Mr. Prof designer home

Need a last minute summer vacation? Have a couple tens of thousands of spare dollars lying around?


Poseidon Undersea Resort is the world's first seafloor resort. The luxury resort is accessible by elevator, and you sleep 40 feet below surface. They'll even teach you to pilot one of their 3 passenger submaries and "explore the abyss."


So the decor is a bit disappointing compared to what it could be, but there's a lot of potential. Too bad it isn't steampunk.

Thanks to Mr. Jon McDougal for pointing this out.

Ms. Heather Morris, a reader, spotted some rather steampunk finds recently at Anthropologie.

The "Old World Lamp" incredibly seems to combine distressed cotton-linen, a globe, and a light into one perfect piece. I'd put this into my Airship Room, if I actually had one.



Also charming are the colored chemistry lab vases -- I suspect lab glass was never actually made in these colors, but then I also find that clear glass ones tend to get "lost," visually, in a room, so this might be a good antidote.

Ms. Morris also points out the tea bowl lanterns and inlaid pearl light switch covers.

Mr. von Slatt was so kind as to point out his recording of the Steampunk Design Panel at Readercon.

It's a lovely rambling panel that covers the politics and philosophy of Steampunk Design (I'm not a purist, nor were most of the panels) -- DIY was deemed a core part of the approach, but it doesn't actually have to carry steam to be considered Steampunk.

Holly Black (author of the Spiderwick Chronicles) mentions her Tudor home that she's redone with hidden passageways, etc. I'll see if I can track down or wheedle pictures of same.

There's some nice references to the Steampunk Home, as well. *blush*

They wrap up the panel brainstorming what a "Steampunk Gibson Chair" would look like -- as best I can tell, it's a steam-warmed hovercraft chair, with armature for dealing with creatures of the night. Fun!

"CHILD TRAINING" by Voddie Baucham

I wanted to share with you the plan for my new kitchen. It's one thing to hunt steampunk stuff and post it to the blog or introduce a lamp next to your bed, but I'm finding it much more challenging to design actual rooms in a way that all the pieces will work together and come in within a budget.

Like most people, I can't afford custom cabinets, so I went with the most-quality-for-your-money Ikea kitchen cabinets. "Ikea?!" I hear you saying, "How can that be steampunk?" Well, it's a challenge, but if you think Ikea is nothing but Scandinavian Modern, you may want to take a look at the Liljestad cabinets. An added plus for steampunks -- Ikea kitchens can be varying levels of DIY. We'll probably assemble all the cabinets ourselves and use a contractor to actually hang them, but if you have more time than money, doing the entire install yourself is entirely feasible.





Ok, enough of the Ikea commercial, on to my kitchen. If you want to see the specific layout of my kitchen you can see it here and here. I chose Liljestad because it has the nice dark wood I like. With lots of glass front doors, I'm hoping it will have the feel of a turn of the century Parisian Bistro.

I'm steampunking it up with a handful of elements. The light over the penisula will be Architects and Hero's Akordian Two Light.


And the backsplash will be antiqued metal -- most likely copper. Here are two of the contenders:

The hardware for the cabinets will likely be brass or copper bin style pulls. (Could I combine copper and brass elements? Would this get too "busy"?)

The problem I'm running into is countertop material. The sort of look I'm going for means the traditional countops would be sheet metal -- zinc or copper for instance -- but that's an expensive and impractical plan. The other traditional counter surface is white carrera marble. Now, I would love carrera marble, but it's fragile and prone to staining. So where does that leave me? Stuck. Do I use a fake carrera marble like Okite's carrara bianca? Do I find a marble that's mostly white (most of them have a lot of yellows and gold in them, which might work nicely with the brass?) Choose a manufactured stone in something that resembles travertine? Any one have other ideas?

So this is more of a "brain dump" sort of post, but I would love your ideas and opinions. Anything strike you as a particularly good or bad idea? Anything else I should have though of?

I'll be done with the library theme pretty soon, but I just ran across this "fantasy" library on Journal 703. It's lovely. He has the most romantic flooring discussion:

The floor I'd choose would be a floor I fell in love with as a fifteen year old boy in one of my friend's house. His parents had a beautiful federal style two story Colonial Revival home. Later, they added a traditional den/library to the back of the house. I've never forgotten the floor. It was brick; very smooth brick from an old street that was dug up and replaced in town. These bricks were reddish brown and very smooth. It had a sealed appearance that was very smooth. I later found out how they managed it. The brick was set, and sealed and coated with gloss polyurethane. On top of that were many coats of oxblood wax.

I'm a big fan of herringbone floors -- it's a unique way to use a standard rectangular shape, which means you can create a particularly unique floor pattern using off the shelf components. I'm building an addition to my house, and for the new upstairs bathroom, I'm going to use standard stock American Olean 3"x6" Subway tile ($.22/piece) laid in a herringbone pattern with a dark grout. I'm hoping it ends up looking like this:

Art Donovan's curating what's turning into an amazing Steampunk Exhibition at the Hamptons Antique Galleries in Bridgehampton, New York. He's got work by my favorites -- Jake von Slatt, Datamancer, Eric Freitas -- plus regulars on Brass Goggles (Crab Fu!), plus more artists I've never heard of.

The opening reception is August 16th from 5-9PM, if you're anywhere near the area.

The full release: