Big Blue Horse on Pena Avenue entering Denver International Airport

Anyone who has had to kill time between connecting flights or has been marooned in an airport has cause to celebrate art in airports. This post will be devoted to some of the more memorable permanent pieces I have seen on my way from here to there.

Although I used to travel frequently for various jobs – particularly wearing a groove between San Francisco and San Diego – I don’t fly much anymore. These days, most of my travel takes off from Sardy Field in Aspen, Colorado,  a sweet little one-runway airport so small that they wheel mobile staircases up to planes to allow you to disembark. No jetways here. (For direct flights, I usually drive to Denver, home of the big blue horse at left. More about that later.)

Because of lessening travel, my memories of airport art tend to be a bit dated, and I asked friends on Facebook to nominate some of their favorite pieces to be featured in this post. My thanks to all of them.

Hot Stuff at O’Hare

Neon at O’Hare in tunnel leading to the United Terminal

With a tip of the hat to my friend Alexei Folger, the Travel Oracle, I will begin my tour of memorable airport art with an installation of neon spaghetti that I remembered, but was unable to place.

Alexei, who provides tech support to Filemaker databases all across the US and who has a permanently-packed overnight kit always at the ready,  reminded me that this art lights up the ceiling of a tunnel connecting concourses in the United Airlines terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

Brachiosaurus at O-Hare Airport. Photo by Team Farkle 7

My Facebook friend Alexander DeWolfe also loves this kinetic display. To really appreciate this installation, which is by Michael Hayden and is called “The Sky’s the Limit,” go check it out on YouTube. Alex reminded me that as the waves of light travel along the tunnel with you, changing to reflect a spectrum of colors, they are accompanied by Brian Eno’s music.

Another surprise awaiting the weary traveler just beyond the neon tunnel is a 72-foot long brachiosaurus.

Although he’s there more in the service of science than art, this Jurassic vegetarian looms upward in a gesture that I find both startling and artistic. I usually think of a concourse as a long, horizontal box, but I find myself staring at the space between my head and the skylights silhouetting the dino’s head, impressed with the verticality of the space. The brachiosaurus comes from Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and s/he stands beside the museum’s store at O’Hare.

I Am Afraid of the Big Blue Horse

Blucifer could kill again! Image by unknown photographer/artist on Facebook.

These days, if I need to travel far, I usually fly out of Denver International Airport. Which brings me to the blue horse pictured at the top of this post.

This horse rears up along Pena Avenue on the way into DIA, and he’s inspired a kind of a cult following. There’s actually a Facebook group called I Am Afraid of the Big Blue Horse at DIA! At one point, before Facebook changed formats and confused things, the group had roughly 10,000 members.

Not to be outdone, Calgary’s Airport also has a big horse. Looks far more benign than DIA’s; maybe she’s a mare? Photo by Calgary Daily Photo.

Nicknamed “Blucifer,” DIA’s  32-foot-high sculpture is officially named the “Blue Mustang.” He is listed as one of the Top 5 Bizarre Art Displays on Yahoo and has also been cited by CNN as one of the nation’s top pieces of airport art.

This very anatomically-correct (!) stallion was commissioned two years before DIA opened, and he was created by New Mexico artist Luis Jimenez in 1993.

But here’s a spooky fact: Blucifer killed his creator.

On June 13, 2006 a large section of Blue Mustang  fell onto Jimenez and severed an artery in the artist’s leg. The sculpture was finished by studio assistants and family members.

Perpetual Motion in Boston

I’m captivated by this art work every time I see it, no matter how much time I have spent tracking little balls making their way through this kinetic sculpture. Located at Logan International Airport, the sculpture was created by George Rhoads and is called “Exercise in Fugality.”

George Rhoads’ Rube Goldberg device at Logan Airport. Photo by Coebabelghoti.

At a time when I was making repeated trips to Boston, I actually looked forward to having to kill time in the airport because it gave me time to stare at what must be the killer app of Rube Goldberg variety.

Clearly, I’m not the only person to have this response.

Below one of several YouTube videos of this sculpture – a medium that communicates the wonder of this artwork far better than the still photo at right -  Darealfiberoptix has written:

“When I was a kid, my mom lost me at an airport somehow.  It took a couple hours to find me and I was just standing in a trance watching the mechanical complexity. I had never seen anything like that before. I was blown away.”

Kicking Calder Around in Philadelphia

“As far as permanent installations go, I think the Calder mobile at Pittsburgh International Airport will always be my favorite,” writes my interior designer friend Wendy Hoechstetter.

Alexander Calder’s mobile entitled “Pittsburgh.” Photo by Elston’s photostream.

“I’ve always been a Calder fan, in part precisely because of this very piece, which figures prominently in my early memories, when my father used to take us out to the airport on weekends to watch the planes. It doesn’t stand out as much in the current newer terminal as it did in the smaller original one, but it’s always a sign that I’m home once I see it.”

Turns out that Calder did call Pittsburgh home – but the city and the airport weren’t always respectful of his sculpture, which is named “Pittsburgh.”  The Pittsburgh City Paper comments, “We’ve treated the sculpture rather shoddily since Calder, a Philadelphia native and one of the foremost American sculptors of the 20^th century, exhibited the 28-by-28-foot sculpture in the 1958 Carnegie International. To all appearances, Calder’s black-and-white mobile of aluminum and iron – two distinctly Pittsburgh metals – was a huge success. ‘Pittsburgh’ won the first prize for sculpture at the 1958 International, and it was purchased at the exhibition by one G. David Thompson.”

Now here’s the dirt. Writing on Flickr, Chuck Schneider explains:

Benny Bufano Peace Sculpture

“County Officials, in their finite wisdom, decided it would be ‘nice’ if the mobile were painted to match the Allegheny County color scheme of green and yellow. This was promptly done.

“Then, in a flash of brilliance, they decided it hung too low, so they hung some weights on it to shift the pieces. This immobilized the mobile, so to solve that problem, they attached it to a motor. All of course without ever consulting the artist.

“Calder, oddly enough, was incensed. At that time in history, however, an artist had very little recourse for such actions. So in a compromise, it was agreed to paint the mobile in a ‘Calder Red’. It wasn’t so easy. When the paint job was finished, the paint had been too thin, and it turned out to be pink.

