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.
From a report in the Wall Street Journal.
Personally, I have found the Zillow tool great fun and often informative of trends and high-level statistics. The reality is, that as a valuation source, Zillow can’t possible know the intricacies of the home, street appeal, neighborhood conditions etc.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a long-range, mid-size wide-body, twin-engine jet airliner Boeing Commercial Airplanes. It seats 210 to 290 passengers, depending on the variant. Boeing states that it is the company’s most fuel-efficient airliner and the world’s first major airliner to use composite materials for most of its construction. The 787 consumes 20% less fuel than the similarly-sized Boeing 767. Some of its distinguishing features include a four-panel windshield, noise-reducing chevrons on its engine nacelles, and a smoother nose contour. developed by
The aircraft’s initial designation was 7E7, prior to its renaming in January 2005.The first 787 was unveiled in a roll-out ceremony on July 8, 2007, at Boeing’s Everett assembly factory, by which time it had become the fastest-selling wide-body airliner in history with 677 orders. By October 2011, 797 Boeing 787s had been ordered by 57 customers, with ILFC having the largest number on order.
The 787 development and production has involved a large-scale collaboration with numerous suppliers around the globe. Final assembly is at the Boeing Everett Factory in Everett, Washington. Aircraft will also be assembled at a new factory in North Charleston, South Carolina. Both sites will deliver 787s to airline customers. Originally planned to enter service in May 2008, the project has suffered from repeated delays and is now more than three years behind schedule. The airliner’s maiden flight took place on December 15, 2009, and completed flight testing in mid-2011. Final Federal Aviation Administration and European Aviation Safety Agency certification was received in late August 2011 and the first model was delivered in late September 2011.
If you want a home office but don’t have the space, consider converting another room. That’s what Crystal, the creator of today’s featured workspace, did to her dining room with only $105 and a few things she already owned.
The original dining room space was pretty dull, cluttered with old furniture and a table used to collect mail rather than seat dinner guests. As part of a sub-2,000-square foot house, wasted space is a big problem. Crystal decided to turn the dining room into the attractive workspace pictured above. She did this with a $105 budget, buying her a couple of table tops, filing cabinets, shelves, and a more modern lighting option (previously, the hanging light was a chandelier). She managed this by getting a few good deals at IKEA and buying second-hand whenever possible. This just goes to show how a little money can go a long way.
To see the before and after shorts, plus plenty of additional images, be sure to check out the full post over at The Weekend Homemaker: Home Office: Before and After
Creating a green residential oasis is no easy feat when faced on three sides with potentially nosy neighbors on an urban plot – the key is making the hard building decisions look easy.
A series of perforated metal, natural stone, cast-in-place concrete and glass deck walls frame the entryway to a relatively secluded-feeling series of indoor and outdoor spaces designed by Australian architect Michael Morris.
Softening the edges of these straight-lined design elements are a complementary set of vegetation-related strategies, starting with a row of young pines in front of the lot, followed by a series wild grasses suspended at eye level, an overhanging old peppercorn tree from an adjacent property and a series of semi-abstract green walls in the courtyard.
Inside, a simple repetitive use of red accents ties together disparate rooms, each designed in a pragmatic way to address its particular function, using conventional finishes and traditional materials in combination with contemporary aesthetic sensibilities.
There is nothing expressly novel about the material palette or the visual techniques employed, but in combination they show a remarkable sensitivity to site and context, and exert conscious control over all views in and out, all without feeling forced or otherwise artificial.
The 2011 National Association of Realtors® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers surveyed 5,708 home buyers and sellers, learning that the demographics of home buyers and types of homes being sold has shifted drastically this year, mostly due to job instability and insecurity as well as tightened lending.
Now, more buyers are married, older and have higher incomes and there is a striking lack of diversity in the home buyer pool with 85 percent of American buyers identifying themselves as Caucasian, and almost all were born in America and primarily speak English.
Why are consumers buying? They cite a desire to own a home as a top reason to buy with affordability close behind. Most people purchased a home because of life changes like a new baby, relocated job or empty nest, and because it was “just the right time to buy.”
The NAR study reveals that 19 percent of recent home buyers own more than one home, which is very promising as this number is up five percent in a year that various other reports indicate the economy is so bad that buyers are hesitant to buy a first or second home. “The increase speaks to those who are able to purchase a home in this market,” NAR reports, reiterating that stable buyers are not the buyers falling off of the map as they can qualify for a mortgage despite tightened lending.
According to the study, 74 percent of buyers over the age of 65 own a second or third home, and only one percent of buyers aged 18 to 24 owning more than one property. Ten percent of buyers aged 45 and up own an investment property in addition to the home they most recently purchased.
So, the second home market is actually performing well because it pulls from a buyer pool that is financially stable, but what are buyers’ plans for the future?
