Monday Visual Inspiration: Attack of the modern unisex public bathroom

Public bathrooms fascinate me for many reasons.  They are places that seem so detail-oriented yet so half-assed--elegant hands-free fixtures and Ann Sacks tile in a room that more often that not doesn't actually meet the ADA clearance requirements.  It's a room in which we are most human and most private, yet the guy that has to come in after us knows just exactly what we've been up to.  I could do countless posts on bathrooms, but I'll start with just one, showing lovely pictures of an almost-acceptable toilet room in Cherry Creek.

The toilet is beautiful, and the flushing mechanism is simple (the stainless steel panel above it), but I'm not sure how as a person in a wheelchair I'm supposed to reach it with the toilet in the way.  How am I supposed to get on the can in the first place with only a side grab bar, and not a back grab bar as well?

Let's look at that sink a little better.

 Wow, that's a true hands-free faucet, and there are little smooth stones in the sink basin.  Squee!  WANT!

 This door is crazy cool.  The glass panels are frosted, so you can neither see in or out, but it lets light in for a less claustrophobic potty-going experience.

The lighting in this room is really nice and flattering to anyone using the can or the mirror, but that grey square on the left is an exhaust vent absolutely caked with lint.  Can someone bring a Swiffer cloth in here once a month, please?

Monday Visual Inspiration: Vulgar display of power outlets

First of all, I really like the coffee shop in which I took these photos.  I like their food and coffee, the decor is great, and the environment overall is great.  It's a fantastic place to people watch, have a great, locally-sourced snack, read or work quietly, or hang out with friends. Below is an art wall towards the back of the coffee shop. I love these laminate panels with exposed fasteners (note to self: find out what these are made of and put them in a future hospital), and I love that the art is the same size as the panels.

Wait, what's that just above...right in those two panels...?

Are you kidding me?!  Are those power outlets??

Yes. Yes, those are poorly-located power outlets. This shop just renovated and did interior repairs due to a water main break, and yet no one fixed this?  No one moved these outlets, even to the middle of a panel where you could replace the stainless steel cover plates with white and kinda-sorta camouflage them?


*sigh* Can I get some Bailey's in my coffee?

Monday Visual Inspiration: Miramont Castle, Manitou Springs CO

Recovering from a month's worth of a cold and working overtime, I thought I should at least post a few nice pictures from a weekend getaway to which Guy whisked me a few months ago. We spent the weekend in Manitou Springs, a few miles west of Colorado Springs and nestled in the shadow of Pikes Peak. More info about Miramont Castle is here; otherwise, enjoy a few shots from the Personal Photographic Collection of Pixie and Guy.

Part 2: a change would do you (and all of us) good

Okay, okay, under intense long-distance pressure from New Hampshah, the rest of the story (part 1 is here):

So, I have to preface this story with another one. On the Friday that I had lunch with the interns, I got back to my desk ready to call it an early day when an email marked "High Importance" popped into my inbox from an interior designer. Turns out all of the interiors gals--the few that we have left, that is--wanted to meet with me. They heard that I was meeting with the interns about good and bad things in the office and was going to report on that to the partners and associates, and they had a few things to discuss. I said I had planned on leaving, but I had a few minutes for them.

I spent the next ninety minutes in a small conference room with three women in their late twenties and early thirties as they described a workplace just this side of the the third concentric ring of Dante's Easy Bake. Prudence, the head of our interior design department, has never been a snuggly person to deal with. I've found her to be prickly and difficult, but I had no idea how bad things were for her staff. These talented young professional women told me of how any attempt to work in a meaningful way on projects with the architects were met with backlash and from Prudence, and even minor mistakes were punished with being thrown under the bus by Prudence to the architects. "Carrie was never sent the carpet pattern submittal for the XYZ Hotel project," said one designer. "So the carpet got installed all wrong! When the architect got the call about it from the owner and took Carrie to task for it, she went to Prudence for advice on how to handle it. All Prudence said was 'well, Sadie made a similar mistake on Will's project last year, and she was laid off a couple of weeks later.' That's it for the 'advice' she gave Carrie on the situation."

