Meet the little building that can! I’m excited to announce the launch of our Flexa Studio: a modern, versatile, 120 square-foot prefabricated room. It’s a way to add space without the expense and disruption of remodeling. Award-winning designer Casper Mork-Ulnes, who holds a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University and is creative director of Modern Cabana, developed Flexa Studio in collaboration with Houseplans.com.

The simple shed-roof and crisp horizontal rain-screen siding — with glass entry door and fixed and operable side windows — give the structure  a handsome contemporary presence to complement any garden setting. Place it in the backyard or side yard,

to use as a home office, media room, or teen pad:

or add a sleeper and turn it into an overflow guest room.

The 10- by 12-foot structure comes pre-assembled or as a panelized kit-of-parts that you put together yourself. In both cases you build the foundation, then bolt the Flexa Studio to it. It’s eco-friendly thanks to the use of  FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council)-certified lumber, recycled denim insulation, prefabricated elements for minimal waste, and a small footprint for less site impact. In most jurisdictions, permits are not required for structures that are 120 square feet or less — check with your building department to verify local permitting requirements. Flexa House starts at $8950 plus shipping, which varies based on distance and whether you order it pre-assembled or as the panelized kit.

I want to thank Room & Board and R & B Design Associate Joe Darling for expertly furnishing our model to illustrate the Live, Work, and Play possibilities. The warm contemporary pieces in the photographs are listed below:

1. Gallery leaning media shelf in natural steel: $749

2. Eames molded plywood lounge chair in walnut by Herman Miller: $679

3. Fuller 7′ x 7′ felted rug in grey: $1715

This is a cool fool-the-eye rug: the design resembles a shadow pattern on the floor and made me look around to see where the light was coming from.

4. Tiffany arm chair in red: $249

5. Portica desk in stainless steel with solid walnut top (48 x 24 x 29h): $959

6. Pierce 69″ two-cushion full comfort sleeper in Delamont charcoal: $2299

7. Outdoor Sunbrella pillow in orange: $59

8. Hive pillow in Ink: $109

9. Sasha table lamps with silver shades: $229 each

10. Link table lamp in orange: $380

11. Nelson medium cigar pendant lamp: $329

12. Framed print, Study for Homage To the Square – 1954, Albers: $419

13. Framed poster, Rothko Blue, Green and Brown poster: $199

14. Laguna outdoor chair (and ottoman, not shown) in Sunbrella taupe: $599 (2)

15. Montego outdoor side table (18 inches square): $449

The Flexa Studio Photography is by Joe Fletcher, who shot the unit at San Francisco’s Flora Grubb Gardens (which provided the plants and pots). The Flexa Studio is a cousin of our Flexahouse modern ranch house plan by architect Nick Noyes — someday I hope we’ll have a whole family of Flexas!

More About Casper Mork-Ulnes

In addition to founding Modern Cabana with builder Nick Damner (last year they showcased other Modern Cabana products at Sunset’s Celebration Weekend where I first spoke to them about working with us), Casper has produced a variety of sleek contemporary houses and remodels through Mork-Ulnes Design. Here, for example, he

reshaped a San Francisco Victorian into a dramatic light-box-cum-stair-tower.

On the top floor he reinvented a dormer window into an elegant sitting, viewing, and storage alcove (photos courtesy Inhabitat.com). These are great ideas worth remembering as you think about ways to customize any of our home plans.

From our Manhattan correspondent, Michael Cannell (author and former NY Times Home Section editor):

The new home product show season got started this past week with Accent on Design, a division of the sprawling New York International Gift Fair held at the Jacob Javits Center. Accent on Design showcases contemporary work, offering an early glimpse of evolving design ideas and a wealth of affordable smaller-scale products. (The splashier high-end furniture introductions come a few months from now at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York and the Milan Furniture Fair. ) Below are our picks for Best of Show.

Bright Box

Here’s a handsome example of how designers are reacting against all the automation of modern life.

