Casa de Estrellas, Luxury Boutique Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Casa de Estrellas
(WebWire) 5/4/2007 2:15:24 AM

High End-Low Key, Famous Hollywood Designer, Jay Payne, Brings Charm and Style to a Top Tourist Destination, Santa Fe New Mexico.

SANTA FE, May 4th, 2007–While his previous client, Sylvester Stallone made Rocky VI, Jay Payne created Santa Fe’s newest Luxury, Boutique Hotel. “Well healed travelers demand quality service and a small, manageable Hotel is the best way to provide that”, says Payne. Dubbed ‘House of the Stars’, Casa de Estrellas is the ultimate luxury accommodation. High End – Low Key, Personalized Service is the key. Rather than calling a concierge for directions you may take your personal host with you. Instead of eating out every night, your Personal Chef will cook a delicious gourmet meal to your specifications, in your Private Villa. Your Personal Butler will unpack your luggage and make a perfect latte’, run errands or turn down the bed.

“This project is a culmination of all I learned working on celebrities homes such as Sylvestor Stallone, Whoopie Goldberg, Prince, Richard Dreyfuss” He has recreated world class restaurants Mirabelle, Clafoutis and others on Los Angeles’ famed Sunset Strip. Giving his Los Angeles home up to Kadee Strckland, star of the TV series Wedding Bells, Payne was inspired by Kadee’s work and has designed a Wedding Garden on the premises.

“The goal is to provide high end – low key service to guests that appreciate extra pampering. Santa Fe, ‘The City Different’, attracts both celebrities and business executives.” Payne’s high end-low key philosophy speaks to his guests twice. First through the inviting interior design combining mud and straw walls with ancient antiquities from around the world and second through the high end- low key type of personalized service. “Successful people need and appreciate good quality help that gets the job done and don’t get in the way.” says Payne.

“Running a hotel is an art form like anything else in life”, says Payne. “Now others will benefit from all I have learned through the years by working for the best teachers in the world. My clients. My life has been blessed and now I can share those gifts with others. I was fortunate to find a Historic property in the pulsating, heart of downtown Santa Fe. Private Villas behind a walled compound allow guests to feel part of a community, yet have complete privacy. Casa de Estrellas is an oasis inside Santa Fe’s bustling, creative community”.

About Casa de Estrellas

The hotel is unique in several ways. It offers separate, private villas instead of rooms or suites. There are only 9 bedrooms inside 6 separate buildings. Each Villa comes with its own private parking. Every Villa has a gourmet kitchen designed so a personal chef can prepare meals. There is an on site, full service salon and spa. Additional services are personal butler and personal host.

www.casadeestrellas.com

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Homes Under Remote Control

Turning Switches, Knobs Becoming Thing Of The Past
By Joe Robinson
April 2, 2007

Erica Salisbury doesn’t like coming home to a shadowy cave at night, and now she doesn’t have to. By clicking a mouse from any computer, anywhere, or by triggering a remote sensor, she can illuminate her house like a stadium before reaching the front door.

“The whole house lights up,” says the mother-to-be, who with husband Ben has made the leap to a digitally integrated home. “That’s important for me because I don’t like being in the dark.”

The Salisburys of Porter Ranch, Calif., are not the only ones leaving the Dark Ages of knobs, dimmers and switches flipped by hand. Thanks to the burgeoning home-automation business, couch potatoes can turn up the heat, turn down the air conditioning, shut off an oven, check a security camera and scroll through their DVD or music library without moving a calf muscle.

New technology also allows them to personalize these functions from wherever they happen to be via the Web or cell phone, ushering in the era of the house you can take with you. Call it the iPad.

“It’s definitely grown,” Pat Hurley, tech analyst for Richmond, Va.-based consulting firm TeleChoice, said of the trend, citing the number of businesses entering the field.

“The digital home is absolutely happening,” said Will West, chief executive of Control4, the Salt Lake City-based manufacturer of the Salisburys’ system. “We can see it in the music we’re listening to, we can see it in our televisions and more devices coming online and into your home.”

