The average U.S. family spends $1,900 a year on the energy bills. By using less energy to keep your home comfortable, you not only spend less money, you also cause fewer greenhouse gases to enter the atmosphere, and ultimately contribute to slowing down global warming.
On Monday, May 22, the EPA’s Energy Star launched a new interactive online tool for improving energy efficiency at home. You can click on each room in the house to get specific tips on how to be smarter about the energy you use.
If you are looking to see a good thriller this summer, forget about The Omen remake, and go see An Inconvenient Truth.
Dutch designer Damian O’Sullivan, has found a way to bring sunlight indoors with his Solar Lampion. The ingenuous lamp is composed of 36 standard-sized solar cells that collect sunlight during the day, and then shine at night. What we love about the Solar Lampion is that through simple geometric arrangement, it manages to transform something that is usually so bulky and ugly (solar panels) into a charming sculptural object. The fact that it is practical and energy efficient only makes it that much better. While it’s durable enough to keep outside - the Solar Lampion is so cute that we think you’ll want to bring it indoors to light up your summer nights.
Incandescent lighting is so taken-for-granted in contemporary culture that most of us have no idea how much energy we use when we flip a light switch. Boiler Design Office wants to change this with their experimental Protea Lamp - a lamp which changes shape based on how hot the bulb gets.
The Protea lamp is thermotropic: meaning it moves away from heat. When the light is off, the petal-like lampshade is cold and closed around the bulb. When the lamp is turned on and heats up, the thermotropic petals gradually move away from the hot bulb - opening up like a flower in the sunshine.
Brooklyn-based Pratt seems to be the school of choice for New York designers, and is currently producing some of the most cutting-edge industrial design in the country, when it comes to new technology and environmental sustainability. According to Design Intelligence (DI), a monthly architecture and design journal, Pratt’s Industrial Design Department is number two in the country - outranked only by California’s Art Center College of Design.
Here’s a great spring project to get you ready for those up-coming summer barbeques: grow your own lawn furniture with the Terra Grass Armchair kit. All you need to do is assemble a cardboard frame, fill it with soil, seed it with grass, then stand back and watch it bloom. In just a couple weeks, a green and grassy armchair will appear in your lawn!
Imagine a house without a single light fixture - but instead walls, ceilings, furnishings, and accessories all sources of light. Thanks to research at Princeton University and the University of Southern California (USC), almost any surface in a building can become a light source with OLEDs.
Although slightly larger than most objects we feature on Inhabitat, this sensual skyscraper located west of Toronto was just too beautiful to pass up. Developers in Mississauga, Canada recently announced the winner of the Absolute Design Ideas Competition for a fifty-plus story residential tower. Although no sustainable measures have been announced for the building itself, this high density development will allow 1,800 families to live, work, and shop all within walking distance. Besting 90 other entries, the Beijing architecture firm of MAD won the commission to design this elegant $120 million structure. Already dubbed the “Marilyn Monroe building” by the press, this flagship structure is slated for completion in 2010.
By no means was this the only design of note. We found several other designs had amazing promise from both aesthetic and environmental standpoints. Check out a few of the more intriguing designs:
We are really excited about the potential of Zenkaya, a great new prefab out of South Africa that has been making the rounds lately. Based on the idea of providing “a headache free process with cutting edge design,” Zenkaya literally references a Zen approach to housing (kaya meaning “home” in the vernacular South African language.)
Anyone who reads Inhabitat regularly will know that we are suckers for furniture with foliage. Julian Lwin has caught our attention before with his fabulously green, wheatgrass-studded Galapagos Coffee Table. Now the Brooklyn based designer is raising the bar again with his new biodegradable BioTube Bench. Thats right - we said it: BIODEGRADABLE FURNITURE!
Almost a year ago today, we raved about kirei, an eco-friendly material which we discovered in Iannone:Sanderson’s gorgeous kirei Mod Coffee Table.
This past weekend at ICFF, we were treated to several new stunning kirei pieces from Iannone:Sanderson. The most attention-grabbing was this Signature 2 cabinet, which has a beautiful “birds-and-the-bees” pattern on the front, and fully-exposed kirei lining the interior. Michael Iannone and James Sanderson also showed several new plyboo cabinets and sideboards, in addition their old beautiful standby - the Bamboo Glowbox. Iannone:Sanderson’s work has such clean precision and spare but original details, we could fill up a whole room with it and never feel bored or crowded.
Now that New York Design week is officially over, we are finally getting a chance to breathe and start writing non-ICFF posts again. For those of you who are tired of hearing about furniture - this is good news for you. But before we get back to business as usual, we want to wrap up design week by sharing our overall impressions of ICFF 2006.
