During the holidays, I am re-working my home office a little bit to fit a bit better for the way I work and to have the kind of look that excites my imagination. One of the things I realized flipping through various catalogs is that, yes, the current fashion for natural materials does speak to me. Then again, I have always like the look of wood, stone, and glass. It’s what makes Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses so appealing, his respect for those materials and where a synthetic material is called for, it’s glass so that again the natural world can shine through.
I am lucky that my small office already offers so much of one of those materials, glass. Though only eight feet in length and width, one of those walls disappears thanks to a six foot square sliding door. Another wall has a three foot square window. The wall opposite the sliding door does not exist but is simply an archway giving onto a small hallway leading from the garage to the kitchen. On the opposite side of the hallway is a six foot square window giving onto the dining room. Above my head the roof slopes up to a four foot square skylight.
Right now, the walls are covered in a light tan that Sherwin Williams calls “Ecru” and which is almost ubiquitous in the house, a neutral tone we introduced to cover the bright white walls when we first moved in and which was meant to buy us time to think about more significant uses of color. The floor of my study is made up of white marble tiles with patches of gray and pink in it. I would never have chosen anything like it, but it is marble and it is already there. Why not live with it until winning the lottery makes money no object?
Until then, we are trying out some smaller changes, to see what effects they produce. And so with some Flor tiles en route, I just requested a tile sample from the American Cork Products Company: Iris Mocha.