“It wasn’t until 1979 that the mobile was taken down, repainted, and the weights removed. For a number of years then it was hung in the Carnegie Museum, where it had originally hung in 1958. In 1992, it was back at the airport, looking just like it did before all that nonsense.”

Old Friends & New in San Francisco

The course of public art, like love, never has run smooth. For years, I loved passing by the Benny Bufano sculpture that stood near the entrance to SFO. It has since been moved to near Lake Merced. Bufano’s Peace sculpture was controversial in its time. It was rejected by the patron who first commissioned it. After seeing it completed, decided that he liked Bufano’s bunnies and bears better than this rocket-like political statement.

Hearts in San Francisco. These hearts are decorated by local artists and placed all over town – including here at Union Square and also at SFO – before being auctioned off in a fundraiser for San Francisco General Hospital.

Beniamino Bufano was a great proponent of public art.  He offered his services to any community that could pay him day wages and supply materials. Of “Peace,” he wrote that he sculpted it “in the form of a projectile to express the idea that if peace is to be preserved today it must be enforced peace – enforced by the democracies against Fascist barbarism. Modern warfare, which involves the bombing of women and children, has no counterpart in a peace interpreted by the conventional motif of olive branches and doves.”

Sanctuario, a mural in the Mexicano Terminal at SFO. Photo courtesy of Jauna Alicia website.

SFO still has plenty of art, including fine changing exhibits. Among those that are installed permanently, my friend Sonnie Willis, a wonderful photographer, nominates as her favorite, “The mural in the Mexicana Terminal at San Francisco Airport.”

Sonnie writes, “I had the pleasure to meet the artist, Juana Alicia, years ago at a school in Marin County. She also worked on the mural for the Women’s Building in San Francisco.”

As Juana Alicia’s website describes it, “The concepts central to our design are the themes of: migration and permanence; movement and stillness; and intimacy within a public space. The airport is often the setting for some of the most dramatic moments and milestones in our lives. In our design we honor the wonderful and significant meetings and partings that happen in the airport, to bring to the foreground and freeze those moments in time, while creating a light-filled context of movement, flow of life and the energy of travel.”

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Please share your favorite examples of memorable airport art by leaving a comment on this blog.

Zapotec rug: Oaxaca Dawn from Novica

Perhaps because of the early darkness and cold outside, I have embarked on quest for color.

I have been wanting a focal piece of art in my living room, and decided to find something that Mason and I could give each other as a holiday gift. Something energetic like the Zapotec rug to the left.

As I mentioned some posts back, my house feels Latin-American or American Indian. The cobalt blue Talavera tile set into the saltillo floor of dining room – not to mention a big New Mexican sun cut into the kitchen tile  – give the open kitchen/dining room a Southwestern flavor, and the south light is as warm and golden as honeyed sopapillas.

The living room doesn’t have great light, nor any Latin touches. Initially, I set it up using things I already owned, figuring to improve on it later. And later is now.

That’s the room on the right — a little drab for my tastes. That rug above the TV chest, a Zapotec with a bird pattern, looks awfully washed out against the ivory walls.

I do have the good fortune to have inherited a genuine, vintage Navajo rug from my step-father, Bill Devine. You can see it on the floor in the foreground.

Teec Nos Navajo rug

“Not Navajo”

Bill was encouraged to buy this rug in the early 1960′s when he was a surveyor for the Nevada highway department.

Bill’s rod man, a Navajo, took Bill to a local trading post and encouraged him to buy some good Navajo weaving. Bill had a tough time selecting the rug. Each time that Bill wood choose something, his rod man – a man of few words – would cross his arms over his chest, shake his head in disapproval and say, “Not Navajo.”

What he meant was that Bill was choosing things that strayed from Navajo weaving tradition.

Two Grey Hills Navajo rug

My rug is definitely Navajo. You can see it on the floor in the foreground. Like many — perhaps most — classic Navajo weavings, it’s not brightly colored.

Prior to the introduction of aniline dyes around the time of the Civil War, Navajos primarily used wool in the colors their sheep grew it: grey, white, brown, black. A few other colors, chiefly red and yellow, were added from plant-based dyes, but these were not very bright.

Ganado Navajo rug

I have included a few classic Navajo rug patterns in this post by way of illustration; most of these pattern types are named for the areas in which they have been traditionally woven: Two Grey Hills, Ganado and Teec Nos are all famous rug patterns and place names. (In my recent internet rug search, I discovered that “Navajo” rugs are being manufactured in Arabia and Hong Kong — a long way from Tuba City!)

A deeply saturated red in a rug — or the inclusion of any color out of the range I mentioned above — should be a tip-off that the rug is “Not Navajo” or at least not historic. (Modern Navajo rugs, and Navajo Yei and sandpainting rugs don’t follow these classic rules.)

Some rather-nice, vibrantly colored rugs are being sold on E-Bay by folks who have described them as Navajo, even though a trained eye will quickly see that they are Zapotec weavings. Zapotec rugs are not rare or expensive, but they are a genuine folk art. Hand woven by Indians in Oaxaca, Mexico, they are part of a weaving tradition that reaches back more than 500 years.

Local Color Wanted

My house already contains a number of brightly-colored Guatemalan textiles and Zapotec rugs — souvenirs of my travels — and this house is the perfect place to indulge my long-time love for American Indian and Southwest art.

A grey Zapotec? Picks up the tones in the Navajo rug nicely, but the room lacks flair.

A blue Zapotec? This would work if I was also seeing the cobalt-colored Talvera tile that’s set into the dining room floor, but you can’t see both at once. And it’s too chilly.

I’m liking this red, but the geometry of the design is a bit too complex. The geometry of the Navajo rug is simple, and I’m thinking this new rug needs to echo that.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not the sort to adorn my space with Kokopelli figures, which have, to my way of thinking, become about as cliche as Hello Kitty. Nor am I enamored of coyotes wearing kerchiefs. That’s too kitschy for me.

I did want to echo the patterns in my Navajo rug, while warming up the room, which does have wine-red leather furniture.

So I went searching for another Zapotec. But the choices are many, and I had almost as much trouble making a selection as Bill did!

Although my choice didn’t have to pass muster with a critical rod man, I did want my husband to pleased. To help him visualize the choices, I Photoshopped the rugs that I liked, dropping them into the photo of the living room that you see above.

I thought that my readers might be also interested in that process, so I have included a few of the Photoshop images to the left.

