carbon based design technologies

3/4″ scrap mdo! What more can i say!

I just cleaned the badboy, so he doesnt look very… elegant all upended like that. Upholstery is sort of a dark purple / eggplanty color. Cant wait to figure out what kind of base to use!

for one thing, isnt that framed ferrari poster from 1984 amazing? best damn 5 dollars i done did spent! secondly, yes, there are literally like 7 different patterns / prints / wallpaperings in my bathroom. but i can explain! ive been testing out ideas to see what works and what doesnt. what you see is probly half – or less! – of the prints ive done trial runs with. currently, the theory is that ill decide on one, and then do everything from the shower around. but for now its a jungle, and, sometimes, it makes me wonder ‘how do i keep… all this crap all over the place!?!?!”

soon, soon.

So, for those of you who aren’t my girlfriend (which is like, what, 6 billion?) this is likely the first youve heard of this space. Basically, a number of months ago i had this idea of this perfect sleeping space, devoid of any clutter (visual or otherwise), storage, large furniture items (ie, dresser) or the like.* However, i didnt own a bed (beyond my futon), and thus my two bedrooms sat essentially empty, unadorned, unattended to, and generally depressed. The INSTANT i was able to acquire Heid’s old mattress, i knew we were in bidness.

So but anyways, this is about as pristine as i can make it now. I WISH i coulda gotten some of those roll-y drape things that anna at doorsixteen.com is always on about, but ikea redesigned them to be all spring loaded now, thus ixnaying custom fitments. So i live still with the analog block-outs – on or off. Thats it. The two giants prints ive had for years; i picked up the gursky print at moma during a random “lets work in new york for one week” visit, while the big ass san francisco map i happily took off a friends hands for free (who got it at a cartographers convention) and which has since become the object of desire of almost all of my san francisco apartments. Been toying with the idea of adding black curtains. See, ive got all sorts of lace from the prior owner… and all it would need is a rit-dye-bath… and it would achieve that in-between that the analog curtains dont feature (ie, light permeation with privacy)… we’ll see how it works out…

So yeah. This is where i sleep most nights (when not at heid’s). Its not recently finished (been there for some time), but then, nor can any space ever be “finished” when lived in by a designer. Mostly, it just occurred to me to post the state of the room.

Its nice. i cherish every morning i awaken to a room with no computers, no stereos, no dirty-socks-but-i-think-that-ones-clean, no piles of i’ll-totally-get-to-that-next laundry, no more omni-room.

*And actually, ive been toying with the idea of a “perfect” sleeping space since i was probly 8? 10? Then, the idea was to custom build a mostly cold-gray cement castle (no exaggeration) buried deep into the sun-soaked hills of california, where the chamber in question would have been as close to the natural center of the house as possible, with no natural light and sonically deadened HVAC. Why i was designing a hangover palace at the age of 10 is beyond me – unless of course the fates do exist, and that was foreshadowing. Now the idea has… mellowed… especially after taking classes in the building that kubrick used as his mental asylum in ‘a clockwork orange’ (yes, it still looks like that).

Always a good day when i can see flames from the kitchen.

Complete and installed! Blam! BODONI BABY, BODONI. and in Poster Bold! Caint beat that, right there!

In process shot of house numbers. Gon’ be tight!

so ive been thinking it might be nice to break up the heavy pattern action of the wallpaper. even though its a small room, mind bending patterns might not be the most *ahem* friendly in the morning, nor for any other time when youd want to shower. you know shower, pleasant time, peace, whatever.

so ive drafted up some sketches of what id like using some found imagery on the net. basically its a three panel triptych with the widest being the middle that runs the length of the shower. the images dont necessarily have to match, so much as give the impression you are showering in an awesome space.

trying to make some rad wall paper for me bathing room. i always like mind bending stuff, although because i can make it me self, there is very little time commitment. heres some proofs.

a one-to-one zoom on the print i have up now in test phase – need to see if it gets the “girlfriend stamp of approval”; tradition, made of some floral elements i rotated (illustrator > effect > distort & transform > transform), plus an ink blot, a lion, a stag and some upside down stars -hail santa!:

and heres one i made today, thats a little more geometric, less floral, less traditional, and totally more mind bendy! (thats the loopable image, but it will be about 4 feet tall when printed):

actually the hardest part – which im sure is all math – is figuring out how to draw the boundaries, so the graphic loops. i think one of my next stops is to make an incorrectly looping image, but whose incorrect loop is ALMOST unnoticeable.

