Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Meeting Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams... Design Experts!

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to meet Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams at a book signing at their store on 14th Street in DC. They launched their new book, "The Comfortable Home" and I was able to get a signed copy, plus pose for a picture with two men I consider Design Icons.

The book talks about the key to comfort is how you set up your home. They share their insights, experience, and practical knowledge so that you can make your home one that is both designed - and designed for living. With a focus on spending money wisely, investing in long-lasting pieces, and making strong statements with affordable "pretty little things," they cover all aspects of creating a beautiful, inviting living space, including: Working with color, furnishing small spaces, finding inspiration in the world around you, creating flow from room to room, and much, much more.

I would recommend picking up the book and checking out all that Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams have to offer.
A Reason to Celebrate...


(The P Four Team with Emcee Jim Vance of NBC Washington)


P Four had a lot to celebrate after winning five awards at the 2009 Great American Living Awards (GALA) in September!

The GALA Awards recognize excellence in new home architecture, interior design, sales, and marketing. We received the following top honors:

  • Best Interior Merchandising, Attached Homes Under 1,900 Square Feet - The Banneker II for EYA at Capitol Quarter, Washington, DC.

  • Best Interior Merchandising, Attached Homes 1,900 - 2,500 Square Feet - The Addison II for EYA at Capitol Quarter, Washington, DC.
  • Best Interior Merchandising, Attached Homes 2,501 - 3,300 Square Feet - The Hopkins for Ruppert O'Brien Group, Baltimore, MD.

  • Best Associate Website, http://www.pfour.com/ with One Eighteen Advertising, Los Angeles, CA.

  • Sales Person of the Year, Attached Homes Under $500,000 - Christina Elliott, Albany Grove, Silver Spring, MD.
After the event we toasted to a fabulous 2009 and an exciting 2010 as we enjoyed some champagne at the Ritz Carlton bar.

We know this is just the beginning of what's to come for P Four!

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Pink.... NotJust For Little Girls' Rooms

While pink is the most popular paint color for a little girls room, using pink elsewhere in a home can create a sexy and sophisticated space. If you don't have a lot of natural sunlight, a pink paint color can create warmth and elegance. Of course, there are many different shades of pink. It doesn't have to be bubble gum or pepto pink! You really need to study the colors and the underlying tones of the different shades as pink is a very difficult color to get right! However, when done right, the results are delicate, crystal-like, and gorgeous.

P Four recently designed a home using pink or "blush" as the accent color and we painted the powder room and one of the guest bedrooms pink. Some of the pink colors we considered were:

* Wild Aster by Benjamin Moore. It's subtle and sophisticated.
* Tutu by Martha Stewart. It's glamorous and would work well with lots of mirrors and chrome.
* Natural Berry by Ralph Lauren. It's muted, soft, and delicate.
Ultimately, we landed on Pink Viburnum by Sherwin Williams. It's soft, powdery, and feminine. Check out the results - glamorous, dazzling, and memorable.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Amazing Wallcoverings!


We recently completed a model home for EYA at Capitol Quarter in Washington, DC. Capitol Quarter is the nation's largest LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for Homes community, with town homes certified by the U.S. Green Building Council as being more environmentally friendly and energy efficient than typical new homes. This community was the perfect opportunity to design an eco-conscious interior. We used no-VOC paint throughout the home and selected fabrics such as cotton, bamboo, and linen. We researched the suppliers and manufacturers of our furnishings and elected to purchase from companies that have a strong environmental commitment and that have integrated eco-friendly practices in the workplace. In our search for eco-friendly wall coverings we came across Maya Romanoff. We selected the Ajiro Basketweave pattern in bronze. The Ajiro wall covering is actual micro-shaved farm raised Paulownia wood. The Paulownia tree is fast growing . The growth the Paulownia tree reaches in 3 to 5 years takes other hardwoods generations to achieve. This tree is an excellent choice as a renewable and sustainable resource. Maya Romanoff uses only water-based glues to adhere the wood veneer to the paper backing, thus eliminating the disposal of any toxic waste. In addition, the glues are water-soluble, containing no formaldehyde or other VOC's. The paper backing is pulp based. The stains and dyes that are used to color the wood wall covering contain no heavy metals or VOC's -- they are also earth friendly.

Maya Romaoff is a leading force in the design community with a passion of using uncommon materials to create uncommon art. The use of precious metals, wood veneers, inlaid shell, and fabric create innovative collections that are truly remarkable and breathtaking.
UPDATE - 9/30/09. Maya Romanoff has added our photo to their web photo gallery!

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

SMILE & MOVE... MOTIVATE YOUR SALES TEAM!

I was searching for ways to motivate sales teams in this uncertain real estate environment and came across this great web site http://www.smileandmove.com/. The 3 minute video attached is a powerful way to introduce the topic of positive ATTITUDE.

http://www.smileandmove.com/video/?utm_source=sam-video-etf&utm_medium=etf&utm_content=button_watch-the-video

A positive attitude helps us cope with the daily affairs of life. In down times, we have a choice, we can maintain a positive attitude or go negative. The easy and more natural way for most of us to go is negative. The best thing we can do to ensure success is to maintain a postive attitude. A positive attitude brings optimism into your life and makes it easier to avoid worry and negative thinking. A positive attitude is a state of mind that is certainly worth developing and strengthening!