Reclaimed wood furniture is usually so predictable: large beams or slabs of driftwood turned into benches and stools. Thats why Brent Comber’s unique reclaimed wood furniture - made from bundles of small irregular pieces - is such a breathe of fresh air. We discovered the Canadian designer’s innovative, eco-friendly furniture last year at ICFF, and it was one of our favorite things in the show. This year we are excited to see Brent Comber back and better than ever, with a beautiful new line of work called “Shattered”.
This weekend HauteGREEN opened with a flourish. The space looked beautiful, full of innovative and thoughtful explorations of sustainable design for the home, including a brand new piece from Scrapile, and an art installation of recycled water bottles from Tobias Wong and Josée Lepage. Here are my photos from the show and party. For photos of ALL the work check out our flickr feed at:
+ http://www.flickr.com/photos/inhabitat/
For photos of the opening party click here>
Lots and lots of party pics from HauteGREEN, Future Perfect and Core77. Click here to see more
Danish designer, Mads Hagstrom, director of The FLOWInstitute at Dansk Design Centre, brought a show-stopping installation to ICFF. FlowMarket sits in the middle of the exhibit floor, enclosed in a sheer white curtain. The booth is set up as a store, but the products on the shelves are empty containers with generic labels addressing the plagues of consumer culture.
Sunday night we attended the Mobile Living event, which proved to be a smashing example of a well-conceived hybrid exhibition. The theme “mobile living” took a comprehensive view, including not just mobile homes, but cars (of which there were two new models on the floor), furnishings, and supposedly even apparel, though we didn’t see it.
In the last few years, knitting and crocheting have made a real come-back. These are no longer old lady sports, and all kinds of type-A execs and supercool hipsters have knitting circles to prove it. When well done, yarn art is lovely. And Cai’s croched lights are downright fabulous.
We were drawn like moths to these illuminated orbs yesterday at ICFF, which emerge from the same design team as the deer head trophy lamps Jill raved about after last year’s show. Essentially, the Stocking Lamps are clear spheres containing a lightbulb on a cord fed down through the top, around which fit perfectly gorgeous crocheted cozies. Isabelle Rolland, one of the Cai design trio, gave us a demo on how the covers can be unbuttoned and swapped out for new colors and patterns. We could gush about these for days.
+ Cai
We are already feeling overwhelmed by the excessive amounts of good stuff on display everywhere this week, but we are not going to give up until we’ve looted and plundered all the best of Design Week for Inhabitat. Here is what we’ve seen so far on day one at ICFF:
We’ve recently become fans of Chicago-based Materious Design, ever since discovering their clever Cubby and innovative Wifi Umbrella. Now, today at the Haute Green exhibition in Brooklyn, we discovered yet another winning design from Materious: the gorgeous Bone Lamp.
On display at the Mobile Living Conference this weekend will be a series of inflatable structures from UK-based company Inflate.
Given how we gravitate towards a good bouncy air castle, we were thrilled to discover Inflate’s work. Within the medium of inflatability, the firm’s portfolio is incredibly diverse. Their custom work includes interior decor, habitable prefabs, and large event structures that resemble yurts, turtle shells and igloos.
All bouncy fun aside, inflatable structures can be incredibly useful in disaster situations, and any time when someone needs shelter that can be erected in a matter of minutes. Most are made of high-strength textiles that can withstand a variety of outdoor weather conditions. And of course the playful appeal of inflatable structures can’t be denied.
We are a sucker for anything using Kirei board, so we were delighted last weekend at BKLYN Designs to discover the material in new form - in Object Interior’s lovely Coup Dresser.
The Coup Storage System combines beautiful modern lines with environmental sustainability by using 100% recycled and renewable materials. The dresser is composed of Kirei board, recycled steel, and recycled paper, and comes in a variety of different colors and sizes. If orange is a little too much for you, you can also get the sides in white, black, grey, and blue. (Custom colors are also available). I want one!
Did you ever have one of those lamps as a kid with a cut-out shade that cast silhouettes on the wall? Something about the combination of light and imagery could magically transport you to a more ethereal place. Artist-turned-lighting designer Andrea Claire has a sophisticated take on this idea, turning landscape photographs into lovely cylindrical lamps.
The idea seems deceptively simple: take a panoramic nature photograph, bend in a circle, afix to the inside of a linen lampshade. Yet the craft of the lamps, together with the beauty of the chosen images illustrate the designer’s unique vision.
Be sure to tune into your local PBS station this week for Edens Lost and Found: How Ordinary Citizens are Restoring Our Great American Cities, a new four part PBS mini-series profiling sustainable community planning and design initiatives in Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia.
Last September, we published a “How To” for making your own biodiesel. We had huge response (mostly positive, some critical).
Since then, gas prices have continued to rise, and things are not getting better where oil resources are concerned. Because of this, we’ve decided today to repost our recipe for biodiesel. Since the initial posting it’s been tweaked slightly in response to some reader feedback.