The Test of Time

Years ago, I bought about a dozen Zapotec rugs in Tijuana. I still have most of them. They have stood up to years of wear on both floors and walls. (The gray and white bird pattern rug that’s currently on the wall was part of that initial purchase. It’s in good shape, but too understated for that spot.)

Zapotecs come in an amazing range of colors, and I tried quite a few before discovering the right combination of color and pattern. I created a dozen Photoshopped pictures, not just the three you see here!

I highly recommend this photo-visualization process; I have used it with my interior design clients, and it always helps them to get a feel for color.

After revising my focal wall a dozen times, I think I finally found the look that I was seeking: Vibrant, yet harmonious.

What do you think?

The winning rug! Woven by Mexico’s Mario Chavez, it’s also from Novica. They call it “Energy of Life,” and say that “each step in the diamond symbolizes a different stage of life beginning with conception.”

Resources

• Novica Zapotec rugs
• La Fuente Zapotec rugs and Mexican crafts
• Mission Del Rey Zapotec Rugs
• A History of Navajo Weaving from the Rockwell Mueum
• Copal Mexican Folk Art – History of Zapotec Rugs

Usually, metal tile is not made only of metal. Often, the metal is a cap over porcelain or ceramic tile, or the metal shine comes from a glaze. Sometimes, pieces of metal or metal tiles are combined with stone (and/or glass) in a mosaic. Here’s an example. This travertine and copper border comes from Australian tile manufacturer Maniscalco.

Bondi Beach Borders: Hotel Bondi

I love the interplay of color and light in the copper, and the contrast of textures between the metal and the travertine. This 3 in x 11 3/4 inch border is called Hotel Bondi and is part of the Bondi Beach Borders™ series. It would be stunning in a kitchen or a bathroom, or as an accent on a mantel.

Porcelanosa: Ironker Cobre

The image above is Ironker Cobre from Porcelanosa. This is a large format porcelain tile — 17″x 26″ — with a metallic shine, and it’s extremely versatile because the pieces are so large. Because it’s durable and somewhat textured, Ironker makes a great, non-slip flooring material. Porcelanosa features it as flooring in their installation shots. Can you visualize this in a bistro-styled dining room or around a home bar?

Alloy

Copper Flashing

Flashier still is La Nova’s Metaluxe Flashing. The Metaluxe collection is metal tile over a porcelain substrate. That means that while it’s pretty enough to be installed inside, it’s also tough enough for exterior applications. You could install this around your grill on the patio.

This tile comes in a choice of 6″ x 12″,  6″ x 24″ and 12″ x 24″ formats, as well as several colors and brushed metal patterns. In addition to the silver and gold tones shown here to the left and right, there’s also a pale platinum tile.

Because of their industrial chic, I can envision these tiles making a handsome kitchen backsplash. Because of their reflectivity, they would also be good at opening up a too-small or too-dark foyer.

Cobre’s Cousin

The Porcelanosa tile shown above has lots of relatives, all members of Porcelanosa’s Stonker line of porcelains. The Cobre (copper) shown above is actually part of the Ironker (iron) family, which also includes an Ironker Acero. Even more extensive is the Ferroker group, which includes Ferroker Alumino, Ferroker Caldera, Ferroker Niquel, Ferroker Titanio and their handsome parent: Ferroker, shown in the detail below.

Porcelanosa: Ferroker

Ferroker is a Stone-Ker porcelain tile, which can be used on indoor or outdoor walls and floors. It can even live outside happily during Aspen’s ski season, which makes it a great choice here in the Rockies. Stone-Ker tiles are made with 95% recycled materials, as an added benefit.

Daltile: Fashion Accents: Fortress Shimmer

The handsome mosaic above is a nickel blend from Daltile’s Fashion accent series. It comes in 12″ x 12″ sheets on a mesh backing, so it’s easy to install. The series includes silvers, coppers and wrought iron tiles mixed with glass and stone tile for lots of choice.

Maniscalco: Bondi Beach Borders, Mermaid Rocks

Above is another stunning border from the Maniscalco Bondi Beach series. I recently helped a woman from Michigan redesign her powder room, using it to top a large-scale porcelain that looks like stone with rusty iron accents in it. The room will also have an underlit, translucent onyx countertop holding a beaten copper sink.

We’ll be sending her the tile from our showroom in Aspen. (Given that it’s an international destination, Balentine sells to customers from all over the world. ) This particular combo of stone and metal sounds so gorgeous, it makes me want to fly to the Great Lakes to see it.

Maybe she’ll send me a photo.

Maniscalco Metal Decos

Landscape by Howard Post, Keating Gallery, Aspen, Colorado

“There are lots of reasons not to buy a painting, and very few reasons to buy one. That’s why I have to have good light,” says Gordon Keating.

Keating, who owns the Keating fine art in Aspen, Colorado, didn’t change the lighting in his gallery for reasons of efficiency or the environment.

The representative from CORE, the County Office of Resource Efficiency, certainly had environmental goals in mind when he stopped by Keating ‘s gallery with a bag full of green literature and a bit of a bribe in the form of a lighting grant. But Keating says that he’s “not a greenie.”

He does care a lot about how the gallery’s lighting is done though.

LED Light That Creates Clear, Beautiful Color

“I was skeptical,” Keating says. “But I did the research. I wanted to duplicate the color and clarity of the 120 volt PAR 20 halogen bulbs I had been using. The paintings respond well to that type of light because it has a warm color, and it’s clean. “

Oil painting by Wilson Hurley, hung in poor light. Notice how the trees at the right side of the painting appear nearly black.

Same painting, well lighted. The trees now have much more green, the white is brighter and the sky is far more subtle. My digital shot definitely picked up the difference, but it was far more marked in person.

Keating replaced nearly all of the existing halogen bulbs in his overhead track fixtures with Toshiba E-Core LED bulbs.

No Change in Fixtures

The new LEDs have the same mounting base as the old halogen flood lights, so Gordon was able to keep his existing fixtures. (By the way, the bulbs have the same screw-in base that American consumers are accustomed to seeing on old-fashioned Edison bulbs.)

What Keating found was that LED technology has come a long way in terms of quality, bulb longevity and aesthetic choices.