How does it work? Installers connect your house’s electronic and digital devices to a command center, a hard drive that looks like a stereo receiver and can stream music, store movies and manipulate security cameras, among other functions. All can be activated by a remote control, wall keypad, off-site computer via the Web or cell phone.

“You don’t have to run around to turn on music in each room and all the lights,” said Jon Blanchard, who runs Vantage Studio, an audio-video and interior design company in Beverly Hills, Calif., which installs home-automation systems. “It’s one button, and you’re done.”

The dream of the smart home has teased the popular imagination for years: sci-fi novels, “The Jetsons,” the Clapper light switch of as-seen-on-TV fame (“Clap on! Clap off!”). But control-freak nirvana is finally attainable with new Wi-Fi technology that makes it affordable for someone other than a potentate or marquis.

Until recently the price tag for home-automation systems ranged from $30,000 to $50,000 and kept the industry stagnant, said Kurt Scherf, a market researcher at Dallas-based Parks Associates, which studies emerging technologies.

These days a slew of firms, such as Control4, are automating homes for $3,000 to $15,000. Best Buy Co. rolled out a $15,000 system called ConnectedLife.Home, which allows you to manage light switches, the thermostat and security cameras by remote control on a high-definition TV. Motorola Inc.’s Homesight and AT&T Inc.’s Remote Monitor allow you to view video, monitor door and window sensors or turn on lights from a Web-enabled phone.

No wonder the home-automation business is expected to double in sales to nearly $6 billion in the next four years, said Scherf.

For those drowning in a flood of unread user manuals for digital devices, the prospect of a total tech home invasion may prompt plans for padded walls. Many of us, after all, would rather have a root canal than program our TiVos or, for true Luddites, the VCR. The biggest challenge of the smart home may be the dumb way user interfaces have been designed.

“Ease of use is still the major issue for most of the technology we write about,” said industry analyst Hurley, co-author of “Smart Homes for Dummies.”

Usability was a prime concern at the Salisbury house. The couple had seen friends and family struggle with the complexity of expensive systems, so they wanted something affordable that they could use without a live-in Nobel laureate engineer.

In the living room of their new home, Erica and Ben demonstrate their system with a single Control4 remote. If you mess up, the red “4″ button takes you back to the main menu.

The opening screen looks decipherable enough. A few icons float on the couple’s 63-inch plasma TV screen listing lights, comfort, videos, TV and music.

“Everything’s right there,” said Ben, who runs a real estate company. “I go to music, hit that. Then all the albums come up, and I just pick one.”

The media features will be familiar to anyone with an iPod. Ben can choose individual songs or highlight an album and start playing it. He also can build playlists. He clicks on an album cover, and the Goo Goo Dolls are instantly rocking the house. He can add other rooms in which he wants the music to play or have the sound rumble from all speakers.

The movie interface is equally logical and a big selling point for Ben. Now he doesn’t have to mount a search party when he wants to find a film from his collection of 500 titles. The command center functions as a home-theater library, organized by genre — comedy, action — and by director.

“I watch stuff and listen to stuff more now because it’s up there, as opposed to having to go find it on my rack,” he said.

Asked to demonstrate how to dim the kitchen lights, however, Erica tries gamely but gets stumped on where to go.

“I have to be honest, I don’t use the light function that often,” she said, laughing.

It turns out she doesn’t need the plasma display anyway. She can control any light from her remote control or touch panels scattered around the house. Or from a computer.

Matt McKenna, owner of Semaphoric Smart Homes, which did the installation and programming for the home, turns down the kitchen lights and adjusts the temperature in the room from his laptop.

“They could be doing this from New York,” McKenna said. “It gives you full control of all functions you have in your house online.”

- – -

Cost of convenience

$6 billion

Estimated sales in the home-automation business in next four years, according to Kurt Scherf, market researcher at Dallas-based Parks Associates, which studies emerging technologies.

$3,000 – $15,000

Price range that home-automation company Control4 charges to outfit a home.

$15,000

Cost of Best Buy Co.’s system, called ConnectedLife.Home, which allows users to manage light switches, the thermostat and security cameras by remote control on a high-definition television.

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IKEA Builds Homes

Pre-Fabulous Homes
Wednesday March 07, 2007

Ikea is branching out into house-building – flatpack-style, of course.

