Lisa Miller's News Interview

Professionally Designed Waiting Room Areas to Inspire Your Space

The waiting room or visitor area is the first place seen by most anyone visiting your place of business. First impressions are formed from this areas decor, style, and level of professionalism. Creating a stylish waiting room starts with an idea or inspiration. To provide that spark, this article will highlight several beautifully designed spaces sure to get your creative juices flowing!

Space 1: The Serpentine

Braden lounge furniture by Global Total Office highlights this space. The modular lounge seating set offers a serpentine shape that's sure to impress. Sets like the one highlighted here are perfect when space is at a premium. Braden's modular design and simplicity make it an easy to spec solution for almost any visitor area. The seemingly limitless array of Global upholstery solutions make interior designers dreams come true. This space is also accented with with a matching square coffee table and gorgeous tile floors. The marbled walls and blue fabric compliment each other nicely, while the whole area boasts a welcoming feel.

Space 2: Elegance On A Budget

The Mayline Santa Cruz collection of leather lounge furniture is hard to beat. This affordable line includes a variety of leather sofas, matching ottomans, and stylish seating sure to impress event he harshest of critics. In fact, all of the seating and items used in this room can be purchased as a set to ease the shopping process! Available in a choice of Almond or Black leather, Santa Cruz lounge furniture sets key on one of the hottest industry trends, light upholstery. Using white, cream, and almond colored materials show class and elegance without taking away from grandeur or the area it accompanies. Along with the seating, this unique visitors area includes full panel windows and contemporary wood wall paneling for an enhance modern appeal. The tile floors and retro side lamp pull this space together for an all around professional look.

Space 3: The Highrise

When it comes to waiting room furniture, OFM,Inc. offers one of the largest selections of quality products found industry wide. This fantastic modern office furniture manufacturer has built an excellent reputation based on customer service and awesome products that ship quickly. This space is a true testament to that fact. The highrise features a curved reception desk from the industry leading Marque reception station collection along with an abundance of sled based visitors chairs. As you can see, this area is all about the welcoming desk. The floors, natural lighting, tables, and seating are all geared towards bringing out the wow factor or the reception desk. The curved designed and plexi glass transaction panels truly make for an impressive space.

Debut Clothing Line

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind. We launched a clothing line and became Salt Lake City's RAW Fashion Designer of the Year!

Of course, each piece in our new collection is handcrafted in Utah. 

Find us on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/LissMee

Or Shop our collection before our website goes live:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/LissMee

A really cool, hip, modern design, at David Barton Gym, NY

Look Better Naked

The David Barton Gym slogan gets a workout at a New York branch by Studio Sofield

Article posted by

Craig Kellogg -- Interior Design, 2/1/2011 3:02:00 PM

Anderson Cooper, Nate Berkus, and this reporter can't all be wrong. The David Barton Gym rocks. And it's not just the Kiss and T. Rex tracks the DJs spin at the latest New York location while the three of us are working out. . .separately. At 37,000 square feet of smoky mirror and amber lighting, this gym stands out in a city where health clubs often resemble health clinics. "So many other gyms are about fluorescents and Clorox," Interior Design Hall of Fame member William Sofield­ says. Yes, he lifts here, too. Of his five David Barton Gyms in New York, Miami Beach, Chicago, and Seattle­, this one was always destined to be the most personal. He's lived in the neighborhood for decades, and Studio Sofield is based here.

Using a torch to cut a semicircular 
opening in a disco ball transformed it 
into a DJ booth. Photo by Eric Laignel.

To David Barton himself, the new location-four levels in a venerable cast-iron building-suggested 1980's punks squatting in an abandoned church. "I'm obsessed with scale and mood," he says, pointing out the window to the rusting fire escapes and heavy black shutters of an ancient courtyard. "I hope they never fix that up." Not that he and Sofield don't continue to "fix up" the gym interior, an ongoing dialogue. One mural has already been repainted elsewhere for greater visibility, and a pair of highly stylized skeleton chairs disappeared to make way for a snack bar.

Sofield proposed the "bat cave" concept for the men's locker room in the subbasement, where contractors ultimately removed truckloads of useless pipe and outmoded electrical equipment before painting some of the old brick foundation bronze and other parts brown. Both the men's lockers and the women's, on the next basement level up, are walnut-veneered and arranged in bays with vermillion-gelled fluorescents washing the ceiling and a tribal motif on the carpet. The glamour of onyx counters "undercuts the sleaze," he notes.