yes, my little abode has a face.

like a book stuck on a very full shelf. like a bookcover designed years ago. like a design that was cool. like a style that left before it even got here. yeah. thats my haus wynbrooks face. notice how you cant see the address numbers? oh yeah, thats because there are none. i have NO idea what even happened to the last ones, if there ever were ones, or the mailperson just figured – for years – that that odd number between 43 and 39 “must be here!” or what, i dont know.

got plans, of course. i got plans. and i could photoshop till hell wont have it. and hell doesnt. but for now im working on products and furniture for my store so i can start to be semi-independent of other bosses, and have a LITTLE extra income. so for now BIG haus wynbrook plans – like locally appropriate and low maintenance landscaping (a la brick house), painted form stone, ditch the eye-lid window shades, paint the main one white, etc – just have to wait.

so at SOME point im going to pull all this houses carpet. this lovely splotchy salmon brown weird carpet. and actually reuse it in the man-basement. but anyways! so it needs to come off everywhere its stapled 417 times-per-square-inch to the mostly-beautiful hardwood floors beneath. (and just to qualify that last exaggeration, there are not one, not two, but three distinctly – as in “takes three different guns” distinctly – different staples holding this carpet to just the landing. MAN my knuckles were KILLIN me by the time id finished what felt like a 10 square foot section – and thats just the landing!)

so heres the landing, as seen from the big room, with the little closette just visible on the right. and whats this?!?! giant black stain from hell. and its deep. like sanding for years deep. like all you can do is replace the wood deep. yeah. roof leaked, and there the water sat, replenished, until them roof guys came and patched up. and so now the boards are toast.

any one with any amazing ideas is more than welcome to send em my way!

fudge.

ive sanded out most of the textural differences, but the discoloration runs more’n skin deep, my friends.

more’n skin deep.

theres this LITTLE teeny tiny closet (closette?) thats assumedly for linens, and was gross and dark and weird and coated in pink fluffy wallpaper, and approaching-mustard yellow painted shelves.

right.

pulled them shelves… and painted that beotch right quick!

then sand the crap out of (and off of) the shelves and whack em back in!

yeah, picked up some big-ass letters from the junk heap at work, and stuck ‘em on my wall in my living room. +cheesy purple christmas lights = awesomeness.

and then wit dem purple sizzurp lights:

visually very messy – as well as very actually messy from sitting in the rain and mud and such – i will freely admit. but there is something cool in there, somewhere, i just need to figure out how to coax it out without spending 5 arms and 3 legs to get there. i think the secret – like a good paint job – is in uniformity; get the lighting even and equi-distant, and / or get them faced!

so, basically, when i moved in to haus wynbrook, the basement was owned by the washer machine. and i dont mean like “he pays the mortgage” kind of own, i mean like PWN TO OWN, chair-across-the-back, leaping from the ring-side with knee-to-face double whammy kind of own.

why?

because the damn thing would always overflow. see, for like 50 years that thing drained directly into the sink which, im guessing, after 50 years, would and did get clogged with all sorts of lint. but so it was, every load i did, meant a soaked basement. not like tides-of-destruction, biblical-tale style water, but enough that youd take that last step off the bottom of the stairs whilst rounding the corner *SPLISH* and immediately regret it.

solution?

pipe the damn thing into the main waste pipe. thats, oh, 6 inches to the washers left. thats also luckily recently replaced with 3″ pvc, which means normal human tools – as apposed to trying to tie into 1,000 pound cast iron pipes! what the hell! who invented that idea!?!?!

the before:

and the after:

yes, i made that thing, that haloed beast, that angelic creature. oh i revel in its beauty, perhaps the most manly thing i have ever made. i mean, ive worked on car engines, built houses and smoked cigars. and its by far the most manly thing i ever made. ‘things got more one-directional flaps, traps, pipes, bits and bobs than a small hardware shop. and man, that was fur-sure a crash course in pvc-plumbing. but it works!