Keating fills his track fixtures with 8-degree and 25-degree flood lights so that he can angle individual lights onto the paintings. To the left, you can see a demonstration. Gordon moved a painting for me so that I could see how different it looked under good and bad lighting conditions.

The Keating Gallery specializes in traditional art, mostly oil paintings and three-dimensional pieces, all with a Western accent. (The photography on the Gallery’s website puts my shots to shame, so go take a look at the true beauty of these works.)

On the day I visited, I admired three beautiful old Navajo bridles and several fine pieces of Acoma pottery, in addition to the paintings. (I’m a painter myself, and I earned a minor in art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder, concentrating on American Indian art, and I felt that these handsome pieces of silver and pottery really deserved a place of honor in this blog.)

“The detail in some paintings requires both a wash of light and a spot,” says Keating. “There can’t be any hot spots. It has to be excellent.”

Vintage Navajo horse bridle, Keating Gallery, Aspen, Colorado

“You also want light that’s more white because you want the colors that the artist painted to show,” he explains. “I have experimented with the color of the light, and have found that the 2700 Kelvin does this.”

How the Color of Light is Measured

As I explained in an April 2010 post about exciting new options in energy-efficient lighting: the color of light is expressed in Kelvin units. For example, the warm white Edison bulbs we typically have used in homes have a color temperature of up to 2800K. They shine with a pinkish light. A halogen bulb, on the other hand, measures  between 2800K to 3500K and it creates a clear, white light. A cool white incandescent bulb usually has a color rating of 3600K to 4900K.

Keating, who opines that he has become “kind of geek about lighting,” says that he has done a lot of experimenting with the color of different sorts of bulbs. “Some M-16′s burn red, or blue or green,” he complained. “That just ruins the look of the painting.” Because LED manufacturers are trying hard to sell their product, they are providing very good consumer information, and he has been able to find the perfect choice.

Controlling the Ambient Light

Keating’s gallery is located in a 1960′s building. While the structure is cinder block, its interior and facings have been rustically finished to fit in with Aspen’s architecture. Many of Aspen’s false-fronted buildings date from Colorado’s silver rush, and they have Western and Victorian features. Although it is reproduction rather than original, the building that houses the gallery features a ceiling rough-hewn and exposed beams and pressed tin tiles.

Pressed tin ceiling and rough beams of the gallery ceiling.

The reflectiveness of the tin ceiling is misleading. The surface is actually fairly dark, and Keating uses it to his advantage. It helps to keep the ambient light subdued.

When Keating moved into the gallery, he replaced some cheap looking chandeliers with some 1920′s era chandeliers. Wavy glass covers the light bulbs that provide the ambient light. Traditional Edison bulbs are used in those fixtures, and Keating wants the resulting light to be low-key. “It helps the gallery to seem bigger,” he explains. “And the gallery should seem kind of romantic.”

Lighting designers think of creating light in three layers: ambient light, accent lighting and task lighting. A art gallery differs from a home in that it needs far more accent lighting than ambient lighting. (An office, by contrast, would require a preponderance of task lighting.) Gordon needs only a small amount of task lighting on his desk, and only enough ambient lighting to make the gallery seem comfortable. Otherwise, the light should direct all eyes to the paintings — just as he has arranged it.

Fixing the LED Dimmer Problem

On the left, the PAR 20 sized Edison bulb the gallery used to use. On the right, the replacement LED the gallery now uses.

Through trial and error, Keating discovered a way to dim his new LEDs. Although the kinks are slowly being worked out, many low-energy bulbs, both CFLs and LEDs, suffer technical problems when it comes to dimming. The lights will flicker and cut out when you try to dim them. But Gordon found that by leaving one halogen bulb on each track strip, he was able to successfully dim the entire fixture.

He’s also pleased that the new LEDs produce far less heat. “I used to have to put on a glove before I could touch the lights,” he explained. “I  have to mess with them a lot to get the light on the paintings right.”

Because of the heat reduction, he’s looking forward to the summer.  In years past, he has had to use an air conditioner to remove the heat that the lights added to his space. ”The gallery is at 8,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains,” he mused. “Air conditioning shouldn’t really be necessary.”

One final benefit he’s found; he has more elbow room. Although the new LEDs are somewhat pricey initially, they come with a five-year warranty.  Keating finds that because he’s having to replace bulbs far less often, he no longer has to devote expensive gallery space to storing light bulbs.

That’s a bright idea. It’s much better to use the space for art.

Two fine pieces of Acoma pottery at the Keating Gallery in Aspen.

As we age and become less mobile, if we sustain a disability, or develop an illness, the access into and around our homes may become a concern that we have not previously considered.

A stairlift won’t take you all the way to heaven, but it can make your home accessible again. The price is far more accessible than a move to a new home – and adapting the houses we already have is far more sustainable than building new ones. Marc and Nicolette agree: building homes to anticipate the full human growth and aging cycle is a much more sustainable approach to housing.

Stairs that were not an issue in the past can become a substantial obstacle, and even dangerous. Multiple-level homes can make “aging in place” — living at home rather than moving to a specialized facility — a real challenge.

If you are an adult child of aging parents, the possibility of injury to a parent who is truing to navigate stairs may become an immediate concern.

Finding a home without any stairs is not easy, and moving to another home might not be possible. As a result, one has to consider what other options are available to create a safe and accessible home that will work for aging seniors, or for those living with a disability or illness.

A stairlift may be a good solution in dealing with a series of stairs, either those encountered when entering or leaving the home, or those inside the home connecting different levels.

Lifts for All Seasons
and All Reasons

These handy pieces of equipment take into account outdoor and indoor applications as well as straight or curved stairs. There are also special models for larger and heavier users.

One of the most important considerations in evaluating a stairlift as a possible option revolves around the user’s ability to transfer from a sitting or standing position onto the stair lift chair.

If a manual transfer is not possible, a stair lift is usually not a good solution.

Outdoor stairlift

Outdoor Applications

The choices for outdoor lifts are more limited than those for indoors, both because not every stairlift manufacturer offers an outdoor version, and because exposure to the weather makes manufacturing more complicated.

Outdoor units will work only on a straight run of stairs, and typically, those stairs cannot exceed 20 feet in length. These lifts will travel at approximately 20 feet per minute, and a 30-45 degree incline is the steepest they can handle.

All outdoor stair lifts include weather-tight components, and they typically use an anodized aluminum track to help protect the power equipment from the elements year-round. Most models available also include a waterproof cover to protect the lift while not in use.

