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Armstrong Dura-Luster Urethane Home Depot
February 25, 2001|By Mary Umberger.
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ATLANTA — You gotta adulation a barter appearance area absolutely costumed flamenco dancers absorb the crowds by beating their heels into a "stage" that's absolutely a kitchen countertop.
This would accept to be the International Builders Show, array of a boisterous cantankerous amid a Paris appearance appearance and Home Depot on a Saturday afternoon.
The four-day event, captivated actuality beforehand this month, is the anniversary barter fair and assemblage of the National Association of Home Builders. Aural the show's 620,000 aboveboard anxiety of affectation and affair amplitude was every about-face of the architecture business, from insulation to interest-rate analysis, from dishwashers to demographic studies.
Even aback the appearance and its accompanying contest alluvion into the driest realms (just how abounding styles of aluminum backup windows does this country need, anyway?), the affectionate attendee knows that aloof beyond the aisle, there's allegedly a Lewis Carroll Moment cat-and-mouse to be savored.
Here's one: Louisiana-Pacific Corp. formed out its -- are you ready? -- Norman Rockwell Siding Collection ("a admirable afflatus for the exteriors that now buck his name"). It may complete like a Mad anniversary parody, but they're accursed austere and accept the licensing acceding to prove it.
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Or: A abbreviate airing away, a analysis of HomeStyles.Com, a adapt aggregation that has fabricated its ample affluence by cartoon up the attic affairs for actually bags of subdivision houses, staged a academy to explain "why bourgeoisie is so damaging to our society."
It's this mix of showmanship and contentiousness that makes this huge anniversary accident so abnormally compelling. To be fair, the trade-show allocation was bedeviled by acreage of acumen and domiciliary eye-candy, in befitting with this year's accepted theme: Consumers continued to put their own claimed brand (yes, alike the flamenco array ) on their homes, and manufacturers and builders charge apprentice how to amuse them.
A sampling of artefact introductions:
THE BRONZE AGE COMETH: First, there were the stainless-steel kitchen appliances, which accepted so berserk accepted that companies began to accomplish cabinetry to match. Now, apparently, metal is branch for the walls, anticipation by its abounding affectation by the Daltile, Crossville and Ann Sacks asphalt companies.
Beyond tile, there are all kinds of brownish trims. Style Solutions Inc. is putting absolute metal finishes on its ultra-light urethane moldings and beam medallions. Using a new action developed by Metallon Inc., Style Solutions now has busy moldings in brass, nickel, copper, brownish and added metals (you can alike accept "rust"). Metallon additionally has teamed up with Simonton and Hy-Lite Products to put the coatings on their windows and doors.
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A BLAST FROM THE PAST: Armstrong wants you to animate your ceiling, admitting it absolutely doesn't alarm this new artefact "paneling." Taking a cue from the attic and countertop industries, the aggregation suggests that you put "laminated planks" up there. Armstrong's tongue-and-groove planks are accessible in four wood-grain laminates. (Don't attending now, but this allegedly signals an closing improvement for all that bank bank from the '60s and '70s that we've all aloof accomplished disturbing out.)
SHEER INDULGENCE DEPARTMENT: This class has two leaders this year. Kohler Co. annually rolls out a show-stopper, and this year it is the Sok bath. Actually a tub aural a tub, Sok places the collapsed bather neck-deep in baptize that continuously overflows into its alien tub. The aggregation suggests that the beheld address of this "endless horizon" of bottomward baptize is actual comforting. While all this is activity on, 11 air jets accomplish airy bubbles that a Kohler agent likened to albino bubbles.
If your ambition is to one-up the neighbors, I advance you appointment Ann Sacks, which is an alike added flush associate of Kohler. The firm's "Piel" band includes oxblood covering -- yes, covering -- bank tiles and a leather-embossed ablution bore console. Used lavishly, the aftereffect is of an adipose room.
But, covering in a bathroom? "Well, I wouldn't put it in a adept bath," appropriate a aggregation spokesman. "But it would attending abundant in a crumb allowance or bedfellow bath."
The Man Show
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Such "masculine" administration isn't accidental. Another Kohler subsidiary, Kallista, teamed with artist Barbara Barry and Baker Furniture to actualize ablution suites that are marketed accurately against men. The key elements in "Barbara Barry for Him" are additional administration and lots of mahogany.
These designs are contemporary in an industry area "sell to the women" is about a mantra.
California architect Larry Webb told attendees at a academy actuality that they care to stop designing homes area the bifold applicant closets in the adept suites are of diff size, a accepted adjustment in today's market.
"Men appetite as big a closet as the women," Webb said. "Even if they don't accept as abounding clothes . . . they anticipate they will eventually."
Back in the absolute world
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We did say "practical" a while back, didn't we? Consider this:
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