Wherever possible, he avoids plain painted plasterboard. Asked for a boxing area, he instantly thought: flocked wall covering. "David smiled immediately," he recalls. The fuzzy black-and-white brocade pattern also covers walls in the adjacent corridor, where a niche frames a life-size lawn sculpture of Michelangelo's David. Flooring in most of the corridors is engineered wood with a surface of carbonized larch brushed to reveal virgin springwood. The same planks extend into the basement Pilates studio that Sofield describes as a "Zen dungeon."


The David isn't the only kitsch trophy. Almost all Barton's gyms have a DJ booth, and Sofield suggested housing it inside a giant disco ball. "I don't know why I never thought of that," Barton replied. "I've got one in storage." This relic of the Tuesday parties that his wife, "Queen of the Night" Susanne Bartsch, used to host at the Happy Valley dance club turned out to be the perfect size to park on a stagelike platform left over from the gym's predecessor, Barnes & Noble. The platform is roughly in the center of the wedge-shape top level, by far the largest of the four.

A custom screen of laser-cut steel biohazard symbols separates the stairwell from reception. Photo by Eric Laignel.

One corner, the former children's reading room, now features the bench presses and free-weight circuits that Barton calls the "clanking iron of World War III." He explains that the steel ballet bar around the perimeter keeps the action a safe distance from the antique heating system set below the huge old windows: "So someone doesn't sit on a hot radiator pipe or fling a dumbbell out." Down the middle of the floor marches a row of structural columns supporting colossal mirrors with charred-looking Goth frames. Anyone standing in front of the mirrors benefits from theatrical spots that highlight every bulge, whether muscle or fat. "If you can't see it, you can't isolate and move it," Sofield argues. Gelled fluorescents, meanwhile, imbue the ceiling with the mystery of black light, even though the actual paint colors are aubergine and smoky cocoa.

He chose high-gloss ultramarine for the ceiling in the lofty lobby. You might not immediately guess that the point of departure for the lobby's industrial beaux arts aesthetic is the Park Avenue Armory, featuring interiors by Stanford White and Louis Comfort Tiffany. However, reverence didn't stop Sofield from wrapping the lobby's columns­ in hardware-store sisal rope or handing workers circular saws to widen gaps between 10-inch-wide oak floorboards reclaimed from a Virginia army barracks. Furnishings include an ornate­ antique sideboard from the Black Forest and a turn-of-the-last-century grandfather clock surmounted by a Russian vintage Father Christmas in a flowing red cloak. Year-round.

Photography by Eric Laignel.

PROJECT TEAM
gensler: architect of record. emphasis lighting group: lighting consultant. thornton tomasetti: structural engineer. emtg consultants: mep. cory-moschetti studio: woodwork. park east construction corporation: general contractor.

Design trends of 2011...

Interior design trends of 2011: 'emotional austerity', 're-balancing'...

An article that appeared in the independent

According to experts, the big design trends of 2011 will stem from consumers reassessing what they need to live comfortably, seeking innovation, finding a local balance in a global world and searching for personalized products.

The book Interior Trends 2011 was recently released by IMM Cologne; compiled by the expert committee of the international trend board at IMM Cologne, this latest in a series of annual publications predicts that people are questioning what they need to live well, demanding innovation not re-imagination, addressing issues of balance and seeking products with personality.

The interior trends of 2011

1. Emotional Austerity

IMM Cologne believes that as a result of the financial crisis people are questioning what it is they need to live well. This is leading to the emergence of simplistic, formal or severe designs that combine the basic and old with the modern and the high-tech.

2. Surprising Empathy

Consumers are no longer content with re-imagined concepts and are instead forcing designers to push boundaries and create truly innovative new products. Aesthetically this trend is characterized by angular or folded structures and ash greys or blacks brightened with dashes of yellows or orange.

3. Re-balancing

IMM Cologne believes that consumers have grown tired of being bombarded by constant marketing and instead are searching for products that are personal and create a sense of home in an increasingly globalized world. Within this trend there is a preference for simple angular structures and soft natural materials such as wool.

4. Transforming perspectives

Designers are beginning to question the boundaries between art and design, the virtual world and the real world - leading them to propose radical new designs that experiment with archaic forms and nature. These designs are characterized by glass and metal complemented with hard and soft plastics that combine to form a changeable surface.

IMM Cologne is an international showcase of the latest household and furniture designs. 2011's event will feature a specialized section dedicated to young, emerging designers around the world.

AG Home Goods Electronics... something for everyone..

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Have a look, its definitely worth your time..


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Until next time...

Alex