Valentino Spring 2012

As I flipped through magazine after magazine, a particular trend caught my eye.

Louis Vuitton Spring 2012

Designers were embracing lace.

Dolce & Gabbana Spring 2012

A LOT of lace.

Which means that the current trend for vintage lace in interiors is only going to get stronger.  But how do you embrace the look without going full on frilly?  Here are some suggestions….

First off, you should limit yourself to only one, at most two, lace items in a room.  This vintage lace hanging lamp, from Etsy seller Nice, makes a great statement, without seeming fussy.  Plus, the shadows from the lace further soften the room.

Speaking of softening a room, that is the second thing you should take away from this post – lace works best as a way to introduce a softer line to rooms that would otherwise seem too harsh or stark.  So if there is a room in your house that feels dead or cold, try adding a touch of lace.

Lastly, keep in mind that the vintage lace look doesn’t actually have to be, well,… lace.  It can take the form of a stenciled floor…

a pretty piece of decorative ceramic (love these bird bowls!)…

or even a concrete curtain.

So go on, give vintage lace a try.  You KNOW you want to!

Oh, and to find out more about these images, and many other cool ways to use lace, check out my Trending – Vintage Lace board on Pinterest.

Thanks for visiting!

Rachel

Ah, let the dancing commence!   This lustrous oak herringbone parquet, which might have been reclaimed from a Parisian apartment, country dwelling, or even – be still my heart – a creaky old chateau, is now available in the U.S.!

Imported by Exquisite Surfaces, this antique French oak flooring is not only beautiful and steeped in history, it is also FSC certified!

I love the juxtaposition of centuries old oak boards with sleek, modern walls.  Each element enhances the other so well, creating a harmonious whole, don’t you think?

There really is nothing like real age to give life to a wood floor.  No manner of machine work, or even hand planning is ever going to recreate the enduringly lovely texture you find in an authentic reclaimed floor.

Exquisite Surfaces takes care to ensure that all of their reclaimed floor boards are from actual floors.  No cut beams, old factory wood, or siding is used.

Happily, Exquisite Surfaces also offers an entire line of natural oils, finishes and waxes that emit low or no (zero) VOCs, so you can maintain the sustainability of your floor.

You can see more of Exquisite Surfaces wonderful FSC certified antique oak flooring here.

Thanks for visiting!

Rachel

via Metropolitan Home

via Desire to Inspire

Via House Beautiful

image by Scott Frances via CocoCozy

So what do you think of this look?  Too cool, or too much?  Always nice to get other opinions, so feel free to comment below.

Thanks for visiting!

Rachel

How about if I pan out a little bit?

See it?  Next to the bridge?  No?  Well, see that big neighborhood right in the middle of the shot?  OK, now look underneath it…

There it is! Hidden beneath that neighborhood of fake streets, fake houses, fake grass, and even faker trees is a massive Boeing plant.

Those pictures were taken during WWII, when the B-17 bomber, also known as the Flying Fortress, was one of the most critical components of our war strategy.  This enormous Boeing plant in Seattle was churning planes out at a rate of up to 362 a month! The plant had to be hidden from potential enemy attack, so Hollywood art director John Detlie created an entire suburban neighborhood to hide it under.  Now that is some camouflage!

My Great Uncle Bill was the bombardier on one of these beautiful planes (sadly, it went down on his last mission and he was declared MIA).  If you ever have the chance to see one, you can marvel at how brave the boys were flying in them.  Many of the gunner’s positions were exceptionally dangerous.  Imagine sitting in a fish bowl on the underside of a plane, where everyone is shooting at you and the is barely room for you to get out, much less have a parachute, so you are essentially toast if the plane goes down.  That was the ball turret gunners position.  Yikes!

Anyway, I digress.  Back to that enormous plant…

It’s being deconstructed now, and Duluth Timber is salvaging as much of the wood as they can.  About 250,000 linear feet!

Some of these old growth beams are HUGE.  In the future they will be reused as building timber for new construction, flooring, millwork, and even furniture.  What a tale of American history you could tell if you had a piece of this reclaimed wood in your own home!

If that isn’t a whole lot of vintage Swedish design deliciousness, I don’t know what is!  Of course, at 9’8″ x 23′ (!), I’m not really sure how many homes could accommodate it, but I bet it would look amazing in the right setting.

Currently available from a curated collection of vintage Swedish Kilim rugs by Mansour.

Penny rounds, and their design sibling “hex tile”, have been around for over a century, as anyone who has been in the lobby of the old apartment building, or the bathroom in an older home would know. Recently there has been a revival in interest for penny rounds, whether for reasons of nostalgia or the fact that just so darn cheerful looking. The great thing is, they can also be very sustainable. Here are some of my favorite looks:

image via Apartment Therapy

I’ll start out with, Savoy, a pretty ceramic version with over 20% recycled content from Ann Sacks.

Daltile makes a simple, classic version in porcelain. In this image you can really see the versatility of a tile with such a small scale.  Great for curved surfaces!

Ann Sacks also makes a beautiful version in matte glass.  I’ve seen this installed and it is just luminous!

