Furniture Designed

Computer Programming, Architecture And Furniture

On November 5 of this year, Christopher Alexander was awarded the Vincent Scully Prize. The National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., established the Prize in 1999 to recognize exemplary practice, scholarship or criticism in architecture, historic preservation and urban design.

Alexander is noted for an unusual combination of accomplishments. He is known as the "father" of the pattern language movement in computer science. But he is better known as an influential architect.

Alexander's book (written with several other contributors), A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction has been hugely influential on architects and builders, although some architects have disapproved of the idea that the nuances of designing great buildings. Slate.com recently published a nice overview of Alexander's influence.

Although there are many wonderful books about furniture design, including many overviews, I don't think any have been as important and influential as Alexander's book has been to architecture. Alexander's books is useful for furniture designers and interior designers. His thoughts about sunlight, in particular, are crucial to creating a great room.

I'd love to see suggestions of books that might be the "Pattern Language" of furniture design.

We're All A-Twitter

Yesterday the fabulous Leslie Carothers answered the question Who is Furniture Brands International? in one tweet.

If you need more than 140 characters (and you're dying to take the awesome StyleFinder Quiz), visit the new Furniture Brands web site. 

And if you need lots and lots more than 140 characters (and some pretty sweet furniture), visit all our brand sites:

• Broyhill
• Drexel Heritage
• Henredon
• Hickory Chair
• Laneventure
• Maitland-Smith
• Pearson Furniture (and Pearson Textiles)
• Thomasville

Would also telling you about the Henredon blog, the Pearson Textiles blog, the Hickory Chair blog and the Facebook pages for Broyhill, Lane Furniture and Thomasville be too much? Okay then, we won't tell you.

Fine Furniture Is The Future

More than 3/4 of home furnishing shoppers are looking for quality these days, according to a recent survey by Furniture Today and HGTV. That's great news to those of us who love beautiful furniture.

Here's what a few of the people surveyed had to say:

“I’m looking for better quality products that will last longer for the price rather than cheaply-made items.”

“I’m looking for items that are very well made.”

“The economy has made me even more apt to buy quality rather than quantity.”

The rest of the survey results will appear in Furniture Today's new issue, out December 7, 2009.

A Checklist For Mixing Patterns

Mixing patterns on multiple pieces within one space can look like Holly Hobbie exploded or it can create a chic and elegant blend of great prints and textures. 

So, how do you make sure you're not heading into Holly Hobbie territory? With a handy checklist!

Is there something tying all the patterns together? (Yes? One point for chic!)

In the room from Hickory Chair in the picture to the right, it's color. The saturated blue with white repeats from pattern to pattern. You could repeat the same shape (maybe a ginkgo leaf motif?) Or you could go with a color theme like jewel tones or earth tones. But there has to be something that ties the patterns together.

Have you thought about texture as well as pattern? (Yes? That's another point towards chic.)

Don't go too crazy with both pattern and texture. It's okay, in fact it's recommended, to mix in a few different textures, but try to treat each new texture the same as you would an additional pattern. For example, choose several patterns in fabrics with similar sheen and then one velvet or chenille for some variety instead of having every pattern in a different texture.

Does the scale of your patterns vary enough? (Yes, three chic points.)

Fall High Point Premarket Scheduled

Furniture Today is reporting that the fall High Point Premarket has been scheduled for Sept. 13-14. (BTW--the spring premarket will be March 15-16.)

Here's what Furniture Today had to say about High Point Premarket:

"Held about a month before each High Point Market, premarket aims to give retailers a chance to preview major product collections, secure distribution, and strengthen relationships with key vendors and company principals, according to market officials."

3 Ideas For Historic Church Style

I used to live in a renovated, de-consecrated Catholic church in the downtown of a small Virginia town. It was one of the most beautiful and special places I've lived.

Several sites have posted in the last couple of months about a couple who have painstakingly restored a church in Northumberland in the U.K. for their home (pictured left, also here and here).

There's also a restored church home from the Netherlands and a Dutch bookstore in a former medieval church that are great examples of modern uses for historic church spaces.

Looking at these pictures and remembering my old church home got me thinking about how you could use furniture to re-create the feeling of a restored church home.

To re-create the feeling of a restored church home using furniture and accessories, you'd have to have 3 important things.

1. The right mix of old and new.

Part of what's so special about living in any historic building is that sense of the past and the present right next to each other.

To re-create the feeling of a church home, pick one very formal style from the past and one less formal style from the present and mix them together.

For example, you could choose 18-century French as your formal style and "cottage" as your more casual modern style. Both styles are a little romantic, plus the neutral colors and natural materials of cottage style would provide a fresh, calm backdrop to elegant details inspired by royal French style.

Other possible combos: gothic with arts and crafts; American colonial with shabby chic; 19th-century English with Bauhaus.

The Dutch church home pictured above has very stark, modern style. But the building itself has the gothic historic details. By including a few select pieces that have the feel of a certain historic period, you can give you space the historic feel of a church home interior.

Can You Live Like Edward Cullen?

Apartment Therapy reports that the stylish home of the Cullen family of vampires from the new movie New Moon is for sale.

The home in the movie is ultra-stylish and modern, just perfect for the vampire Edward Cullen.

For us warm-blooded types, we might want to soften things a little. We'll keep the sleek lines, solid colors and uncluttered zen of it all. But let's lose some of the harsh modern shapes in favor of contemporary and transitional designs.

That red sectional is number one. It has to be a squared-off sectional with the option for an open chaise-like feel at one end. We used Henredon's "design your own" feature to make a bright red one.

Then, those blue chairs. Love the round chairs with the square sectional, but slightly more traditional shapes seem a little more comfy and cozy.

Maybe a couple of the Wessex Chairs from Drexel.

Movies With Stylin' Furniture

Cote de Texas has been talking about Nancy Meyers because of her great use of furniture and interior designs in movies like Something's Gotta Give and The Holiday. (I think I remember the house in Something's Gotta Give better than the characters, and I'm not alone.)

So, we went looking for some other examples of striking interior design in movies and found all kinds of people who'd already thought about it.

• A design-loving list maker made a list of movies with great interior design on Amazon.com
• Peak of Chic looked at some wonderful vintage movie interiors
• Architectural Digest featured great movie houses
• Apartment Therapy came up with some nice examples of romantic movie sets
• Don't miss Design*Sponge's terrific series of "living in" posts, too, where she looks at style of all kinds of movies: Rosemary's Baby, Edwards Scissorhands, Dirty Dancing and more