Most models offer a choice of seat covers and fabric.

Available Options

The track of a stairlift is mounted to your stairs. The chair itself will fold up so that it is out of the way when not in use. This allows for more clearance on the stairs — an important consideration when multiple people use the stairs. This type of unit can usually carry a passenger weighing up to 350 pounds.

Most of the seats that are available on stairlifts swivel 90 degrees toward the landing at each end of the track; this allows for safe entry and exit. The units include safety sensors that will stop the lift immediately if it comes into contact with anything on the stairs. They can all be installed on either side of a staircase and run off 115 VAC electricity.

Indoor Straight Applications

There are considerably more options available with interior stair lifts. They are normally designed to sit close to the wall or the stair railing. This is important because interior stairs are often narrower than exterior stairs.

A folding lift is a good solution for a narrow staircase.

Remote control directs the stairlift.

Lift stops automatically if the way is blocked.

Your seat can include a seatbelt.

Some models offer a hinged track that can be moved out of the way.

One model that I am familiar with extrudes only 11” from the wall when the seat is in the folded position. This makes it a good choice for narrow staircases. As with the outdoor models, indoor lifts can be installed on either side of the stairs by attaching them to the stairs.

Like outdoor lifts, indoor models also swivel for safe transfer at both ends. They include easy operating controls for up and down movement, and they can be summoned from either direction with a supplied call switch or remote.

Most of these units offer a very smooth ride, traveling approximately 16-22 feet per minute. The straight-run units normally include 16-18 feet of track and can often be upgraded to as much as 75 feet, as long as travel remains in a straight line. Many indoor stairlifts operate off a 24 VDC battery that is kept charged by a 115 VAC power supply connected to the rail.

In the event of a power outage, most lifts will complete between 20-40 full runs on the battery assuming that the battery is at full capacity.

All stair lifts can be manually lowered to the bottom of the rail in an emergency, and they include safety sensors that will stop the lift immediately if it comes into contact with anything on the stairs.

An Option for Aching Knees

One option available for straight-run applications is a perch stairlift. This lift is designed for users who have restricted movement in knee or hip joints and who find sitting painful.

The rider of this lift — shown below with the red seat — will remain in an almost full-standing position while using the lift. The moving platform includes a shortened seat and retractable seat belt for added support and stability.

Some companies also offer a heavy-duty stairlift for larger users. These models offer the heaviest carrying capacity which is normally 500 pounds, although I am aware of one model that has a 600 pound capacity.

Heavy-duty lifts, such as the one shown below to the right with a tan covering, all include a larger contoured seat that measures from 23 to 25” wide with a high back. The footrest is reinforced for added stability, and the armrests are heavy duty for more secure transfers.

These heavy duty lifts will serve a limited-length run of stairs; they operate over a maximum 20-foot length of track and move at 10 feet per minute. They will climb a 30-45 degree maximum incline.

The SL 500 carries heavier riders.

The straight-run stair lifts are normally very affordable. Because installation can usually completed in 2 to 4 hours, labor costs are manageable and contribute to keeping the costs of these units down.

The enhanced equipment for heavy duty models make these stair lifts a little more costly than the standard units, but most people still find them quite affordable.

Interior Curved Applications

Not every manufacturer of stair lifts offers a curved stairlift option. The makeup of these units is more complex. Careful calculations are necessary to make sure that the rail will remains at the same elevation relative to the stair from top to bottom of the rise.

Many companies have adopted a state-of-the-art digital target system of measurement to assure accuracy of dimensions.

A perch-style lift like this one is a good option for those who have knee problems or other issues that make sitting difficult.

Models such as the Minivator, shown below with the brown seat, can travel around corners, across intermediate landings, and up spiral staircases. They must be tailor-made for each individual staircase.

I once installed a curved stairlift that included a 180-degree turn at both ends!

Most curved-stair models allow you to choose to add a powered footplate and swivel seat — options that allow the rider to enjoy an easier exit at the top or bottom of the stairs.

These models also offer a powered, automatic hinge solution on the track — an example is shown above in the photos of various options — to prevent the track from blocking a doorway at the base of the stairs.

The Minivator 2000 will work on a curved staircase.

The complexity of their operation, the options available, and an added installation time of 1-2 days, results in the costs of these curved stair units running 3-to-5 times higher than a simple straight stairlift unit.

What to Choose?
Start with Expert Help!

In all instances, a universal design specialist who is familiar with the options that are available – and which are useful to your particular needs — can help determine the best choice for your particular situation.

While it is also possible to obtain an opinion from the companies selling this type of equipment their opinion may not always be neutral, given the motivation to sell their specific equipment.

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About Marc Mendelsohn

Marc Mendelsohn is an Architectural Design Professional, Certified Kitchen Designer (CKD), a Certified Bathroom Designer (CBD) and a Licensed General Contractor with Advanced Certifications in “Green” Building.

He has specialized in Universal Design and barrier free construction since 1992, and is considered one of leading experts in the country.

Marc has been featured on “The House Doctor” and has been published in magazines and newspapers. He lectures to college students and teaches Universal Design principles to professional associations.

His expertise in barrier-free design and construction brings credence to his work as an expert witness, assisting attorneys and litigants in building their cases and in providing expert testimony. Marc combines green/sustainable/healthy building practices with universal design in all his work as he believes that one without the other is an incomplete solution.

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Resource Links

• Marc’s Company: Universal Design Specialists
• Marc’s Blog
• Other kinds of lifting equipment
• Walk-in bathtubs

The author's house in Carbondale, Colorado

My house does have a green roof, but it’s not the kind on which sheep can safely graze.

But for reasons of purse and practicality, my main squeeze and I bought a modest, three-bedroom, ranch style house, circa 1983, in a quiet neighborhood here in Carbondale, Colorado, down the road from Aspen. Not a “green house” to my way of thinking.

But we’re working on greening this little pumpkin-colored house, working to save water, natural resources and energy.

The first thing we did before moving in was to have an energy assessment and thermal imaging done to show us where it was leaking. Those photos, as you will see here, have tales to tell.

Truth be told, I have written about this topic long enough that I already knew what the photos would show. Heat leaks out of an uninsulated roof, old-style single-paned windows, an uninsulated floor, and any holes in the walls. (Such as the dog door that we immediately asked our contractor to close.)