One of my all-time favorite materials is cork, and it just happens to make some of the best penny tile of all. Cut from discarded wine corks, these tiles are sustainable in so many ways.  I’ve installed this before, and it really does work as well as they say. Believe it or not, it’s put in just like any other tile, grout and all. Just seal it with a few coats of water-based urethane and you have yourself a durable flooring that can even be used in a shower.

image via Apartment Therapy

Of course if you want to be literal about it, you could actually make penny rounds out of pennies, as was done at New York’s Standard Hotel. Penny rounds usually come pre-spaced on mesh sheets, but I have to imagine some poor installers had to actually lay these out individually.

image via Apartment Therapy

Penny tile not doing it for you? How about nickel tile? Talk about one-upsmanship, this installation is more of a five-upmanship.

Penny Rounds are definitely a fun look, as well as a nice nod to the past, but do keep in mind that the smaller the tile, the greater quantity of grout will make up your floors surface. If you have grout issues, and many people do, this look may not be for you.

But what if even barn wood doesn’t have enough quirkiness for you?  What if you want to have something nobody you know has yet?  Well, maybe you should look into one of these unusual reclaimed wood floors:

Wine barrel flooring by Fontenay

1.  Wine Barrels - Created out of salvaged wine barrels, this flooring still bears all the stamps and other markings from its previous life.  Now you can eat off the floor and read off it too!

Trestle flooring by Trestlewood

2.  Train Trestle – There was once a gigantic train trestle (bridge) that spanned across Utah’s Great Salt Lake.  Rendered obsolete by the construction of a solid fill causeway in the 1960′s, the wood sat dormant for years.  Recently, a salvage operation began rescuing the tens of millions of board feet of Douglas Fir, much of it given a unique look due to  “pickling” for almost 100 years in the briny water.   I love the gray streaks in the flooring above.  Here’s a little video that will give you a good idea of how enormous the trestle was:

World Mix shipping crate flooring by Terra Mai

3.  Packing Crates – All over the world, goods are moved from place to place packed in wooden crates.  Often these crates are enormous, and constructed especially for the particular item contained within.  Therefore, they have a limited lifespan as crates, but they can be reclaimed into beautiful wood floors like the one above!

Pallet flooring done for RDF181

4.  Pallets – Wooden pallets are another product of the global economy and its love for transporting goods from there to here.  For an experimental space in Brussels, the Rotor design group used shipping pallets from a neighboring business to create a temporary wood floor.  Wonder if it’s still there?

5.  Snow Fence – In the wide open spaces of Wyoming, snow is a big problem.  As soon as you clear a highway, the snow just blows right back onto it from the adjacent fields and meadows.   The only way to keep the snow at bay is to literally fence it in.  Hence the term “snow fence”.   After several years of taming snow, the fences start to come apart, and the boards are reclaimed into wonderfully weathered flooring and other products.

Have you seen an unusual source for reclaimed wooden floors?  We’d love to hear about it, so feel free to add it to the list in the comments below!

Interstyle

Oceanside Glasstile

Vetrocolor

Oceanside Glasstile

Hakatai

So, what do you think?

TORLYS

EcoDomo

Veledo by Merida

TING (made of leather belts)

Click on an image to find out more about the company.

Now, back to bed and a cup of tea for me.

This beautiful “Blue Pine” flooring, by Greenway, LLC, isn’t the result of a clever dye job.  Instead it is a natural effect of Mountain Pine Beetle infestation on Lodgepole and Ponderosa Pines in many parts of North America.  The pine beetles are thriving – decimating vast areas of forest, due to global warming and the subsequent lack of the really cold winters needed to kill off the beetles.

Image by Erich G. Vallery, USDA Forest Service - SRS-4552, Bugwood.org

When the bark beetles infest a tree, it introduces a fungi to the sap, which impedes the tree’s ability to fight off the beetle’s damage, as well as turning the sap blue.  This blue color remains in the wood once it is harvested.

So what to do with the (sadly) increasing amount of what is sometimes referred to as Denim Pine?

Well, you could make some amazing furniture, like this farmhouse trestle table by Corbin Woodworking.

Or how about a bathroom vanity, also by Corbin?  Kitchen cabinetry, wood paneling, bedroom set,… you name it.  In looking through images for this post, I ran across everything from turned wood bowls to log cabins.

The visual interest inherent in the wood makes it suitable for just about any style of decor, from contemporary to traditional.  This is a softwood though, so, like most pine, expect it to show some wear pattern after awhile.

The interesting thing is that wood like this has been around forever, although in much lower quantities than it is now.  What was once thought to be defective, throwaway lumber, is now being marketed as a green alternative.  Removing dead and dying trees is one of the necessary steps in controlling the beetle population explosion, but lumber companies must have a market for the product in order to afford to remove them.  Canada and Colorado both have campaigns aimed at encouraging the use of Blue Mountain Pine, which seem to be having a positive effect.

Beautiful though it is, considering its reason for being I can’t say I’d be the least bit unhappy if it became scarce again.  In the meanwhile, lets make good use of it.  What would you use it for?

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