Orb Audio Speakers

Z's absolute pride-find, I think I will get the baby speaker set to surprise him since he's so happy to have found them and has all these ideas about where to put them in the house and the kitchen.

Unfortunately not much of a surprise as he realized I had tracked them down online. He says I'm a menace at the computer.

This company Orb Audio makes their Mod1 and Mod2 satellites are manufactured in the United States by craftspeople with years of experience in electronics assembly. Their claim is to be made for performance as guaranteed by a boutique employee-owned company that can pay attention to detail and manufacture smaller batches of handmade speaker systems each month, than an office space eating, advertising, corporate junky that has to mass produce tens of thousands of speakers a month.

Their speakers are all hand-made and come in neat copper and steel finishes, along with the regular patent white and black. Customer service is taken care of by every single employee of the company, from the designer-engineers and president downward. Z says it is a big deal that all the different audio guides and magazines have given glowing reviews of the product and there is not a single one of their product for resale on Ebay. I must say the company has a sense of humour, their speaker stands are called HOSS. Hunk of Solid Steel.

Recess in the master bedroom

The original masterbedroom, or what is now the study, has a very ugly recess in the wall. This is because one side of that recess houses the air-conditioning units but to me, it's probably the fault of incompetent design in the first place.

In the showroom, they disguised this as a inset for the bed and headboard and I did think that if the bed was here, it would be a back-lighted shelving or feature shelf area. However, we also felt it would actually make a very good study area with a streamline study table and shelving.

Not wanting to pay for a full in-built wardrobe and study table construction cost, we designed something which hopefully keeps the clean look, will provide a place for documents, box files and books and thanks to Leslie, simply utilises some great natural grain teak wood planks.

New pictures up, wall hacked at BR2

This is the second bathroom, looking into the BR2 and MBR, now the doorways have been removed so there's a large hole of sorts.


These three pictures are from the outside and inside of BR2 where the doorway and wardrobe have been removed.




This last picture is from MBR looking back down the corridor to the living room, shows the large hole that is in the ceiling right now! The ceiling board is actually this less-than-one inch of cardboard! It hides a lot of wiring and the telephone/internet/TV cables.

WODD Design, finding a dining and living room

Z and I share a thing for raw wood. It's one of those strange things where he prefers it in its hunky, chunky form (hence my term "lumberjackish cottage") and I like it better when combined with raw steel or glass.

We had thought early on that the dining table ought to have an element of wood and I collated a bunch of maybe four different tables for him to have a look at. The funny thing is, it's always that you don't necessarily have a lot of pickings in the end because there are many choices that you just aren't willing to accept.

Our options were a pure wood table, a wood and marble top table, a wood and brushed aluminium frame table. The primary teak furniture places in Singapore are Scanteak, The Shophouse, Originals, Gallery 278, Lava East and of course, Barang Barang. However, there are also many places in Kaki Bukit or Defu Lane where you can get the same sort of look for much less and also pick up solid pieces of wood grain that you can have created into a table.

In our many weeks of traversing furniture places, we had somehow managed to skip Wodd Design. But with a tagline "raw living for today" we were bound to come back to it eventually.

Leslie, the proprietor of Wodd Design, has been in the wood furniture and manufacturing business for many years but recently started out to start his own store and brand, based on original designs in raw teak with oiled finishes, combined with brushed matt aluminum in a swirl texture.

His work is showcased in local projects like the Ardmore and overseas projects in Dubai but he remains a really humble, obliging and artistic man.

What drew us to his designs, other than the clean lines, was the comfort factor, Z loved his chairs because they were made in I suppose what could be called Caucasian sizes, that is, they are deep and wide with very good back support and sturdy cushioning. He particularly liked the depth of the sofa which at 90cm - 1 meter, allows you to sit cross-legged on the seat.

My only input was that we should have coordinated elements in the dining and living room, such as the same woods (because the timber decking would be a different wood, as would the antique console) and similar brushed aluminuim legs. The colour of the sofa upholstery and the dining chairs is also the same, with the sofa cushions edged in a contrasting coloured piping. It also mattered to me that all the furniture be raised off the ground to make cleaning easier.

In the end, we kept the coffee table out of the order, pending our space constraints. But I felt that if we couldn't find anything else, we would take the square raw wood stumps and overlay it with a glass table...this is definitely me indulging Z's lumber-jack preferences! But hopefully in a more clean-cut way!