Read on to learn how you can have a healthier, cheaper, more environmentally-friendly ride.
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One of our first and most enduring design loves at Inhabitat is Scrapile. In the year since we first discovered them at BKLYN Designs 2005, they’ve come to epitomize sexy, cutting-edge sustainable design. Carlos Salgado and Bart Bettencourt walk their talk with their designs, which are made entirely from reclaimed and recycled wood.
Jill had a chance to see Scrapile’s newest products last weekend at this years BKLYN DESIGNS. Their signature multi-layered wood now comes in chairs, side tables, and hanging box shelves. We can’t get enough — if we could, we’d have Scrapile walls!
+ Scrapile
Design week is almost upon us in New York, and the biggest show of the season is of course, the International Contemporary Furniture Fair at the Javits Center. This year, ICFF is getting greened up by “The Green6,” a booth dedicated entirely to providing gorgeous evidence of a new generation of design, in which sustainability is an indispensable aspect of a good product. Green6 will feature six of New York’s leading sustainable design studios: Brave Space (makers of the long-adored Tetris shelves), Cambium Studio, Fire & Water, Niche Design, Moe Design Studio, and Vivavi by Delano Collection.
(above: new PoppyCotton pillow, Rhubarb Decor shelf and Scrapile side table)
All of you savvy Inhabitat readers know that sustainable = sexy when it comes to design. However, we realize that there is still a stigma out there in general culture that equates sustainable design with straw bale houses and ugly hemp sandals. Fortunately, more and more designers and media outlets are providing examples of stylish sustainable design to conquer that misperception. Now, HauteGREEN show, the big eco-design event of the year is coming to New York City this weekend, and we can’t wait to check it out:
In Bart Bettencourt’s warehouse over in Williamsburg, over 40 of the best and brightest sustainable designers will be exhibiting their work, showing innovative and sexy examples of eco-friendly furniture, lighting and accessories.
+HauteGREEN show
Saturday through Monday, May 20-22, 12-7pm
If you’re not a little soggy already, you must have heard by now about the deluge of rain that has been soaking New England for the past week, producing the some of the worst flooding the region has seen in 70 years. I just can’t help wondering how things might be improved if green roofs played a more dominant role in conventional building practices. Instead of acres of non-porous asphalt, concrete and other materials funneling stormwaters straight into overburdened drainages, we might have thousands of green rooftop oases to drink up the downpour!
One of the best finds I made at BKLYN Designs this weekend was discovering new design collective EverySpace Designs. The three designers have a portfolio of beautiful pieces which take simple, basic components and combine them in innovative ways to create fresh, unique designs - inevitably evoking a “why didn’t I think of that?”
This beautiful Arrange shelf is a perfect example: take a shelf, add test tubes, insert flowers! Straightforward as it is, I have never seen anything quite like this before. The contrast between the basic wooden shelf, the fragile glass test-tubes, and the sprig of flowers makes it a stunning piece. If only all furniture came with test-tube vases attached!
One of the best new things I saw at BKLYN Designs over the weekend was Uhuru Design’s Stoolen chair. Reminiscent of a tree stump, this awesome cylindrical seat is actually composed of recycled wood scraps held in shape by a pressurized aluminum bicycle rim (also recycled of course). The whole chair is 100% recycled - and manages to be as beautiful and evocative as it is environmentally friendly.
The Stoolen is available in a couple different sizes and types of wood.
In honor of Mother’s Day, we thought we’d cover some mom-friendly (and kid-friendly) contemporary design. If you have energetic little ones but still want to maintain a stylish design aesthetic, then Iglooplay is the furniture for you. I don’t even have kids, yet checking out Iglooplay’s adorable Mod Rocker and Tea Pods makes me wanna get started soon, so I have a reason to buy these insanely cute bent-ply pieces!
I went to BKLYN Designs this weekend and I must say that the exhibition was even better this year than last. The show featured 55 different Brooklyn designers this year, bringing back old faves like Scrapile and BraveSpace, as well as adding plenty of hot new up-and-comers like EverySpace and ObjectInteriors.
Below are some quick pics so far, for all of my photos from the event, check out my Flickr feed photostream:
What was once an oversized and overlooked backyard toolbox has suddenly become a desirable hang out, thanks to designs like the Modern Shed and the recently released Metroshed. This 13′ x 8′ Metroshed pool house comes flat-packed and ready for installation next to your [real or imaginary] pool.
If your pool is more like a mirage, you can also place the Metroshed in the yard, next to the house, or even on a rooftop. It has a cedar beam post frame, aluminum sliding doors, wood floor panels, and ventilation shutters with bug screens. They also have a number of other sizes and designs, including the Metroship.
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