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Home & Garden

Old Made

Architects and designers are taking their cues from the green movement and finding new uses for old stuff.

By Peggy Levinson |

Forget all that nonsense about old dogs and new tricks—you can always find new and interesting uses for old materials. Glass beads, wire mesh, leather strips, felt, and even tree roots are showing up in surprising places for use in your home.

The Maya Romanoff Company, to the trade at the Donghia showroom, is an industry leader for wall coverings produced from natural materials, including crushed Capiz shells, paper-thin sheets of brass (finished in a variety of metallics), and semitransparent glass beads, for their Mother of Pearl, True Metals, and Bedazzled collections. If you attended the Neiman Marcus 100th anniversary party last fall at the downtown store, you couldn’t miss the vintage fashion photographs covered in Bedazzled wallpaper. Recreate the look at home by covering an old mural, photograph, or painting with a transparent layer.

Clockwise from top left: Vintage fashion photographs covered with Bedazzled wallpaper by Maya Romanoff, Bridle Collection from Stark, Cascade Coil installation, and an Allan Knight tree-root chair.

Allan Knight just received delivery of unique tree-root sculptures that are produced for him in China. Pieces of root are intricately woven together by hand to create strange and wonderful chairs and tables and then lacquered in bright, decidedly nonearthy colors. These pieces are right at home with the Hobbit in Middle Earth or on your covered patio. Either way, they add a note of whimsy, surrounded by trees and greenery.

Stark Carpet just introduced a woven leather rug collection called Bridle, which can be installed wall to wall. The technology for weaving leather into carpeting is new. Before, leather strips weren’t long enough or strong enough for carpet. Now, though, the strips are tightly woven with wool yarn to create a tailored, linear pattern. You know the warm comfort of a worn leather sofa and how great it looks after a few years? Now think about that wonderful patina underfoot.

Speaking of underfoot, felt rugs are all the rage, especially those that are hand-embroidered and hand-stitched by artisans in Kashmir. Find them at Odegard. Felt is a pedestrian sort of material that you probably remember from grammar school art class, but it’s actually the oldest cloth, appearing as early as 6500 B.C. and predating woven textiles by centuries. Made by matting and pressing fibers into cloth, it can be soft and supple or strong enough to use in construction, as in the Yurt houses in Central Asia. We’re also seeing it in a new wallpaper collection by Maya Romanoff, aptly called Blanket.

Do you ever wonder about those huge piles of scrap metal that make the outskirts of our city so unsightly? Cascade Coil Drapery uses this scrap to make wire mesh fabric that’s 90 percent recycled. The effect is dramatic, with soft light being diffused and reflected through the metal mesh. It’s being used by the most innovative of designers and architects, such as Duhon and Richardson Architects for drapery treatments, transparent room dividers, and visual merchandising. Check it out at Warren Barrón Bridal, the Westin Galleria, and Victory Tavern, and then buy it at www.cascadecoil.com.

Of course, we can’t talk about ordinary objects popping up in surprising places without referring to Italian companies such as Flos and Ingo Maurer, both of which always astonish us with their use of common items. Take the Campari Light chandelier. It’s composed of authentic Campari bottles designed in 2002 by Raffaele Celentano for Ingo Maurer. Then there’s Maurer’s Birdie, which is a suspension of bare incandescent bulbs with goose feather wings. (What if we could make beautiful, magical chandeliers out of things we discard every day?) The chandelier at Rise No. 1 soufflé restaurant in Inwood Village is just that, a load of washed wine bottles on a drying rack. We have the materials for a few more of those on hand.

E-mail Peggy at [email protected].

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