Kitchenware and Tableware Market

If you missed the Dwell on Design show last weekend, the L.A. at Home crew can catch you up on what was new and notable, starting with Duarte-based designer John McDonald and his SemiHandmade line.

Thinking outside the box paid off for McDonald, who was "overwhelmed" by interest in his inventive mix-and-match — not to mention economical — approach to custom cabinetry. The idea is simple: Keep the kitchen or bath cabinets you already have, and McDonald will replace doors, panels and drawer faces to your specifications. Another option: Buy cabinet boxes from manufacturers such as Ikea or Home Depot, and then upgrade with McDonald's custom facades.

McDonald displayed sequence-matched veneers, redwood, laminate on plywood and reclaimed basketball floorboards that he says cost "about 30% more than the nicest Ikea doors." He is rolling out SemiHandmade in Southern California before launching it nationally at the beginning of next year. For further information and pricing, call (323) 383-2009 or e-mail McDonald at john@ahandmadehome.com.

– Lisa Boone

Photo: SemiHandmade

CORRECTED: An earlier version of this post had an incorrect e-mail for John McDonald.

This just in: The Pet Gear Clip-On Pet High Chair.

Says the news release from CSN Stores: "This hilarious high-chair is a must-have for any dog who wishes to dine in style with the family and forgo the usual scraps from the floor."

Price: $36.95.

Is it just me or does even the dog seem to be saying, "Are you kidding me?"

Reader captions welcome. Submit them via comments.

– Craig Nakano

Photo credit: CSN Stores

UPDATED! Check out the Hammacher Schlemmer variation, if only for the photo.

We've listed select home and garden events below. Suggest your own viareader comments. Submissions must be fewer than 75 words and must befor one-time events with legitimate value to other readers. No storepromotions and no frivolous links, please. L.A. at Home staff willdetermine which submissions will be made public, but we won't edit thecomments.

Thursday: The A+D Museum and Syyn Labs present “Syynterstitial (Part 1),” a night of interactive art and music. $10. 5 to 11 p.m. 6032 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. $10. (323) 932-9393.

Thursday: As part of Descanso Gardens' summer concert series "The Evolution of American Jazz," Robert Kyle performs Brazilian jazz under the trees. 5:30 to 7 p.m. Series runs Thursdays through July. Blankets and picnics (normally not allowed) are encouraged. 1418 Descanso Drive, La Ca?ada Flintridge. Included in regular garden admission of $3 to $8. (818) 949-2400.

Thursday: David MacLaren, curator of Asian gardens at the Huntington, willdiscuss the horticultural, aesthetic and philosophical differencesbetween Japanese and Chinese gardens, with a particular focus on plants and pruning techniques. A sale will follow theprogram. 2:30 p.m. Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. Free. No reservations required. (626) 405-2100.

Saturday: Tree of Life Nursery offers “Replace Your Lawn” workshops every Saturday in July beginning at 9 a.m. Free. 33201 Ortega Highway in San Juan Capistrano. (949) 728-0685.

July 8: Master gardener Marta Teegan will discuss and sign her new book "Homegrown," a guide for growing your own vegetables in easy-to-tend plots and spaces. 7 p.m. Vromans, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. (626) 449-5320.

ONGOING

Brown Bag Tuesdays: The Gamble House, the Arts and Crafts landmark designed by Charles and Henry Greene, continues a weekly lunch program. Visitors are invited to picnic on the rear lawn or terrace of the 1908 estate between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. each Tuesday. Twenty-minute docent-led tours will be given at 12:15 and 12:45 p.m. for $5. 4 Westmoreland Place, Pasadena; (626) 793-3334. Reservations: (626) 449-4178. Tours continue through Oct. 23.

Butterfly pavilion: An interactive exhibition allows visitors to walk among native Southern California butterflies at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden. 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily through Aug. 1. Entry fee is $2 on top of regular garden admission of $4 to $8. 1500 N. College Ave., Claremont. (909) 625-8767.

