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.
The bathroom is one of the only rooms in a multibodied household where we’re expected and encouraged to lock ourselves inside. With that kind of permission, it makes sense to use this private space as a luxurious sanctuary. Make the most of your haven by giving it the proper lighting.
I spoke with two lighting experts about how best to transform a bathroom into a relaxing, functional refuge with light. Here’s their advice.
Oodles of time and research go into designing corporate workspaces, but home offices are different. People creating office spaces for themselves usually don’t have access to all of the studies that have been done to determine what design aspects allow them to work best.
Research from the social and physical sciences has shown that anyone can create a home office that allows for more productivity. Try these 7 tips to see if they work for you.
From the folks at YardSaleHelper.com
Imagine a world where every night whenever a family goes to bed, they press a button and 2 ton steel walls close down over their entire house; where everyone has their own personal police officer living in their basement to be sure everything is always alright; and where people are equal, thus, having nothing that others could covet. This world sounds safe, but at a very high and controlling cost.
Now imagine a world where all there is to protect a family is a small steel bar in a wooden door, or a glass window, where the police take at least 15 minutes to respond to a call, and where there are millions of men and women who do not have anything and feel the need to rob for drugs, money or sheer thrill. This world sounds more easy going, but also potentially scary.
It would be agreed that the second scenario is the world today, and everything goes alright, until something goes wrong. Luckily, with home security systems people are able to feel as if they are that much closer to existing in the top scenario. As soon as anything goes wrong in a residence the security alarm goes off, an office is called to immediately phone the police, and the criminal breaking in will generally leave from fear. Any individual who is hoping for steel doors, and in-house policemen should consider this option, because it is one of the safest and most realistic ones available.
An article I found on AGBeat caught my attention.
The City Council for Palo Alto, California unanimously adopted a new policy making it illegal to sell a new home without an electric car charging station, betting big on electric vehicles – perhaps as the city is home to luxury electric vehicle maker Tesla?
Read the entire article here.
Not long ago a friend let us borrow her hybrid car so we could travel from Port Angeles, Washington, to Seattle. The car was amazingly energy efficient. A really cool feature was the dashboard display, which provided constant feedback on energy use and source. For example, when we were waiting at a drawbridge, we could see just when the gas engine provided power and when the car was in battery mode only. And while in motion, the display kept us informed as to how many miles per gallon we were getting. Sure enough, having that instant feedback altered the way I drove, going a little slower and not being, as my wife would say, Speed Racer all the time.
And the car was quite comfortable, even luxurious. It was a larger sedan that I could fit in comfortably, and it had a terrific sound system. Not once did we feel like we were giving up something in the name of efficiency. Which brings up the question: If we can build cars like this, why can’t we do the same for houses?
Well, the good news is we can. Here’s just one example: a home designed by Lake/Flato Architects, where some wonderful architecture is combined with energy efficiency for a truly special home.
Lighting tends to be one of the most overlooked and under-appreciated aspects of a kitchen during the design process. There is an art to lighting a kitchen, though lighting usually goes unnoticed unless it’s planned poorly. And that isn’t discovered until after the contractor is long gone.
Remember the days when kitchens were lit with a single fixture in the center of the ceiling and maybe some fluorescent accents that would constantly flicker? There’s no excuse for that anymore, thanks to the vast array of lighting options and industry experts available to devise a custom plan for your kitchen.
I spoke with two such experts, interior designer Katie Anderson and lighting designer Randall Whitehead, about the importance of investing time and money into a proper lighting plan, and how to design the best scheme for any kitchen.
Nest, the “learning thermostat” maker founded by former Apple’s senior vice president of its iPod division, is reportedly working on a smart smoke detector, according to former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin.
Kara Swisher of AllThingsD adds that it will be called Protect, and be part of a series of smart devices, including the original thermostat.
Nest’s thermostat does more than turn your furnace and your air conditioning on and off. Nest’s product learns your schedule – when you’re home, when you’re away, how you like the temperature set when you’re there – and figures out how to set itself. It also takes commands from a smartphone, and connects to the household Wi-Fi. A built-in LCD display shows you temperature and current operations, all built into a rotary interface that’s familiar to most people who have used dial-based thermostats.
Read the rest on iMore
There’s something about the sound of a vinyl record that can’t be beat. Today’s infographic informs us that vinyl sales have increased 17.7% since 2011. And I have to say, I don’t really know people who buy CDs anymore, what everybody really wants is records. There’s something ritualistic about putting on a record that might satisfy people as much as the actual music does. In high school I practically lived at my best friend’s house, who also happened to be my neighbor, and every time it rained we would put on Bridge over Troubled Water, by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and listened to all of its vinyl-ly goodness, paired with raindrops. If we had done this with a CD, I don’t think the end result would have been the same.
There’s quite a bit of novelty and nostalgia wrapped up in record players themselves, and I think a lot of people are catching onto this. Whether it’s their sound–a kind gravelly and familiar heaviness in many cases–that makes us happy, or the attractiveness of the record player itself. What’s old is cool again–we’ve expressed this with vintage clothes, styles, and interests, and we’re now expressing this in the way we listen to music.
Check out today’s infographic for the low-down on vinyl records. I will leave you now with a quote from the great book High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby. “What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?” [Via]