I listened in near-horror as they described how unclear and frustrating their day-to-day jobs were. Prudence is evidently so focused on how much profit her jobs are making that she literally looks over her designers' shoulders at their computer screens and carps, "What are you drawing?! You better be billing that to the architecture code on this!!" The designers are never told at the start of the project what exactly their fee entails, so when they start doing something that would reasonably be their job, they get shouted down and told "stop that!" Meanwhile and unbeknownst to the interiors department, the architects in our office (especially Howie) have a terrible opinion of our interior designers as lazy and penny pinching because the refrain over and over from that department is "we're not doing that; we don't have the fee for it."

At one point, designer Carrie grabbed the hand of each girl on her left (Claudia) and right (Saffie) and said, "Yesterday, I was so upset that I called my husband at work and asked him if I could please quit work. Every day, we just pat ourselves on the backs and head so we can talk ourselves into coming back to work each morning. And we don't have any backup or support or guidance or mentorship or anything...we just lean on each other."

Saffie, the youngest of the group piped up. "We heard you were doing this Intern 101 thing for the architects and teaching them about the business side, and we thought, 'why isn't anyone doing this for us?'" I was mortified to realize that I'd never included the interiors group in my intern seminars, and I informed them all that they were welcome to join us and would be included in all events from here on out.

Claudia then jumped in. "Pixie, we haven't had reviews or raises in two years. We've all been working at least eight hours of unpaid overtime a week for months. If we're not going to be treated with some sense of respect, then there's no reason to stay here anymore. As soon as the work comes back elsewhere, we're gone."

I thanked them for sharing and told them that I'd talk to the partners on the following Monday. That very Monday morning, Carrie came downstairs and asked me to step into a conference room.

"Look," she said, her breath and voice catching a bit. "We still feel the same way we did on Friday, but...maybe we should just lay low for a while...."

"Not at all," I replied. "Carrie, when you have to talk yourself into coming into work every day, that's not acceptable. That's not the kind of workplace that Design Associates want to promote. I'm not going to say anything bad about Prudence, but I want to tell someone about what's going on with you ladies. Frankly, you've suffered enough."

After the big group discussion during lunch, I figured I might have the best chance if I talked to Audrey alone. So, we went into a small conference room, and I laid out for her the working conditions that interiors has been dealing with: the lack of support, the retribution when they dare to work for architects instead of her, the sniping and looking over their shoulders, the snarkiness and veiled menacing threats, the lack of backup and support and reviews, the continual unpaid overtime.... Audrey started the conversation with the usual concerned but deflecting observations: "well, Prudence has never been a very touchy-feely person...yeah, Prudence has always been about the profit and nothing much else...." By the end of the discussion, she had a couple of steno pad pages of notes, and she looked genuinely concerned and even a bit horrified.

"Audrey," I finished, "Carrie came down here this morning to ask me to not say anything just now, that they wanted to 'lay low' for a while. They're terrified of her and of some kind of retribution."

Audrey's face twisted into the kind of expression one usually makes while watching "Silence of the Lambs". "They haven't approached her about this?"

"Audrey, they don't feel safe doing so, given the lack of support in their day-to-day workplace duties," I explained. "How can you confront the boss about their behavior when you're terrified of him or her?"

So, we'll see if Audrey shares any of this to the rest of the partners about Prudence's behavior. There's only so much that I can do. I just hope that something is done. This is a good way to increase turnover in a very important department at our office, and there's just no excuse for this kind of behavior anywhere. Meanwhile, I'm going to go attempt to have a quiet and truly restful Labor Day weekend, and I hope the same kind of weekend for all fifteen of my readers.

Architect is watching a paradigm shift, please stand by....