This lamp is concealed in a box. It operates by what might be called a “hands-on dimmer:” it slides in and out to adjust the light level. The Box Light by Jonas Hakaniem from Design House Stockholm — famous for their light bulb encased in clear glass resembling a block of ice — is available May, 2010 (10 cm wide, 8 cm high, 15 cm deep): $275.

Message Center

Bamboo was prevalent at the show as the appetite for green materials gains momentum.

For kitchen or entryway, this Dry Erase Panel by Three by Three allows you to scrawl a message or shopping list without resorting to that office-style whiteboard. It’s magnetic too. Large, 31.5 by 15.75 inches, including letter holder, three hooks, bamboo cup and holder, magnetic strip (1″x12″), four strong magnets, and a dry erase pen: $100. Small, 23.5 by 11.5 inches, including two hooks, bamboo cup and holder, magnetic strip (1″x9″), three strong magnets, and a dry erase pen: $70.

Valentine Glow

Lighting designers are moving toward the atmospheric effects of indirect lighting,

as evidenced by these 5 inch-tall silicone Mood Flame tealight holders by Jan Hoekstra, from gSelect: $25.

Relative Merits

Like family members gathered around a dining table, these Family Chairs by Lina Nordqvist are similar but unique.

Available in beech, black and white lacquer, from Design House Stockholm: $700 for two.

Low-hanging Felt

Felt is the material of the moment—a reaction against the sharp lines and hard surfaces of modernism.

This pendant made of stitched wool felt triangles provides a soft, glowing presence. Called Icosa, it was designed by Ross Menuez; available from Areaware after March 3^rd, 2010: $120.

Flexible Table

Swedish furniture design tends to be minimal but inviting, and the Wing collection by Sara Szyber is no exception.

The solid-wood Drop Leaf Table is big enough to seat six people

and small enough (30 centimeters) to serve as a side table when it’s folded down. Comes in black or white, from Design House Stockholm: $695.

Wood Light

Throughout the show designers used materials in new and surprising ways, and with an emphasis on the natural and renewable.

In this case the standard plastic flashlight is redone in beech wood with an LED bulb. The Small Torch is by Jonas Damon.  Something to keep on a table instead of in a drawer; from Areaware: $32.

Return — Recline? — of a Classic

It is increasingly common to see classic furniture pieces reintroduced at design shows as companies squeezed by the economy play their trump cards.

In this case it’s the award-winning canvas NY Chair from 1958 by Takeshi Nii, which also happens to feed the current appetite for flexible furniture. It folds  to five inches in width when not in use; from yliving: $590.

Walt Disney was fascinated with the shaping of space both visually and physically, from the way he transformed the animated film to his invention of the modern theme park. I think architecture was always an important theme for him, like the shiny-bright suburb in the Goofy cartoon Motor Mania of 1950 or the suave contemporary ranch house in the original Parent Trap of 1961. I vividly remember touring Monsanto’s  House of the Future at Disneyland

(image fromYesterland.com) with its curvilinear white plastic pods

cantilevered over a central support and utility podium (Yesterland.com). Though designed not by Disney but by two MIT professors — who must have been channeling Buckminster Fuller

and his similarly central-masted Minimum Dymaxion house of 1929 — Walt had the sense to give the plastic Monsanto house a ten-year lease in Tomorrowland. The swoopy modern  furniture from fifty years ago

still looks contemporary today (Yesterland.com photo)

I was reminded of these images and Disney’s huge influence on design and our appreciation of it when I toured the superb new Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco’s Presidio, which opened last week. Two hours flew by. I felt I had stumbled into an animated autobiography, or rather, a compelling four-dimensional biopic.

San Francisco’s Page & Turnbull Architects have deftly inserted the state-of-the-art museum

into an historic 19th century brick row (photo by Cesar Rubio) along the Presidio’s parade ground — which is itself like a distant extension of Disneyland’s own Main Street. From the front there’s no hint of the wonderland within. And at the rear only an elegant glass skin

drawn across an addition (photo by Bruce Damonte) suggests a house of marvels. You experience the museum as a journey through Walt’s life with text blocks, still images, film clips, memorabilia, and narrations by Walt and others every few feet along a carefully choreographed and roughly chronological path. It’s a soft cacophony of sounds and images,  a “dark ride” that you walk, and even then it’s impossible to absorb everything.

