to check out. I particularly like their indoor kitchen garden system.

Flexible Love Chair – Three different versions of this chair available here.

Ulo Chair

Flexible Love Chair

The website has been pretty serious as of late so I wanted to throw out a nice post to sort of catch people up on what’s going with me and the family. Hopefully you’re enjoying the holidays and the winter months, we certainly have.

Sophie had a couple of chances to cozy up to Santa Claus but she pretty much wasn’t digging that. At first she was downright terrified with the white bearded old man but she is slowly warming up to him. Hopefully by next christmas she’ll be on board cause we certainly wouldn’t want Santa to miss our chimney. She is however enjoying the decorations and having a tree in our house. Last year she was way too little to know what was going on but she’s a smart little cookie so I think she’s picking up on it all. We went to Michigan to visit with my family and she loved seeing the snow – so did I, I sure wish we got snow by the foot instead of one or two inches a winter.

Christmas came early for me this year. During an email exchange with my friend Phil he “forced” this KLR 650 on me with a payment plan I couldn’t refuse so I am once again on two MOTORIZED wheels. While Tina would’ve rather seen a beautiful old scooter sitting in the garage that wasn’t how this worked out. Truly I want to own another vintage scooter sometime too but for practical reasons this KLR is exactly what the doctor ordered. I’m looking forward to making some camping trips on it and plenty of other adventures. Look out Mid-Ohio vintage days, I won’t feel so ashamed about showing up there this year now that I’m back on a bike as opposed to the past couple years.

Tina continues to amaze me with her kick ass plush toys and we’re underway to turning our upstairs into an art studio. I’m hoping to make some real progress on that over this weekend. We both are extremely excited about this because we currently have to do a lot of digging through boxes and other such hunting in order to get through projects right now. With the new space we’ll be able to do much more involved work and have Sophie hang out with us during our projects. I’m particularly looking forward to having space for model building so that I’m not designing and building full size pieces of furniture just to see if something works the way I hope it will.

Finally, speaking of furniture, I designed and built a side table for our sofa which is meant to match the other living room pieces I designed. This piece will also serve as a cubby for Sophie’s toys and in the future possibly contain some blankets or something similar. I still need to put another coat of stain and then poly on it but I’m basically done with it. Again, I hope to have this project complete by the end of this weekend as well.

I just can’t even put into words how cool I think this is. Thanks to Apryl for giving me a heads up about it. Designer Nicola Frombern has created templates that he freely distributes on the Foldschool website to make your own sturdy cardboard childrens furniture. Currently he has 4 designs, a learning project, a chair, stool and rocker. I’m looking forward to picking up some cardboard and getting to work!

Since the house is always in flex with all of our activities there are rare moments where we can get some good pictures of the work we’ve done. I was uploading some pictures yesterday when I came across these of the nursery in all of it’s glory. We framed up some pictures and sort of have that room done (as if it ever can be done).

The room is fairly small and we had a number of items that we needed to place into that space. With that in mind I think we managed to really maximize our space by using 2 doors on the sides of the closet instead of a single door in the middle. This allowed the placement of the crib on an interior wall and gave us use of that wall. Likewise we found a nice looking futon at Ikea which gives us the ability to sleep in that room along with our daughter when we have guests. This way the guests can utilize our bedroom and have a bit more privacy.

The bookshelfs are secured to the wall and their layout actually has room that we can expand them somewhat if necessary. Due to the small size of our house every room must be multipurposed and thus the piano (free craigslist find – hooray) is living in the nursery as well. Hopefully it will get used more once we have a couple more years under our belts.

We love the fact that we have so many kids coming around that like to draw, this gives us plenty of options for switching out the art on the walls. Likewise I was happy to create the piece hanging over the piano and our friend Becky painted the lovely picture that is sitting on the piano.

The white walls make the room feel nice and bright which is no secret trick, everyone knows that (I think). We’d still like to do something else with the overhead light and Tina has been working on a number of other pieces of art for the room as well which I can’t wait to see finished. She is very talented and creates some really fun stuff.

First things first – the couch finally arrived and it looks great! Here’s a *fuzzy* picture of the living room in its current glory. We still have plenty of things left to do in there but I am thrilled that it is once again a functional room. First thing will be to build a new coffee table, we decided the solution we have now isn’t going to work for us. A frame around the mantel mirror is in order and we intend to create a piece of art for behind the couch that all three of us contribute to – I think that will be especially fun! OH MAN, I just had an idea, what if we let the children at our next cookout create the painting for behind our couch? Ok, sorry, here’s the picture.

While we enjoy our new couch we’ll be able to enjoy some new tunes as well. One of my favorite bands STEREO TOTAL has a new album set for release in the states August 20th. The new album titled “Paris<>Berlin” is, according to our hero’s, “all about love, rebellion and nostalgia.” Sounds like the perfect cure to those dog days of summer blues. Flasher.com is hosting an interview with Francoise & Brezel which I highly recommend you watch, it is well worth your two minutes.

One final bit of kit for the day is that I had a letter to the editor published regarding my rant about the press coverage of the new courthouse. In case you’re interested I have included the newsprint here as published in the June 21, 2007 The Other Paper.