As a leader of a sales team, do you struggle to find meaningful fresh content for your weekly meetings? Or are you a manager that plans ahead and looks forward to the chance to lead and inspire your team? I would often start my sales meetings with a movie clip to help motivate the team. Perhaps a clip from Glengarry Glen Ross, Wall Street, Boiler Room or Cadillac Man. I like Smile and Move because it's different, unexpected, powerful, inspiring. Enjoy!



Friday, May 8, 2009

BE GREEN The lowdown on planet-friendly paint

How to Go Green, Even If You're Thinking Cream or Ecru

By Christina Ianzito
Special to The Washington Post Thursday, May 7, 2009

There was a time when choosing paint for a home mostly meant mulling over color swatches ("Sahara or Sandy Beach?"). Now, for many homeowners, there's also the pressing issue of being green: finding paint that not only looks good but is environmentally friendly or, at the very least, not toxic.
"You know that new-paint smell?" asks Vic Barnhill, customer service manager for an environmentally friendly brand called American Pride Paints. "Those are the harmful chemicals evaporating."
The major paint companies have been in a rush to present green products. Such paints generally have a low level of VOCs, the volatile organic compounds that have been associated with respiratory and nervous-system disorders, and that the EPA has determined contribute to smog when they hit the air. (A low level is usually considered to be below 50 grams per liter of VOCs.) Remember, however, that the VOC level printed on paint cans often masks the true amount of the chemicals because it applies only to the base paint and doesn't include what may be lurking in the colorant.
There are several rungs in the ladder of eco-friendly paints, including clay paints and some milk-based products so pure they're nearly edible. But they might not have the same opaque sheen some users of conventional paints have come to expect.

Here is the lowdown on painting green:
Mass-market paints. The big paint companies all have low- or zero-VOC acrylic-latex paints these days. Sherwin-Williams sells a zero-VOC interior paint called Harmony; it starts at $40 a gallon and is available as a top coat or primer.
The paint in Benjamin Moore's premium Aura line (about $60 a gallon) is durable and low-odor, rolls on thickly and dries quickly. And the company says its new Natura paint is VOC-free, with "practically no odor" ($50 a gallon). "It's the greenest paint we make," says communications director Eileen McComb.
Specialty brands. Some of these VOC-free paints are similar to a mass-market paint like Natura. They're not entirely natural, but they are several steps beyond your average paint in eco-friendliness. American Pride, which is also known as Mythic Paint, is latex-based (though the semigloss is acrylic), has zero VOCs and is almost odorless. It comes in more than 1,200 colors.
Jason Holstine, co-owner of Amicus Green Building Center in Kensington, says, "I painted my 4-year-old son's room with American Pride while he was sleeping, and he never knew it until he woke up and his room was blue." It costs $30 to $35 a gallon at only Amicus Green (4080A Howard Ave., Kensington, 301-571-8590).
In the same zero-VOC category and general price range is odor-free AFM Safecoat paint, which is trusted among schools and hospitals after decades in the healthy-living market. It's sold at Amicus Green and Eco-Green Living (6201 Blair Rd. NW, 202-234-7110).
Clay-based paints. BioShield and Green Planet Paints, both based in the Southwest, sell clay-based paints. BioShield paint creates a matte surface that can be sealed and glossed with a wax finish. Without the wax, it isn't ideal for handling the moisture of a bathroom or kitchen (it's clay, after all).
Green Planet's paints include soy resin and mineral pigments in a mix that allows for an eggshell-like finish, says Keith Ware, co-owner of Eco-Green Living, who used the brand to paint the back wall of his store a deep sky blue. Cherlyn H.T. Jones, a Washington area designer, has fallen hard for Green Planet despite its "limited color deck" of 48 shades that tend toward the muted. Even clients who aren't particularly environmentally conscious "are just over the moon" for the brand, Jones says. Eco-Green Living sells both brands for $43 a gallon.
Milk-based paints. Although the norm before the Civil War, these now seem exotic, in part because many of them come in powder form. BioShield has a milk paint that looks a bit like confectioners' sugar: Add water and mix. BioShield milk paint is about $12 for a bag that weighs just under a pound, and to make a gallon of paint you'd need four or five bags.
"A properly mixed milk paint acts just like a latex," Ware says, but "add a drop too much water and you've got a wash." Amicus Green offers a Quakertown, Pa.-based brand called Real Milk Paint, whose products consist of curdled milk, lime and earth pigment. Holstine suggests it for the more-forgiving wood surfaces of furniture and cabinets rather than walls because "it's pretty temperamental and tends to lump." (A $46 bag of powder makes one gallon.) For the super-adventurous, Martha Stewart's Web site (http://www.marthastewart.com/) offers a recipe for making milk paint from scratch (search for "milk paint").
Tools. One option is the EcoPro line by Purdy. It includes brushes with recycled nylon bristles; a biodegradable, disposable pulp tray; and recycled roller covers. EcoPro line products are available at area Sherwin-Williams and Duron Paints & Wallcoverings stores.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Milan Furniture Fair, a from Flashy Design


DESPITE the economic gloom, Milan seemed as frenzied as ever during the furniture fair here last week. Hotels were full, even at vertiginous rates, cabs scarce (empty ones, at least) and roads choked with traffic. There were hundreds of parties, including one every night at the flagship store of Skitsch, a new Italian furniture company.