A thermal image of the living room ceiling. It's easy to see where the heat is going. We sent the contractor into the attic - which is and was insulated - but sure enough, there was a big gap in the insulation right where the photo showed it would be.

We immediately added spray-foam insulation and a moisture barrier to the crawl space under the floor, and we added insulation and weather-stripped in all the places where the images showed heat escaping.

The change was dramatic. The house felt drafty before, and the day after the insulation went in, it felt cozy and snug. (At least until you approach one of those leaky windows.)

I also closed and insulated those ubiquitous five-inch-in-diameter-holes-in-wall that you will find under sink vanities. Those monster holes that allow small water pipes to enter the house? Why, oh why do contractors cut holes three times as big as the pipe and then fail to fill them? This is third house where I have conducted this particular operation after feeling a very noticeable draft on my feet while brushing my teeth!

We’re planning to replace all the leaky windows with efficient ones, and to also improve the daylighting by adding a skylight, but we need to wait until finances improve for that. Our contractor, Tim Rafaelson, recommended that we replace all of the coving along the floors, and all the trim around the windows for thermal reasons. I was dubious. But Tim had me put my hand next to the old trim, fancy routed strips with a tongue and groove pattern that was very good at catching dust, and the draft was easily felt. You can also see the cold in the thermal image of the window. Replacing that trim, foam-sealing the gap between the wall board and the door or window frames, and then tightly attaching the new trim, made a heck of a difference.

This photo doesn't have much to do with insulation; I just couldn't post a whole blog without showing you how inviting the place has become. That sun is streaming in from the south exposure. In this photo, you can also see the Waterford gas stove in the living room. It's quite an efficient little stove - if a bit homely, in my view. We call her "Mabel." Since all the rooms radiate off this central living room, Mabel does a pretty good job of warming most of the house. We rarely use the electric baseboard heaters.

I have been redecorating rooms as well – and writing about that – and it’s getting to be a lovely, inviting and comfortable house. I’m having a housewarming this weekend, and my lovely friend the Reverend Barbara Palmer is going to perform a house blessing ritual for us.

But even though it will be blessed, it will never going be a straw bale house or a Passive House.

Face it. My house is orange, not green.

I was feeling a little disappointed about that until yesterday, when I was looking through old blog posts and repairing broken photo links. In the process, I stumbled across the post I had written about the house that US Green Building Council David Gottfried had built in Oakland. Among the major reasons that Gottfried’s house was green - it was not a new house!

Gottfried retrofitted an existing house. One that is very similar in size to my pumpkin-colored house. His has 1,440 square feet; mine is about 1,500. His house, like mine, is well-sited with a significant southern exposure that is perfect for solar panels. (I don’t have any panels yet, but I bought the house with an eye to that possibility. We get on the order of 290 days of sunshine a year here.) My house, like Gottfried’s, is within walking distance of shopping and public transit. (If you’re going for a LEED rating, you get points for that.)

Thermal imaging showing cold seeping in around the window frame.

There’s ever so much still to be done to green-up my orange house, but I was gratified to rediscover that there are huge energy savings to be tallied when people retrofit existing houses, rather than build new ones. And I’m not just talking about the energy used to heat the house and its occupants.

New York architect Richard Stein, working with researchers at the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana, found that constructing a 4,600 square meter building uses about as much energy as it takes to drive a car over 22 million kilometers - or more than 600 times around the earth!

My house from the back. The long axis of the house, and the peak line of its roof, is oriented east/west so that the roof you see here is perfectly situated for solar panels.

The “embodied energy” in a house – that is, the amount of energy it takes to manufacture the materials, ship them, cut them and build the house – can range from 30 to 50% of the total energy used by the house over its lifespan. This is what’s known as the home’s lifetime “carbon budget.”

Taken together, the running and construction of homes and buildings in America use a whopping 45% of our total energy budget. That’s a very big deal, with big implications for climate change.

Now I’m not making any claims for this house being highly energy efficient or environmentally responsible, or any such thing. I was just surprised – and happy – to rediscover the lesson that what’s old is new, when it comes to homes.

And how could I not be concerned about my home’s carbon budget?

After all, I live in Carbondale!

After the color makeover

When I first posted some of the MLS photos of my place near Aspen, one of my designer friends asked, “Were the people who owned it colorblind?”

That made me chuckle. I don’t think that there was anything wrong with their eyes; I could see what they were trying to do with the colors in the house. They were trying to make it lively, but I don’t think that they quite understood how to pull a unified palette together. They didn’t understand that certain colors had cultural roots, or that particular materials evoked places and styles that were also associated with color palettes.

Nor did they know much about light.

Color reflects light of course, and it also changes light. One can learn this via observation, by studying design, and through experimentation.

The room before the color makeover

Before: the chocolate brown half-wall. It's also visible (barely in the dark) in the "before" photo above.

The brown wall repainted with five colors in a dry-brush technique.

Of course, judgement plays a role. As the witty Michael Adams, president of BJ Adams and Company real estate in Aspen asked me a couple months ago, “Do you know where good judgement comes from?”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite. Where does good judgement come from?”

“From experience,” he answered. “And do you know where experience comes from?”

“I bet you’re going to tell me.”

“Yes! It comes from bad judgement.”

Oh yeah, that rings true. We all learn by making mistakes. Some years ago, I painted a rather gloomy dining room a coral pink, hoping to warm it up. The color didn’t work as I had hoped. The room did look warmer, but still a bit gloomy. There simply wasn’t enough light in the room, and the place still looked dark.

The room has a lovely, rustic Mexican tile floor. It is a saltillo tile inset with blue Talavera diamonds. I think that those blue tiles were probably what inspired the home’s owners to paint the dining room wall a dark blue — a color that positively sucks the light out of the room.

In the case of this current dining room – which was also somewhat dark as the “before” photos show – the home’s owners hoped to pick up on a color that is prominent in one of the room’s nicer features and play it up.

Vibrant blue can be stunning on walls in the right situation. The Hotel Casa Azul in Antigua, Guatalemala, where I stayed during the wedding of my friends Diana Reid and Terry  Hanold, comes to mind. Amid bougainvillea, palms and tropical light, the hotel’s grotto-like reception area and deep blue walls are soothing.