Call Leslie at 96234822, Yvonne at 98776792
www.wodd.com.sg (mail@wodd.com.sg or leslie@wodd.com.sg)

Painting Tracks

One thing that works really well in the house, if you are an art lover, is painting tracks. These plastic tracks are often inexpensive and relatively discreet. They can be installed at the top edge of particular walls and used to suspend cables on which to hang and move paintings.




Strangely a lot of contractors have never heard of these track systems and ask clients to get their own system which they will then install. This is the system that Merlin sells at Takashimaya, which is from http://www.stas.nl

Of course, I have yet to go down and purchase one. I am so behind schedule and jet lagged still!

Moulding

One day, I want to make a house with waist-high moulding. A kid's room, so that the child develops a European appreciation for indoor heights.

Wallpaper madness- Omexco Cannabis

God Bless Goodrich. I could wallpaper forever, or create room and rooms in the endless textures and combinations. Not for the first time, I feel like I don't actually want to live here, rather to do it up and move on to the next project, the next home.

This is from the Omexco Cannabis collection. Tender green, ochre-yellow, sagebrush-gray - natural colors of cannabis warmed by summer sun, complemented by natural shades of ground, eggplant, or red wine will bring natural disengagement into the home.

The paper of these wall-coverings actualizes deferent kinds of wicker-works made from hempen straws. This ubiquitous plant is growing all over the world, so the collection will allows the use of Japanese matting, Russian gunny, or bamboo tropical jalousies in interiors.

Which Wallpaper to choose?

We are trying to look for three wallpapers, a possibility for the lift lobby, a light blue one for the masterbedroom and a fun but gentle light tan/biege one for the spare bedroom. I adored the pale flat blue-green colours and the biege-on-biege tonal thin vertical striped textured wallpaper. Very american pennsylvania house.

The more radical choices have been a mottled pale shiny green-blue-silver model-esque sheet for the lift lobby, a gorgeous hand-painted plantation house motif of budding flowers or sparrowed trees. I'm dying to put in a chintzy toile-de-jouy farmer prints...or leather stiched, or lizard skin wallpaper?

After some consideration, these two were shortlisted for the spare bedroom with colour-matched walls. What do you think?

Stemware- Ikea and others

At a wine sale with a friend last week, I came across their 40% sale on Restaurant Series Riedel glasses which are much more affordable and apparently also much more durable. He decided to get a set as a housewarming gift, which is really generous, thank you!
I've always had a long-standing love affair with stemware and glassware and it's always a pleasant surprise (especially when in a guy's house) to find coordinated sets of plates, particularly large presentation plates and drinkware. It usually means he is a good cook and an avid entertainer!




Back in college, I used to take my cravings out on Crate and Barrel and Williams and Sonoma, agglomerating a collection of pasta plates, trumpet flutes and a couple of pitchers, though not their iconic Ona Pitcher. Looking back, their $3.95 glassware was both quality and a great price, even, or perhaps, especially compared to Singapore store offerings and I now wish I had got their lowball glasses which I had totally no use for in college!

So we have some things, since I shipped my stuff back to Singapore, the new stemware and I came across a Bodum sale which looked pretty attractive at Robinsons (once I figure out, are Bodum cups better as tea mugs or should them be with a handle?).




When I feel like being more creative with wedding gifts, I go to the Zwiesel store that's down the road from my office. I couldn't find a picture of their gorgeous coloured glasses, which they were making in these dark aubergine to light amber hues for some commemorative anniversary but they have some great decanters and lowball glasses. I always think of Schott-Zwiesel as more of a whisky-brandy house as opposed to Riedel's wineglasses, I don't know why.






In Singapore, we are sadly remiss in the "medium tier" category of glassware, indeed homeware offerings and the department store drinkware offerings are also unreasonable. Of course, there's always Ikea and I can tell you that's where the highball and water glasses will come from!

Sheets for an Egyptian

Egyptian cotton, combed cotton and sateen cotton sheet sets, containing a fitted sheet, a flat sheet and two sham pillow cases. I won't go into the boring differences of each kind here, you can read that yourself.

Thread count: 800-1000. Price: $60-90 USD on www.overstock.com. Another reason the Robinsons Great Sale isn't that great.

Thanks to brilliant, wonderful friends (you know who you are), I grabbed these in white and seaglass blue, they look amazing and yes, they feel hotel-heavenly-awesome.

ID Layout for Rooms

While Z was away, I thought I'd put together in a comprehensive way, all the furniture that we had shopped, seen and picked over the months, as well as a colour scheme that worked with the structural form of the house.