Behind the bravado, some manufacturers cut costs by introducing fewer products than usual, and designers swapped sob stories of canceled projects and dwindling royalties. The number of people visiting the Salone del Mobile, which ran from April 22 to 27 in the labyrinthine Rho-Pero complex, fell from last year’s record of 348,452 to 304,702, according to the organizer, Cosmit.

There was also an uncomfortable awareness that the investment decisions to green-light this season’s new products and ventures, like Skitsch, had been made over a year ago, when the industry’s prospects looked very different.

“The market is obviously much tougher now,” said Alasdhair Willis, chief executive of the British furniture company Established & Sons. “But we won’t see the full effect of the recession on the fair until next year.”

Young companies, like the five-year-old Established & Sons, can still grow, albeit more slowly, by expanding into new countries. The chief casualties of the economic crisis are the larger, longer-established European manufacturers, whose sales have fallen. These companies have, at least, weathered recessions before. Some also have the advantage of being privately owned, and therefore free from the scrutiny of external investors.

“Family ownership is a great strength, especially at a difficult time like this,” observed Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of Vitra, the Swiss furniture group founded by his father in 1950. “You need that passion, commitment and craziness.”

Yet the economic storm has also aggravated the European manufacturers’ longer-term problems of fierce competition from China, and their own failure to meet consumers’ demands for sustainable products. The most depressing sights in Milan last week were the seemingly endless “eco-installations,” typically featuring twee New Age music and digitally animated trees, and apparently bent on guzzling as much energy as pointlessly as possible.

That said, there were some gems to be found in the fair’s flotsam. Among the technical coups were Vegetal, an intricately molded plastic chair by the brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Vitra, and Konstantin Grcic’s 360° collection of office furniture for Magis, another innovation in advanced plastics. Equally ingenious were Paul Cocksedge’s lights for Flos, one of which is switched on by placing a flower into a vase and switched off when the flower is removed, and the eco-savvy 10-Unit series of furniture designed by Shigeru Ban for Artek, made from identical L-shaped pieces of a recycled composite material.

Several manufacturers responded to the crisis with things that they hope people will care about and use for longer, because they were so thoughtfully designed and made.

This was the theme of a quietly elegant exhibition by the Dutch school Design Academy Eindhoven, which showed products intended to encourage the enjoyment of the rituals of daily life, like a series of liquid and solid soaps meant to make washing more engaging. (The exhibition was the debut of Alexander van Slobbe, the Dutch fashion designer, as Eindhoven’s artistic director; he has the unenviable task of succeeding the formidable Li Edelkoort, who established it as the world’s most dynamic and influential design school.)

Some companies put the theory of “thoughtfulness” into practice. The 400-year-old Dutch ceramic manufacturer Royal Tichelaar Makkum showed off its workers’ skills in Dick van Hoff’s tiled stoves, as did the Venetian glassmaker Venini, in BarberOsgerby’s gorgeous Lanterne Marine vases.

Other examples were Amsterdam Armoire, Scholten & Baijings’s digital take on an antique Dutch cabinet with screen-printed decoration, and the beautifully restrained, improbably slender Iri chair by the young Italian designer Paolo Cappello, the rising star of the fair this year. Only a few years out of design school, he also showed a desk, as purist in style as the chair, for which he won a prize from Abitare, the Italian design magazine.

Another theme was functionalism, a rugged variation on the dystopian survivalist style that surfaced in Milan last year. This took the form of sparse compositions of angular shapes made from rough materials in boldly contrasting colors and reflected the influence of Mr. Grcic and the Dutch conceptualist Jurgen Bey.

Those qualities were visible in the work of Nacho Carbonell, Peter Marigold and Raw Edges in Design Miami’s “Craft Punk” installation, as well as in Maarten Baas’s roughly hewn wooden Standard Unique chairs for Established & Sons and the circular tables that Martino Gamper made from salvaged chunks of laminated hotel cabinets, originally designed by Gio Ponti in 1960, for the gallery Nilufar.

Whatever happens to the economy, the future of design arguably lies not in reinventing old styles or dreaming up new ones, but in harnessing technology to develop solutions to the world’s problems. A group of Japanese manufacturers rose to the challenge by inviting designers to invent practical applications for their newly developed nanofibers — some of which are 1/7500 the width of human hair — and displaying the results at an exhibition at La Triennale di Milano, a design museum.

From “wiping robots” that sweep across the floor like tiny clouds and clean it after detecting dirt with their sensors to a sofa that changes shape at the touch of a remote control pad, the results were pragmatic and optimistic, offering an enticing glimpse of a future in which design will help to improve our lives — hopefully without a note of twee New Age music.