The Scandinavian-style timber-framed houses and flats will be built near the Gateshead International Stadium after planning permission was given for 117 homes.

The Tyneside town is now set to become the first site in the UK to boast a development of BoKlok homes.

They were designed in the mid-1990s to help Swedes on to the property ladder.

It is believed that work on the first phase of 36 flats in six two-storey blocks will begin later in the spring with the first flats being marketed in Ikea’s Gateshead store in the autumn.

The flats are said to be space-saving and functional and within reach of households earning between £12,500 and £30,000 a year.

Flexible and open-plan with high ceilings and large windows, they are built in a factory from insulated panels.

Homes come with a host of additional features as standard, such as wooden flooring, fitted kitchens and free interior design advice from Ikea.

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The Mail-Order House

A New York exhibition traces the early days of pre-fab housing
by David Sokol
March 8, 2007

If any proof was necessary that architects are as prone to following trends as the average Joe, one need look no further than prefabricated housing. This construction method du jour has been suggested for everything from stylish vacation homes, to cozy replacements for FEMA trailers in the Gulf Coast region.

Prefab architects and their fans talk about the subject with the kind of enthusiasm and reverence reserved for just-hatched inventions. But newcomers to the party may be unaware that prefab construction predates contemporary architectural currents. At the New York School of Interior Design (NYSID), the exhibition “Prefabricated Homes in America: The Early 20th Century Mail-Order House” traces the trend as far back as 1912, when Sears Roebuck first offered consumers the chance to purchase house plans and all the parts necessary to build them.

Exhibition curator and NYSID professor Evie T. Joselow says that while early 20th-century prefab designs failed to corner the housing market, they did take root in the imagination of consumers. Companies including Sears, Aladdin, and Gordon-Van Tine offered middle-class Americans their first chance at homeownership—a strikingly Modern vision, too, that featured open plans, appliances, mechanical equipment, lighting fixtures, and built-in furnishings.

We chatted with Joselow about this first wave of prefab design and gained some historical context for our current obsession. “Prefabricated Homes in America” runs alongside the show “The Home House Project: The Future of Affordable Housing,” through April 21.

So, prefab housing isn’t such a new concept after all.

Actually, prefab was a part of very early American history. Houses were transported to the colonies from England. These were sectionalized buildings in which entire wall panels were shipped with the door and window frames already cut out. And at the end of the 19th century, materials for houses were often supplied already cut, but unassembled.

What prompted that industry to pop up then?

Building-supply companies had depleted the large timber around the Great Lakes, so they figured that they could use their remaining milling resources to offer house plans and cutting wood to match them. And since they were already selling stairs and moldings, they bundled these products into a menu for customizing a house. Also, you see the rise of mail-order business in the 19th century: Sears Roebuck mail-order clothing ultimately led to readymade housing.

The prefab advertisements exhibited here look quaint, but these designs were in fact quite modern.

For many people this was the first house to have the modern bathroom and kitchen included. More generally, prefabs parallel the new interest in American homeownership—this was the time when home economics was born.

So the efficiency studies associated with early home economics explains the seamless flow between rooms?

Yes, but when we walk in these places today we notice the small size of the rooms. We don’t realize just how ingenious the floor plan was.

And yet, on the outside, these houses didn’t push the envelope at all.

Consumers had no interest in concrete or glass. This is not novel taste. It’s comfortable, quaint, cozy, cute: it’s the California bungalow, or Cape, or foursquare farmhouse you see in your dreams. This was trickle-down taste. The public was not yet ready for the modern look we associate with innovative prefab today. Still, in the 1930s you start finding shiny surfaces and some pared-down houses. So the middle class was looking to Europe somewhat and demanding styles that originated there. Companies also introduced new materials like aluminum-protected lumber, asbestos, new roof materials, and paint solvents. Some of these things are just lethal, but back then they were modernity. Aladdin even compared its homes to the Woolworth Building.

How big was prefab back then? Outside of conventional manufactured housing, today’s modern stuff, as new as it is, captures just a sliver of the market.