Highlights for me are the multi-story “multiplane camera” that allowed Disney  filmmakers to create a realistic sense of depth within animations, the clever elevator that’s designed as a train car (the vertical naturally becomes the horizontal in this Looking Glass world), and the sleek modern terrazzo-and-glass mini-Guggenheim ramp

(image courtesy Walt Disney Family Museum) spiraling around a huge and meticulously detailed scale model of Disneyland.

In one sense it’s all a bit deifying, as if Walt were a latter day King Tut, but — as they say in Egypt — what a cool tomb! And here the hieroglyphics even dance to Silly Symphonies.

Beyond the Casino

I was also in Las Vegas last week, for a talk about Cliff May’s ranch houses at the World Market Center, which is another sort of  “ride.”

Well off the Strip on the north end of town across from City Hall (you can see the Stratosphere Casino tower in the background), this enormous furnishings marketplace is a contemporary landmark in its own right. The complex consists of a series of interpenetrating cubes and polygons that wrap around a 15 story tall central court that’s open to the sky,

like a box canyon from Red Rocks Park  reassembled as a building. It feels like the entrance to Oz. One of the great things about this design center is that it’s open to the general public, not just to professional designers. The Center’s Design Salon

offers consumers the ability to purchase designer furnishings previously offered only to the trade. Complimentary one-hour consultations with interior designers accredited by the American Society of Interior Designers are also offered. It’s a good place to get ideas for shaping or reshaping your home.

A short ride away is the new 180 acre Springs Preserve, Las Vegas’ answer to Tucson’s Living Desert Museum, and built on the site of the original springs for which the city is named (vega means spring in Spanish).

Here’s one of  the rotundas, recalling a sculptural sundial or open cistern. Part of the vast indoor-outdoor complex comprises a  sustainability hall where one gallery has  been turned into a model home — which puts a novel recycling spin on that overworked trademark phrase “what’s done in Vegas stays in Vegas.” One of the most effective exhibits here

simply shows how much water is used in a typical five-minute shower with and without a low flow showerhead. (Nothing about sand baths, however…) Elsewhere in the museum you can experience a simulated desert flash flood (perhaps the other side of sustainability?) which in this case is fun: inside one of the buildings you stand on a metal bridge across a boulder-strewn arroyo and suddenly the water surges around and under you.

So what does it signify, when Disney comes to San Francisco and resource conservation arrives in Las Vegas? That may sound like the resolution of some distant prophecy but I think it means that things are looking up.

In other news, check out Writer Tracey Taylor’s  fine article about about us and affordable home design in the Financial Times! Her website tktaylor.com includes a wide range of stories about design and is a must read.

Our window on the modern home is widening: we’ve recently added some exciting (and exclusive to us) contemporary plans from abroad. Plan 473-1 by architect Lorenzo Spano of Terni, Italy, takes  an artful and sleek approach to indoor-outdoor living, from the cylindrical chimney floating over a circular hearth

that draws your gaze into the landscape (in a retro wave at mid-century modernity), to the dramatic concrete cantilever

that shades one side of the house,

to the seamless connection to a pool terrace on the other side. A roof deck also overlooks the water.

Plan 467-2, by Mumbai architect Rinka D’Monte opens up a simple box with walls of glass.

The floor plan takes the form of two rectangular volumes that appear to slide past

each other, which allows room for private decks at front and rear.  It’s a new twist on the row house idea. We’ll be adding more international plans shortly.

Dutch Design and Other Inspirations in New York

I just returned from New York City, where I visited Governor’s Island off the tip of Lower Manhattan.

It’s a remarkable enclave of early 19th and 20th century Army and Coast Guard houses, barracks, forts, and other structures now being preserved by the Governor’s Island Preservation and Education Committee  (GIPEC), a New York State agency. One model for them might be the public-private joint venture at San Francisco’s Presidio, which was reinvented as a national park.

