Green Design

The Uncommon Designer is set for your Green Designs.

Over the past few years, The Uncommon Designer, Inc. has established itself as a local leader in promoting green building practices in the housing community. We work extensively with the community development corporations, architects, financial institutions, and government agencies at the local, and state level.

Green housing directly benefits individuals and families in need by reducing energy bills and creating healthier living environments. Housing developers and operators gain through higher quality, more efficient, and more durable buildings.

Through this Initiative, The Uncommon Designer works to encourage the adoption of green building strategies and materials in housing. Working with green building and affordable housing organizations, we provide information and education on the practices and components of green affordable housing, cost issues and financial strategies, and relevant policy initiatives.
We have provided technical assistance to nearly two dozen housing developers

We will remain engaged in a range of endeavors locally to encourage the development of green housing, to enhance your comfort & save the environment.

Great New Deals

We have been informed by Hunter Douglas that the fall season will be the best offering for hard treatments.

There are rebates ranging from $ 25 per unit for Shutters, Roman Shades and Vignettes. Rebates fof $ 50 per unit for Silhouettes, and $ 100 per unit for Luminettes and Skyline panels.

They also have great new technology for remotes. RF & IR!! You can open a blind from 30 feet away, and you don't have to be in the room.

Leather sofas are not leather

You have seen the ads for real cheap "leather" sofas. Why are they so cheap? Cause they are not true leather.
If you were tarred and feathered would you be a chicken? If your selling or buying "bonded leather" you are not leather.
The term "bonded leather is a convenient shorthand within the industry, and bound to confuse consumers. even worst, true bonded leather is produced more like a paper product, which would be a terribly inferior cover for upholstery.
New composite fabrics are now called "bonded leather" have a surface layer of vinyl or polyurethane, a center layer of fabric, and a backing that contains leather fiber mixed with latex or other material, such as splits, glued onto a fabric for a look that is similar to the back of a leather hide.
On the outside its polyurethane embossed to look like leather. Then to complete the effect, the manufacturer has glued on fibers [on the back] to look like leather.
No matter how much leather fiber is mixed into the backing, its still not a leather cover, at least not in any way a consumer can see or touch.. It is deceptive because it does nor represent its true nature. Its a vinyl - its not leather.
So if you tar and feather someone, does that make them a chicken? Obviously not!!

So watch out for those inexpensive furniture pieces advertised as leather - they are not. A true leather piece does cost more, and is longer lasting. Cheap is not good. Watch what you are buying!

Kitchen errors prevalent in new homes

The kitchen stadium

The "bigger is better" ethos that led to the great room has also helped put the kitchen on steroids. I also blame the popularity of celebrity chefs and their arena-size cooking spaces. While it's true that many post-W.W. II suburban kitchens were cramped and drab, the response has been wildly disproportionate:The "Dream Kitchen" Problem People think they need enough space to cook banquets for 16. But what's more useful is a layout that lets them pivot from the chicken in the oven to the peas in the fridge to the tomatoes on the counter for a Monday-night dinner.

Industrial Relations Oversize commercial appliances force the scale of everything in a kitchen to be ratcheted up to a preposterous degree. Countertops and cabinets swell to accommodate Nimitz-class equipment.

A Counter Too Far Countertops never have to be more than four feet apart. And it's crazy to think that a kitchen longer than 20 feet is easy to use--you'd need Rollerblades to get from one end to the other.

Kitchens: The right way The perfect kitchen feels spacious but keeps everything close at hand. If you really want to have a sense of openness (and more storage room), consider a walk-in pantry.You can then eliminate some or all of the upper cabinets in your kitchen, which removes a lot of bulk at eye level and makes the room feel more airy. It's also important to create a sensible layout: You shouldn't have to take more than two steps between every countertop and no more than three steps between the work triangle of sink, oven and refrigerator.

The Payoff: Typical kitchen cabinet: $200 to $800
Counter surfaces: $20 to $150 a square foot

Track lighting

Many homes built before World War II had almost no fixed lighting. The result was that as night fell, rooms became as dim as Paula Abdul at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting. The reaction to this was built-in lighting solutions that were anything but. Here's what went wrong:Recess Time Is Over It's true that recessing light fixtures into the ceiling can flood a room with light, but is that what you want in, say, a bedroom? Furthermore, the end result of such an installation is a pockmarked ceiling that looks like a meeting room at a convention center.Tracks of My Tears Another response to darkened rooms has been track lighting, but it comes with its own set of problems: It creates a vaguely department-store vibe with its pseudo-high-tech fixtures, and those fixtures are often dangerously close to your head when dropped from many mid-century homes' seven-foot, six-inch ceilings. Variety Is the Spice of Light Over-reliance on either of these options compounds their problems. A well-lit room has multiple sources of illumination (ambient, accent and task). Using one for all three means nothing is done well.

Lighting: The right way
You don't need - and shouldn't want - all your lighting to come from the ceiling. Your room has three dimensions, so use the walls of your room as space for sconces while adding floor outlets so you can place lamps beside a loveseat or table. Combine these elements with switches and dimmers and you can create different moods at the twist of a knob - not just corner-bar dim or operating-room bright.The Payoff: 12 ceiling fixtures, installed: $1,800Three sconces, two floor outlets, installed: $900

Great Rooms too Great

Fad: The great room craze
The great Great-Room Craze of the 1980s was all about openness: Why should the kitchen be so removed from the other living spaces? Indeed, why should there be any distinction between one public room living, dining, den and so on) and another? Everyone should happily congregate in one free-flowing space. Sadly, the result is usually a great big mess. Think about it: The Echo Chamber You know what you get when cooking, video-game playing, conversation and television viewing occur in the same space? Noise. Lots of noise. Weird Windows All these windows and doorways are on the ground level and...also floating up on the second-story space, somehow reminiscent of a burned-out building. Also, how do you light such a space without it looking like a lobby in a Marriott?An Inconvenient Truth Boiling in the summer (all that glass!) and freezing in the winter (all those high ceilings!), giant rooms such as these are nearly impossible to heat and cool without spending some dough on an engineer - and you know that's not cheap.

Solution!!

How to Do It Right Instead of lumping public rooms into one vast open space, a better option is to properly arrange a group of normal size rooms (with normal-size ceilings). With the cunning use of french and sliding doors, rooms can be closed off when needed - say, when one person is watching TV and another is doing the family's taxes - and opened up when you want a more spacious feel. In the end you wind up with as much square footage as in a great room but with a more intimate, livable feel.The Payoff: Typical great-room construction: $150 to $350 a square foot Building a collection of normal rooms: $125 to $250 a square foot.Bigger is better? No, bigger is more expensive

VIVE MAGAZINE

VIVE magazine
We recently had a four page article published in the VIVE magazine [February/Match 2007 issue. This was for a new home that we designed and installed for a client from CT that had a vacation here in the Palm Beaches.