Detail of the Talavera tile floor with the cobalt blue inset

But in Colorado, where the light may be reflecting off snow on the porch, that blue is chilling. Worse, when the natural light comes from a single source, it’s important to bounce the light as far into the interior as possible.

A mirror or a white wall will do the trick, but that deep blue wall shown in the “before” picture simply sucks the light out of the room. (Interestingly, the reflectance of a white wall is as good as a mirror, both of them having an albedo rating of one.)

In the case of this dining room, the gloom cast by the blue wall was further deepened by painting the half-wall between the dining room and living room a dark, chocolate brown. The interior doors were painted black.

To repair these design mistakes, the room was painted a warm white (the color is Sherwin Williams’ “downey”). New paneled doors replaced the ugly slab doors, which were also painted white. This made quite a difference, as the before and after photos below will show.

The brown half wall, which has a rough, uneven texture was art-painted in five earthtone colors – terracotta, amber, poppy gold, butter gold and ivory – in a dry brush stroke. The colors were chosen to pick up and extend the natural colors of the floor tile.

To pick up on that deep, cobalt blue, I went back to the cultural source of the tile: Mexico. Talavera tile comes in beautiful hues, typically a wine red, poppy yellow and cobalt blue, mixed with other coordinated shades.

Detail of Talavera tile on the mirror showing the typical Talavera palette - Tuscan pottery uses a similar color palette and is used to great effect in kitchens

Talavera is a type of majolica earthenware that dates back to the 16th century. It has a white base glaze, over which patterns are hand painted.  

Authentic Talavera pottery comes from the city of Puebla and the nearby communities of Atlixco, Cholula and Tecali.

A Talavera palette is brought into the room with a large, beaten tin mirror that is ornamented with tile. (The mirror is 33″ in diameter, and was purchased from La Fuente imports in San Diego.)

The Latin theme is further elaborated with Guatemalan textiles; that’s one draped over the golden-hued half wall in the “after” photo above.  Somehow,  the light is now soft and the colors are glowing. When it’s right, you feel it as much as you see it — and I feel very, very good in this room.

Before: Black doors

After: white doors

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DE COLORES

De colores,
De colores se visten los campos en la primavera.
De colores,
De colores son los pajaritos que vienen de afuera.
De colores,
De colores es el arco iris que vemos lucir.
Y por eso los grandes amores de muchos colores
Me gustan a mí. 

The dining room I just redesigned in my Carbondale home near Aspen provides a cautionary tale. This room suffered from many problems, as the “before” photos below will show: dark colors, gloss paint, blocked sight lines and a mish-mash of disconnected styles and motifs. But for this post, I will concentrate on the towering table. Here’s how the room looks now.

Compare the visual effect of this table with the one below.

It’s had a makeover that has included paint, lighting, color scheme and a change of furniture that included the purchase of a round, traditional height table that expands from 42 inches in diameter to a large oval that easily seats six people, and eight if they are friendly. (This is the Ronan table from Pier 1 Imports.)

Here's how the dining room looked before. This was a sales photo from the MLS listings!

As you can see from the “before” photo below, placing a counter-height table in this rather diminutive dining space was a double-dip doozy of a design mistake. First, the dimensions of the table were all wrong for this room — or any small area — because they take up too much visual space.

When you’re short on room, whether it’s floor space or cramped vertical space resulting from a low ceiling, the best approach is choose smaller-scale furniture.

In a small bedroom, for example, a low, modern bed with clean, un-fussy lines will make the room feel more open and accessible. It’s best to leave the raised-platform beds with steps to the mansions up the hill. (However, I am sorry to report that I have seen enormous, ornate beds dominating not-big-enough bedrooms in the grand homes up in Aspen, near where I live. Some of those four-poster beds can make even a generously-sized room feel cramped.)

But back to my place downvalley from Aspen.

The faux pas committed by the too-tall table that formerly occupied my dining room was compounded by the fact that the dining room is raised. To reach it, one climbs two steps up from the adjacent living room. Given this split-level arrangement, the table top, as seen from the living room, was well above the eye-level of most visitors. Coming up to it felt oppressive, like running into a wall.

The shorter table and the removal of a dangling pot rack opens up the sight lines from the kitchen into the dining room.

What’s more, the hulking bulk of the too-tall table and chairs blocked the light coming into the living room and the sight lines from both the kitchen and living room. This made all three areas seem darker than they needed to be.

Finally, I wondered how well that tall table and chairs worked in a family with a young child. Since he was in grade school, I supposed he had learned to clamber up on the high chairs, but the family also had an infant on the way. I can’t imagine those chairs being particularly easy for toddlers or elders to use.

Tall tables work well in rooms that are airy, bright, spacious and have high-ceilings. Unfortunately, those adjectives don’t describe dining rooms in most of our houses.

In this "before" picture, a dangling pot rack, a bar-height table and a too-tall sideboard all conspire to block sightlines and cramp the room.

Despite all that, tall tables seem to be the order of the day in small apartments and in houses with children who will without a doubt tip over those towering chairs. I really don’t understand the allure. Who’s buying them? Are these the same people who went for platform shoes?

If you’re not living in a coffee house, a bar or a mansion, my advice – which you didn’t ask for and is worth more than you’re paying for it – is to just say no. Don’t be a fashion victim.

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I wanna jump but I’m afraid I’ll fall
I wanna holler but the joint’s too small
Young man rhythm’s got a hold of me too
I got the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu

Call some other’s baby that ain’t all
I wanna kiss her but she’s way too tall
Young man rhythm’s got a hold of me too
I got the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu…

- Johnny Rivers

My husband and I just bought a house in Carbondale, near Aspen, Colorado. Although the photos posted on the MLS didn’t look all that great, I could see that the place has wonderful possibilities.I’m eager to start a design makeover on my Rock Court house, and I will be sharing my progress here in this blog.

Right after the previous owners moved out, I walked around the naked house and took lots of photos. The house has lots of potential, and it was easier to see it with the house stripped of its furnishings.

Talavera tile with cobalt blue insets - one of the handsome features of this house

It has good bones.

I have been looking for clues that would tell me what the house wanted to be.  As I walked through it, multiple details have caught my eye. It is as if the house has been whispering, “I feel a bit Latin.”

It wasn’t about to break into a Tango, but the clues were there: a handsome Talavera tile floor. A round arch in the entryway. Rooms clustered around a central social space.