When I toured the Island the historic officer’s houses (at lower right in photo above) were being used for art installations celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Dutch arrival in New Amsterdam (New York). Droog, the innovative Dutch industrial design and branding firm was one of the participants and worked with artist Marije Vogelzang (she is known as an “eating-designer”) to convert one house into a “Go Slow Cafe” that I found very appealing. I entered an all-white room and was asked to take off my shoes — the first gesture toward slowing down –  and then sat at a white table. Lunch arrived on a simple board, like this:

with circles around each item noting the distance it had traveled. The wood and the food comprised the only color in the space. The point: to slow down, focus on the meal,  and think about the energy used to bring us sustenance. The generous sampling of lettuce and cheese came from less than 100 miles away while the small portion of Chinese lychees (the white fruit at right) came many thousands of miles. For a while I was alone at the table as other visitors ambled past. I felt like part of the installation, which I guess I was. Of course another way to “slow down” like this is simply to have a real conversation with your family over the dinner table!

Droog is a fascinating global firm and reminds me of Marcel Duchamp in the way they transform an everyday object into something unusual, like a clothes hanger into a lamp, shown below:

(This image is from 2modern.com.) The word droog, in Dutch, means “dry” or “wry.” One of Droog’s more provocative products is the “Do hit Chair”:

a metal box that comes with a sledgehammer allowing you to bang it

(and your frustrations, presumably) into shape.

At the Island, Droog took a somewhat calmer, “Do Hit the Cool-It Button” approach (as we have seen) and also supplied products for an intriguing temporary design  store designed by Marcel Schmalgemeijer. He stacked chairs to create shelving and display units like this:

It makes you reconsider the typical rented party chair  — maybe a way to use that leftover furniture in your basement…

Finally, I just had to visit one of the greatest American Beaux Arts monuments: the monumental New York Public Library of 1911, by Carerre & Hastings. Now this is a room for reading!

In the age of Kindles and I-phones, it still has the power to awe and made me appreciate anew the grandeur and majesty that can arise from the intersection of knowledge and imagination. And outside, the famous lions

are still guarding the majestic Fifth Avenue entrance. Read about them and New York’s many other landmarks in the just published Public Art New York by architect Jean Parker Phifer (W. W. Norton 2009).

Deftly written, it’s an indispensable guidebook to every monument worth seeing in Metropolis. From the book I learned that the lions, sculpted by Edward Clark Potter in 1911, are named “Patience” and “Fortitude.” I think they’re good to have around in a time of economic uncertainty. Don’t leave home without them.

Before the kitchen island, geologically speaking, came the kitchen table. It’s still a viable option for many homes and is often part of a “country kitchen.”  As we saw in a previous post, Julia Child’s 14- by 20-foot kitchen was organized around one that doubled as a work surface. Table choices are many, from an Aaltoesque contemporary birch veneer table

like the Vika Grevska/Vika Oleby by IKEA, to a stainless steel restaurant work table

from Worktable World, to an art and science classroom table

with adjustable legs (to vary the height as needed) from CSN Supply.com, to a wheeled stainless steel example

from Design Within Reach, to a small chopping block

table like the Cherry Cucina Laforza (party of one!) from John Boos & Co. Circular tables tend to require a little more room. You can also create your own table from prefabricated legs and tops available from companies like Tablelegs.com and IKEA.

Island Time

What if you prefer island living? That is, a table that’s built-in. The classic layout of Plan 23-587,

uses the island for food preparation, informal eating,

and storage — with room for cookbooks. (Note that the orientation of the island has been changed in the built example.) In Plan431-1 (below)

architect Greg La Vardera uses a smaller food prep island and a round table.

In both cases the island separates the work area from the more formal dining space; guests or family members can sit at the table or the far side of the island and chat with the cook without getting in the way. In Plan 469-1, the island is two-tiered

to make the separation between work and sitting area more emphatic; the shaded L-shaped tier, which is raised several inches above the work surface, functions as the breakfast bar and hides kitchen clutter from the more formal dining area.

But really, the design possibilities are endless,

as this collage from Trendir shows. So, what island is calling you?