We reported that Trulia’s American Dream Survey revealed that two thirds of consumers over the age of 55 still anticipate they will purchase a second home in the future, while Coldwell Banker’s study on Baby Boomers offered similar results, noting that 87 percent of agent/broker respondents said that they have baby boomer clients who already own or are looking to own a second property for investment.
The Coldwell Banker study split Baby Boomers up into two groups, the first aged 47 to 55 and the other aged 56 to 65, which revealed very different results in buyer habits. Regarding second homes, more than one in three younger boomers are interested in buying a second home while only one in five older boomers are interested in buying an investment property.
Although this market is performing well and buyers have future plans, the disparity between those capable and interested and investing and those that are on low, fixed incomes is becoming wider. A recent Pacific Investment Management Company, LLC (PIMCO) report entitled “Are There Any Rungs Left on the Housing Ladder?” revealed that many seniors are becoming renters as they are now required to contribute 10 percent more of their pay to their retirement savings and have less disposable income, limiting their ability or willingness to upgrade their home or buy second homes which has long been a tradition in this segment of America.
The second home market is healthy, and the buyer pool tends to be older and plans to keep the American dreams of homeownership, land ownership and investment alive, but the haves and have nots, like many demographics in America, are becoming disparate.
I’m here to help: 206-713-3244 – email me. 
The role of government agencies in causing the housing bubble continues to be debated endlessly.
As such, it’s always a good idea to have this chart — posted today by Hale Stewart — of various housing bubbles around the world.
If you really think it was all Fannie and Freddie’s fault, then you have to explain why the U.S. just happened to have the same (roughly) arc of a housing boom as basically every other industrialized country all around the world at the same time.
Your thoughts?
I just found a Christmas album that will give you the warm festive feeling of the season. Michael Bublé is the consummate crooner, with a voice tailor-made for performing merry, holiday numbers. He is a hybrid of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin for the modern generation. He is at once a throwback and current—that’s not easy to do—but Bublé does it with grace, class, and most of all, infinite style! Bublé is the entire Rat Pack rolled into one.
The singer’s latest Christmas offering, simply titled Christmas, is a batch of standards and familiar fare, given the Bublé treatment. It’s a holiday marvel, one you will want to blast while wrapping presents, baking Santa-shaped cookies; sipping cider with a cinnamon stick floating in it; and decking the halls. Buble’s warm voice is worthy of an invite into all of your holiday parties. He doesn’t overdo it with chimes, bells and whistles, either! It’s all about that mellifluous voice with the backing arrangements produced by the genius of David Foster.
"It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" is as warm and toasty as a mug of peppermint-spiked hot cocoa and is true to Bublé’s Rat Pack style. His "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" is big-band, old world and epic. He partners with The Puppini Sisters (a headline act in their own right) for "Jingle Bells", with its bass-heavy kick contrasting with the female trio voices. Bublé is matched with fellow Canadian, Shania Twain for “White Christmas”. They make a decent team on the classic tune. "Silent Night" is rich and creamy, a true showpiece for Buble’s voice. On "Ave Maria," he shows his spiritual side. It may be the most beautiful he’s ever sounded. He turns "Blue Christmas" into a festive room-filler. The charts are world-class on Christmas.
A surprise song is "All I Want For Christmas is You," a sweeping re-make of Mariah Carey’s bouncy, upbeat original, but Bublé slows it down and gives it a gorgeous, slow and striking makeover. He makes the song fit his strengths. Few artists can take a popular song, cover it and give it such a twist that they reinvent , but that’s just what Bublé does.
The album is rounded out with the standards “Holly Jolly Christmas”, “Santa Baby” and “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”. Christmas, with its 15 strong songs has plenty of music for entertaining this holiday season. If you can’t tell, I absolutely recommend this CD!
Nothing quite says ‘urban blight’ like an abandoned, virtually windowless concrete tower sprouting up like a super-sized weed from the surrounding flat landscape. But what can you do with such a building, structurally sound but with no access to natural light and limited square footage on each floor?
The solution may sound counter-intuitive, but fits the situation like a glove: C. F. Moller Architects retrofitted the center as a service and circulation shaft, then suspended brand new dwellings on three of its four sides (leaving a key piece of history exposed on this last surface).
The resulting uneven rhythms give the visual appearance of something organically growing up alongside or out from the old structure rather than merely an additive cloak to its exterior, and the new residences within get to experience the historic center without sacrificing daylight or views.
“Many towns in Denmark have centrally located industrial silos; most are no longer in use, but continue to visually dominate the local skyline …. Around the tower, the apartments are built up upon a steel structure in eye-catching forms which protrude out into the light and the landscape – a bit like Lego bricks. This unusual structure with its protrusions and displacements provides all of the apartments with a view of Aarhus Bay.”