L.A. Box Collective: A newly formed group of 12 Los Angeles-based furniture designers and makers committed to environmentally-conscious design and production show their latest works. Fifth Floor gallery, 502 Chung King Court, Chinatown. Ends Aug. 29. (213) 687-8443.

Rohlfs exhibition: The first major exhibition of furniture and decorative art by the American craftsman Charles Rohlfs (1853-1936) features more than 40 pieces from 10 museums and private collections. Through Sept. 6. Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. (626) 405-2100.

– Lisa Boone

Photo: Rosemary Barillas, 17, left, and Ivan Mateo, 17, of West Adams Preparatory High School of Los Angeles look at a chalcedon checkerspot at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden's seasonal butterfly pavilion in Claremont. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times.

Architect: Deborah Teltscher, (310) 991-3719, djteltscher@gmail.com

Lansdcape designer: Katherine Glascock

Location: Santa Monica

Goals: To add a second story, a home office with a separate entrance and an outdoor play area.

Architect’s description: The existing one-story house was a small (1,944-square-foot) Spanish-style single-family home built in 1942. The rectangular lot slopes about six feet from the street to a rear alley and is next to a Rite-Aid drugstore parking lot. The challenge was to add a second story, an office with a separate patient entrance for the husband, who is a psychiatrist and sees patients at home, and to create a safe outdoor play space for the couple’s two children, screening them from view of the patients and the parking lot next door.

The design includes a new front entry hall; a reworked kitchen/family/dining room; a home office for the wife, a physician; two children’s rooms with shared bath; and guest room/bath upstairs.

The existing master suite was remodeled and enlarged to include a walk-in closet, window seat/ dressing area and a domed ceiling. The existing detached garage was demolished and a new garage was added at the alley, with a new basement underneath and the office for the husband on top.  With the additions, the home now totals 5,250 square feet. To see more photos, click to the jump …

Snapshots from The Times archives: Jan. 8, 1967

Such a deal: sofa, chair, coffee and end tables, lamp and a piece of art — plus a 25-inch TV console — for less than $700. And a Tijuana Brass album for qualifying buyers.

But even more amazing: a single area code for Gardena and Sherman Oaks.

– Joan Fantazia

Photo credit: Bob Chamberlain / Los Angeles Times

When Rachel Klauber-Speiden first challenged architects Tryggvi Thorsteinsson and Erla D?gg Ingjaldsdóttir to transform a 1962 apartment complex into a single-family home, they did not ask her for a wish list of things. “They asked me, 'How do you live? How do you want to live?'” says Klauber-Speiden. 

She and husband Josh Empson wanted a family-friendly space that was both open and private. She also wanted her architects to build in a way that was “as kind to the Earth as possible.” 

She turned to D?gg Ingjaldsdóttir and Thorsteinsson, principals of the Santa Monica firm Minarc, largely because of their passion for green design. “I don’t like wasting things,” she says.

The architects started by gutting the first floor and creating a free-flowing open floor plan but leaving the second floor largely intact. 

“We left more than 50% of the building walls,” Thorsteinsson says. “As architects we have a responsibility to build something that is  sustainable.” 

What was not used was donated to Habitat for Humanity. “Our garage doors, sinks, everything that was reusable was donated. Someone came and salvaged the iron from the original staircase,” Klauber-Speiden says. Repurposed wood from the original apartment complex was even used to create arresting beams over what had once been the mailbox area. 

Eco-friendly inventive touches accentuate the whimsical spirit of the house. Inexpensive recycled rubber was used to create bathroom sinks. Kitchen drawers are made from recycled cork and rubber, and the kitchen countertops and dining-room table are made from recycled wood scraps. “It looks like a giant cutting board,” Klauber-Speiden says. 

The Icelandic architects say the house represents what they want to do in the world: maximize materials, minimize waste. “We come from a land where everything was imported, everything was valued and used. We didn’t even see plastic bottles until the 1990s,” Thorsteinsson says.