Am planning to go lighter in the dining and living rooms, given the space, the lightness of the marble and the view of the surroundings. These rooms are flooded with great natural light during the day and can probably see a bit of a city scape at night. This means these rooms are shaded in medium tone woods, more glass, chrome, linen and seagrass knits in khaki, white and yellow.

The colour should get progressively darker toward the more private rooms in the house with the bedroom and study in darker brown woods with more luxurious and cooler tone walls and fabrics in pale blue, green and greys.

You probably can't see the details from the drawings though!

Custom and Carpentry, Tables and Chairs

The funny thing is, the more you see of furniture, the more you realize that it's the same as fiction, there are only 12 unique plots in the world (or was it 13?)

I saw a brilliant table in the Edge magazine, from Allgreen's Viva showflat. The table had a simple light-coloured wooden frame and a carrera (white with seams of grey) marble top. In the picture it was portrayed with those Hans Wegner-esque wing-back woven ratten chairs which I'm pretty sure were Not the originals.

I called the Allgreen office and was directed to the Viva showroom office, from there I was directed to Suying Designs on River Valley road, which does brilliant work but only for large projects and from there to the Viva design director who said helpfully, "Oh, you want the contact of my supplier?"

Yes, please.

The cost of the table? $2400...just like the table, it's fairly hefty! The other way to do it, is to get woodworker to make the frame, then source the carrera marble myself. Through more research, I discovered the chairs are available at Lorgan's Repro place in Pasir Panjang, or at Space at Millenia Walk (spidey sense says those are the real things) or else at Room and Board.com in the US.

The hunt for a table and chair set continues but I now have some pretty dope carpenter contacts. For the particular table or this one, featured below, which is available also at AIR division, call Elise. The table pictured isn't extraordinary but it's streamline shape comes from the thin rectangle frame legs which most places can't do because it requires strong enough wood to support a heavy table top.



These photos don't do any of their pieces justice, but suffice to say they can make you almost anything you wish, especially becautiful tables.

Elise from BM Best Renovation Pte Ltd
Tel: 64812933 Fax: 64810972
Ah Meng 9088 5780 (Carpenter for Allgreen table)
Ah Hua 90084378 Cosmic Woodworks No 21 Kim Chudn Terrace cosmicwoodworks@singnet.com.sg

Lestari Furniture- The Bed and Shoe Cabinet

Should one trust an Indonesian furniture maker? Well, since Amy has been so amazing at firstly, tracking down good deals and secondly, being able to coordinate with the company, I have had nothing but a good experience so far.

The good thing is the company came through recommendations and they are featured in many wood-focused websites. They use mostly mahagony timber, teak wood and munggur (samanea saman), which was introduced to Indonesia by the dutch 300 years ago to shade plantations and roadways.

The plantation wood is bought from department of forestry as government owned forest enterprise in central Java. The company has a scary website given their antique and repro french furniture but they can do really good work. Check it out. http://www.furniture-export.20m.com/

Decided to put the bed, shoe cabinet and am contemplating putting the coffee table on order from them. The process of designing and ordering has been really interesting, Amy had us compile a detailed order, specifying our instructions, measurements and pictorial diagrams for each item.


This is important for us anyway because the second bedroom, now the main bedroom, doesn't have a lot of space (length) so the room cannot accomodate a very thick headboard nor extra-long bed frame.




The shoe cabinet is going to be a light salek (straw bamboo) colour to match the main doorframe, with the doors of the first picture and the legs of the second. I wasn't able to show the internal diagrams that I drew for the shelving but it was actually very helpful to be able to custom the width and the shelf heights for the shoes and shoe boxes.



The designs are relatively simple anyway, although I was entirely envious of my friends' Chinese-wrought blackwood and salek furniture and black neo-Victorian chair and table set that had far more stylish patterns. It just goes to show their great taste!

The best part of this service is definitely the price. I think the bed came up to a grand total of $225 USD and the shoe cabinet for $167 (probably because of all the extra work for the shelves). Even with shipping charges, it will probably be much cheaper than anything we could purchase here .

The ability to custom make something or rather anything you have in mind for a fraction of the price is so exciting and fantastic. I was definitely tempted to make a few more smaller pieces- we definitely need a dressing vanity in the bedroom, a low seat for the lift lobby and a high console with a drawer or lower shelving for Z's coffee corner in the dining room. I just hope our existing order comes out like planned!