Emmanuel Fonte | Music | Art | Leadership
If music be the food of love, play on. Emmanuel Fonte website is about music, art, real estate, architecture, design and decor. Occasionally, I talk about my other passion, hockey.
There’s nothing like the feel of a crackling fireplace when the temperature drops, but not all of us are so lucky as to have one ready to fire up in the living room.
Warm those cockles then with this infographic from Compact Appliance and get some ideas of modern versions that could keep you cozy for the rest of the winter.
A well-planned ground-floor addition makes room for a streamlined kitchen and dining area in a London terraced houseWhen Paul Brivati was asked to design the kitchen for this London terraced house, he soon became involved in rethinking the entire ground floor. “There are four bedrooms upstairs, but downstairs was not that great,” he says. “It was cramped and didn’t flow well. We wanted to give the owners and their two children more of an open family home by extending out to create a kitchen and dining room that lead into the garden.”
Brivati cast his design eye over the garden and into the hallway too, where he and his team recommended moving a wall and installing sleek storage to help the entrance flow into the house. This attention to the overall space made the finished kitchen not simply a beautiful room sitting at the back of the house, but one that is fully integrated into a connected, flowing and family-friendly ground floor.
The Hardworking Home: From Juliet balconies to movable walls, here’s how to make a home of any size feel more open, flexible and funNew homes are getting bigger. The size of the average American home built in 2013 was 2,600 square feet, which is bigger than ever, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. While it can be nice to have such a spacious dwelling, many of us live in much older homes, built early in the previous century, with smaller floor plans that reflect the routines of a different era. Many people are continuing to flock to urban environments, too, where living spaces are generally smaller. So how do you make a smaller home feel bigger? If you have limited space, consider these design solutions to improve the livability of your home.
Homer Simpson seems to be one of the more well-off characters that we’ve listed below. With affordable living being at 30% of one’s monthly income – Homer dominates with only spending about 15% of income on living. Other TV stars aren’t so lucky. Full house is devastated when taken into account San Francisco’s housing boom. With modern day prices even Don Draper of Mad Men would be spending too much on living, although I’d say it’s worth it to live in his homes.
Our TV stars seem to have good jobs and no one is living on the minimum wage. Well, there’s always It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Who knows how that crew pays rent. [via]
The Hardworking Home: Halls can do more than connect rooms. The ones here house bookcases, cabinets, office space and moreHow hard does your hallway work? If it does little more than provide a way to get from point A to point B, consider if you could use your hall for something more. From simple DIY wall-mounted storage to custom bookshelves and built-in workstations, here’s how to get the hardworking hallway your home deserves.
Companies are betting big on connected devices in 2015. Here’s a look at what’s to comeCompanies that make appliances and electronics for the home will be doing two main things at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on January 6 to 9: exhibiting their smart-home tech products and explaining to people just what a smart-home tech product is.
That’s because while there’s obvious interest, even demand, for devices that allow people to adjust lighting or unlock a door from a smartphone, the average homeowner isn’t quite sure what to make of it all yet. There are so many different products running different software systems, each with its own smartphone app, that it’s hard to know where to begin in making a home more “connected.”
Searching for Connection
For now the smart-home frontier is more like the Wild West, with many developers creating their own operating systems independent of one another or compatible only with certain brands. It’s somewhat good for innovation but sort of bad for the consumer, because it’s hard to make sense of the overwhelming number of products and which ones have the ability to coordinate with others.
For example, you might own a smart thermostat, a smart light dimmer package and a smart door lock, but all three could have very different systems that don’t necessarily communicate with one another. So, you’re left to toggle between different apps, interfaces and panels to control them all. As a consumer, you have to do some serious research before buying smart-home products if you want them to be compatible in the future. For now it can be like having a separate remote for the DVD player, TV, stereo, ceiling fan and so on. At some point you just say, “Well, how is this smart?”
The Hardworking Home: Laptops, phones and tablets now have a safe space in this kitchen, keeping the countertops uncluttered“Everything tends to wind up on the kitchen counters,” says interior designer Harmony Weihs. While working on a breakfast nook in Jeff and Amy Miller’s Mercer Island, Washington, kitchen, she couldn’t help but notice all of the phones, tablets and laptops that had overtaken this couple’s kitchen counters. “They had wires everywhere, even dragged across a gas range,” Weihs says. “I said, ‘Yeah … so … this is a safety hazard!’” In addition to safety concerns and keeping the electronics sheltered from spills and grease, the designer wanted to help the couple free up their cooking and prep space. She designed a freestanding cabinet with built-in power strips that not only cleared up their countertop space but also added to it.
Take a different approach this year, making simple, positive changes that add up before you know itIt’s January. Oh, the humanity. Perhaps you live in the Southern Hemisphere or some other warm and sunny place where those two words don’t bring a sense of doom so profound it propels one back into bed with a plate of cookies.
Maybe you are Naturally Organized and, now that all the holiday decor is put away, you just can’t wait to get the place cleaned up! You’ve dusted the lightbulbs and — honestly, I don’t have the strength to try to imagine what else you’re doing.
For some of us, the mere thought of the new year opens up a 55-gallon drum of worry and stress. How can it even be January again? Last year we were going to simplify and declutter. We were going to lose a bunch of weight and become profoundly spiritual or flat-out profound. We were going to meditate and plant an organic garden and read a ton of books, become more grateful and get super in shape — which is not the same thing as losing weight, let me tell you — and we were going to give up gluten, or was it sugar? We were going to go paleo! That’s it, except we couldn’t figure out how to make noodles out of squash. Were we going to give up meat? Dairy?
I know we were going to entertain more, practice hospitality and open our homes, make deeper connections and all that — you know, build community; but before we could have anyone over, we absolutely had to clean the place up and get totally organized! It was going to be the best, most productive, spiritually aware year ever, and here it is January again and we’re having a spot of trouble getting out of bed with or without the cookies.
Do you feel me?