Read more about the Rainbow House, or click to see pictures of the Santa Monica house.

– Lisa Boone

Photo credits: Nancy Pastor / For The Times

Honda's FCX Clarity hydrogen fuel-cell car made headlines when it premiered a couple of years ago, and with good reason.

The only emissions from the tailpipe are droplets of water. Who wouldn't want that?

But one of the obstacles to wider adoption of the emerging technology has been the question of gas stations: Places where drivers could refill their tanks with hydrogen were few and far between.

Times staff writer Susan Carpenter, however, recently got a peek at one potential solution: a Honda Clarity home refueling system that essentially turns your house into a personal gas station.

A car that's refueled at home using solar panels and water? Could this be our future?

Read the story to find out. Carpenter and Times videographer Jeff Amlotte also have put together an accompanying video showing the Honda hydrogen refueling station in action.

– Craig Nakano

Illustration credit: Ellen Weinstein / For The Times 

 

Planning a Fourth of July party? Perhaps it’s time to roll out a new look. We selected some bar carts for a range of tastes and budgets. First up: Vagoon from El Salvador-based Kiu Interiors.

We first saw Vagoon this spring at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. The red top can flip over for use as a serving tray, and despite the playful look, the design has some heft to it — about 29 pounds. Price: $272 plus shipping, which varies depending on your location. Kiu doesn’t have any U.S. retailers for Vagoon at the moment. Contact the firm through its website. 

Six more bar carts after the jump, including Vladimir Kagan, Espasso, West Elm and CB2 …

Paradise is at once so attainable and so far away.

This column was going to be about how the most immediate and affordable thing that Southern California homeowners could do to reduce our collective dependency on fossil fuel would be to rip out lawn. But events in the Gulf of Mexico are too crazy-making to be sure that it wouldn’t be the garden-writing equivalent of picking a fight at the dinner table. So this column is about coyote mint.

It is sheer serendipity that coyote mint is one of the most seductive late-June bloomers to win converts to sustainable gardening.

As taxonomists have it, Monardella villosa has a native range that descends from the Oregon border to Santa Barbara. But as the 1-foot-tall-by-3-foot-wide tufts of coyote mint that soldier it out in my midcity Los Angeles garden can attest, these plants do just fine farther south. You must excuse them if, by August, with little more than weekly watering, they shed their leaves.

Oh, those leaves! We all think that we know mint, with flavors so sharp and intriguingly base that we pay for the same flavor in toothpaste as in ice cream. That is, of course, a prelude to “but” — and it’s a big one.

There’s a beehive in the backyard, a dark closet full of fermenting kombucha tea and music from cigar boxes-turned-guitars floating through the air: Welcome to the do-it-yourself Studio City haven of Mark Frauenfelder.

Jessica Hundley over at Brand X recently spoke with Frauenfelder, who is the current editor of MAKE magazine and founding editor of tech/culture webblog Boing Boing, about these DIY experiments and others, chronicled in Frauenfelder’s new book “Made by Hand.”

What immediately stood out about this DIY approach — which also includes pickling experiments to make sauerkraut (“great with eggs”) and a machine to make the homemade yogurt Frauenfelder eats with fruit and nuts twice a day — is its function over form.

“I think it's great that people make these bizarre robots, or windmill or Burning Man style sculptures, but … I wanted to make things that would be part of my life — coffee, yogurt, that sort of thing. I wanted to try to make some things by hand that I would normally just go out and buy,” Frauenfelder said in the interview.

“With this book I wanted to do things that would enrich our lives and would be possible to do and still work and write and spend time with my family.”

As for the attached temperature control device on his espresso machine that helps him brew the perfect shot (the same one is used by NASA), well, that would definitely enrich my life.

Read Brand X’s full interview with Frauenfelder or see more of his DIY projects.

– Kelsey Ramos

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Photo: Mark Frauenfelder tending to his beehive. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

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