Sears said it sold more than 100,000 homes. Aladdin has other claims, possibly more or less. There are few archives nowadays, so we’ll never know exactly many houses were sold. But if you look at government statistics, it’s not a huge portion. Magazine coverage and ads made it seem huge, but the carpenter-built house was predominant.

What forced these businesses to close?

Aladdin didn’t stop operations until the 1970s, actually. Sears ended its modern home division in 1936, because they got into the mortgage business and the Depression caught them in a big way. However, they leased their factories to other developers who began to build these Levittown-type communities using the Sears name. The company’s appliances came with every house sold—the lure of those houses was the modern equipment.

Despite this early, positive history, prefab did have a bad name for itself in the latter half of the 20th century. At what point did our understanding of prefab change?

Well, the word “prefabricated” itself didn’t come around until the 1940s with the rise of industrial housing. Aladdin and Sears had separate divisions that provided industrial housing—shed-like buildings—to different corporations. Sears worked with Standard Oil, and Aladdin had a connection with Dupont, building towns for their gunpowder plants. These divisions continued to configure after the war effort, and ultimately materials and focus shifted.

What about today? How is the promise of the modernist prefab different?

Architects are offering the same thing: The newest manufacturing methods, modern style, a new way of living. Today that means, say, eco-friendly interiors. But declarations of “up-to-the-minute construction efficiency” come straight from an Aladdin catalog.

So does that mean our present crop of architect-entrepreneurs are bound to make the same mistakes as their mail-order predecessors?

Even if they’re advertising these homes as affordable, they become more expensive with delivery and with actual construction. That’s just like the past. I’ll bet a lot of architects don’t know that this early prefab movement even existed. I think they would be absolutely amazed to read the literature and make the connections.

If early-20th-century prefab was a short-live phenomenon, are you implying that history could repeat itself today?

I do see an outlet for these architects’ work, and we do need more affordable housing. It’s surprising to see the faces of the people living on the edge; in today’s world, those faces belong to you and me. I would say that while most architects have done the great design work, they’ve done it without understanding who they’re really doing it for and how affordability can be accomplished. We need wider support for their vision, government support, to make that leap.

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PaperCrete Anyone???

Building a house with used paper?
by New Straits Times
03 Mar 2007

KUALA LUMPUR: Using recycled paper as construction material? It may sound a bit far-fetched to most people, but not to two future mechanical engineers who have worked hard at turning the radical idea into reality.

“Papercrete” or “paper plus concrete” is a creation that makes use of waste paper, such as old newspapers and magazines, to replace sand. The waste paper is mixed with cement, lime and water. Sand is used only in making papercrete blocks. The cement, paper and lime ratio is 1:4:½.

Inventors Nuraishah Abdul Rahman and Najwa Juaini Azmi are both 22-year-old final-year Bachelor of Civil Engineering undergraduates at Universiti Tenaga Malaysia in Bangi, Selangor.

Their main objective was to develop a new construction material which would work in the same way as conventional concrete but would be cheaper and lighter. Papercrete can be 50 per cent lighter than normal concrete and is 20 to 30 per cent cheaper.

“In terms of strength, papercrete has acceptable properties in compressive and flexural strength and is suitable for use in construction,” said Nuraishah.

Using the lighter papercrete blocks results in the reduced deadweight of construction, which in turn brings about cheaper cost in building the foundation structure.

Najwa said papercrete was easy to use and good for interior design, such as for making plaster ceilings, and can be made into any shape and cut with a hand saw.

Despite the fact that papercrete absorbs water, it still holds its shape. It would be better to waterproof it to keep fungus and termites at bay.

Papercrete would also encourage the recycling of used paper, which would reduce the need for landfills and the cutting of trees.

Nuraishah and Najwa did the research for their project by reading journals on concrete production and getting information from the Internet.

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Interactive Blueprint Web Site

If you’re having trouble picturing how that farmhouse sink will fit into your kitchen remodel, help is on the way.

A new Web site, still in the beta phase, allows you to clip product images from any Web site and drop them into an interactive blueprint. The free site, MyDesignIn.com, changes the pictures into blueprint images for your specs, but the pictures pop up when you roll the mouse over them.

Share your plans with an architect, contractor or your sister who has a good eye for interior design.

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