It’s not built around a courtyard, as would be traditional in a Spanish house. (Those courtyards serve a cooling function in warm, Mediterranean climates. Here, we’re in ski country.) But all of the rooms do radiate off of a central, open-plan living room which serves a social function similar to the courtyard.

Granite inset in the living room - another nice detail.

This light fixture would look good in a New York studio or a very modern interior. But it's all out of whack with the Mexican tile --looks like the Jetsons landed at the wrong airport.

The house also has exposed beams and a nice inset of granite in the living room.

Best yet, the place is oriented perfectly on its lot; the long axis lies east/west, and the kitchen window and dining room, with its sliding glass doors, face south. This means that the house is appropriately oriented for solar heating and cooling, and I mean to take advantage of that.

Even though the interior is a bit dark, the orientation of the house should make it reasonably easy to improve amount of natural light available inside the house.

Dark interior colors have made the low level of lighting even worse than it might be. There’s a lime green entry hall, a cobalt blue accent wall in the dining room, and a half wall that is painted a dark brown. (When I posted photos on Facebook, a friend asked, “Did the owners have something wrong with their eyes? They seem a bit color-challenged.”

This interior is going to have plenty of color, but I’m starting by painting it all a warm, creamy white.

That’s the contractor’s second job. His first is to install insulation under the floors and to order energy-efficient windows. Replacing the windows is going to be a bit of a juggling act, with winter coming on, but we’re just down the valley from Aspen here and that’s a priority.

Although it’s not a priority, I couldn’t close this post without a nod to the infamous “Bronco’s Room” — aka “the man cave.” What can I say about this eye-popping spot? Maybe the realtor who wrote the copy for the MLS listing handled it with just the right note of understatement: “Wait until you see the Broncos room.”

The wait here will be very short. Just look below.

OMG! LMAO!

Because the table moves, you would think a video would best convey what it’s like. But a YouTube video that shows the table’s spinning glass plates in action doesn’t fully convey the way that the colors change and that the patterns interact. (You can see the video at the bottom of this post.)

The one-of-a-kind kaleiscope table is a collaborative work of art that took eight artists, engineers and fabricators more than seven years to produce. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find something like this at a gallery in downtown San Francisco. But Carbondale, Colorado?

Detail of jeweled glass

When I moved back to Colorado in the spring of 2011, and new friends suggested that Carbondale was the place for me, I worried about whether they had both oars in the water. I also suspected that they were seeing me in way quite at odds with the way I see myself.

When I knew Carbondale back in the 1970′s, it was a wide place in the road where there was a bait and tackle shop and a potato farmer’s co-op. It was a place you could roll out your sleeping bag for a couple bucks a night during a ski trip to Aspen. But that was about it.

Why would an urbane, artsy sort like me want to go there?

Since then, Carbondale has grown into a wonderful artists’ community. It’s a town of about 6,000 that features not only gorgeous scenery, but also great restaurants, frequent cultural festivals, and delightful art galleries. The Ravenheart Gallery on Weant Boulevard is one of them. Ravenheart has a bit of specialty in glass and when one walks in the front door, the kaleidoscope table takes center stage.

The half-ton table is made of four stacked orbs of glass, each more than six feet in diameter. All four balance on a steel stem, and only the lowest orb, which is made of clear and crackled glass underlit by LEDs, is fixed in place.

Above the lighted plate, everything rotates.  The second-to-the-bottom orb spins around to reveal rainbow-hued peacocks, ravens, rivers, fish, mountains, orchids and symbols. The third-level orb, which is divided into sections by three jeweled scepters; a detail of one of them is shown at the top of this post. This orb rotates across the two below, changing colors and flashing as its facets cross the lights.

The fourth orb, perched at the top of the stack, is composed of clear tempered glass. Although it protects the artwork below it and provides a dining surface, it also has a decorative job: it frames a large lighted dome of crystal that perches at the table’s center.

The table’s three decorated layers contain at least 16 kinds of glass: fused, dichroic, jeweled, stained, rippled, textured, seeded, mirrored, molded, crackled, watered, etched and beveled glass, to name a few.

The idiosyncratic table was the brainchild of Willa Doolin, who opened the Ravenheart Gallery in the spring of 2011. “I thought of this about 20 years ago,” said Doolin, “but it took 14 years to find the right people to make it, and for technology to catch up to my vision.”

Because of the table’s weight, and because three of the four orbs are supported only by the tensile strength of the glass plates themselves, the table required custom-made ball bearings. Two engineers and four different metal shops were involved in making the petal-shaped base to which the orbs are attached.

A sun and a peacock in the table. Doolin's family raised peacocks in Texas. Most of the symbols in the table have autobiographical significance.

Glass artist Mary Matchael, who drew the table’s designs for Doolin and fabricated the glass plates, said, “If anything was so much as 1/16 of an inch out of true, it wouldn’t work. The glass is essentially balanced on a pipe that is nine inches in diameter, and the plates extend out more than six feet. If a 200-pound man were to lean on the edge – and someone will because it’s a dining table – the table can’t tip. The base had to sit on the floor and be very stable. It took a lot of trial and error to get it all to work, to get it to rotate smoothly and quietly.”

Matchael is the owner of the Crystal Glass Studio, located behind the Ravenheart Gallery. Matchael cuts, cooks, and carves glass to create sophisticated architectural lighting, doors, windows and giftware. She has received commissions from all across the US. Despite nearly 40 years of glass-making experience, Matchael had to develop new techniques for adhering and attaching the glass plates in the kaleidoscope.

A school of jeweled fish swimming in the Crystal River; it's the river that flows through Carbondale on its way to the Colorado River.

If you’re looking for a distinctive dining room table, this one is for sale. The asking price: $200,000.

Doolin admits that she’s “rather conflicted” about selling the table. The art in it commemorates her sons, her birth constellation, the peacocks that her family raised in Dallas, and orchids that her scientist brother named after discovering them in the Amazon.

But no matter; now that all the kinks have been worked out, other kaleidoscope tables can be made.

“If a person wanted to commission a table like this, we would know how to do it now,” said Doolin. “We wouldn’t have to have seven or eight people work on it. It wouldn’t have to be as heavy; this one could bow a floor. It would have the buyer’s own symbols in it, rather than mine. Or it could be geometrical, more like a traditional kaleidoscope.”