I know I haven't been posting worth crap lately, y'all. Part of it is my general life/mindset lately, where all I want is to chill out and be still and not do anything more than is absolutely necessary. But part of it is also that I've witnessed (and been a part of) some really interesting changes at Design Associates lately, I'm waiting to see how a couple of those things play out early next week before I post on them in earnest.

The short version is this: remember the presentation I did back in June to a group of architects from around the country? Well, I did it for the partners and managers at DA, and they loved it and want to focus on ways to make DA better for the interns (and even people at my level). Simultaneously, though, Prudence, the head of our interiors department, may be about to have a mutiny on her hands--years of cranky managing and a lack of a mentorship mindset on her part may be about to do her in, or at the very least have a walkout on her hands.

I'll post more this/next week as things unfold.

So, what is beyond the bed and the bath?

Sunday was spent by the pool. Guy started to work on the bathroom cabinets, and I said:

"Reckon I need to swiff the house."

"Nope," came Guy's reply. You need to go lay by the pool for a couple of hours. When you're done, get a shower and we'll go to Bed Bath & Beyond."

I've always wondered: shouldn't there be some commas or something in that store name? Anyway....

We ended up replacing both sets of our placemats and napkins as well as our kitchen towels and oven mitts. This sounds silly, but I gotta tell you, it felt nice. The house looks clean, perty, nice.

Table and chairs: Crate and Barrel. Chair covers: Mom. Pleather powder blue placemats and matching linen-look napkins: Bed Bath & Beyond. Flowers: Whole Foods.

There's a saying, that the cobbler's children have no shoes. Well, the architect's children have no Ikea furniture. Guy and I haven't really started working on our house in earnest until last summer when he started painting. Then, he hurt his back and the majority of painting didn't get done until February. After working on remodeling other people's spaces all day, we really don't feel like it when we come home. But strolling around BB&B oogling microplaners and cutting boards? Oh, honeh, my pulse....

Material Girl

I'm lucky that I work in an office that has a full staff of interior designers and landscape architects. These people make my life fifty times easier on most days. They work with things I don't usually use and understand little details that I don't. Of course, I know these same things about my job that they don't, but you understand what I'm trying to say. However, one's project budget and/or scope does not always allow for the use of these folks.

Case in point: the four small projects I'm working on for Jann right now aren't big enough to really warrant having an interior designer on board. Also, the projects I'm doing are in buildings that we designed in the last six years, so the interior design work is already partially done. Interior designers prepare a palette of materials--flooring (tile, sheet vinyl, VCT, carpet, etc), paint, wallcovering, wall tile, wood laminate or wood stain, fabrics for upholstery or drapes or cubicle curtains, finshes for casework, and so on--and then make a finish schedule that lists each room and what finish it gets where. Each room is listed by name and number, and then s/he says what goes on each wall and on the floor and what plastic laminate goes on the cabinet faces and what's on the countertop and what's on the ceiling. Then, s/he creates a finish plan to show more clearly where accent paints go, what the floor pattern looks like for the VCT and sheet vinyl and carpet, and so on. This is a fair amount of work that I usually don't do. But due to the scope of my projects, these tasks fall in my lap.

Which is not all bad. Bear in mind that all these projects are remodels inside larger projects that DA has done in the past six years, so someone already did a finish schedule and palette for them. I can go to the existing finish plan and schedule and legend and see what colors and materials were listed in the area and put those in my new plan.

Would that it were so easy.

First of all, some of the areas I'm working on now need materials that weren't there originally. The admin area that's turning into the end scope procedure suite needs sheet vinyl for the procedure rooms, plastic laminate for casework, and VCT for the halls and recovery cubicles. So now I have to look at the areas around this new department to see what those areas used and use those here. Except that the project went through a huge VE process halfway through construction (what?! even Jann rolls her eyes when she tells the story) so some of the finishes were taken out. Here I am, specifying paint and plastic laminate that exists nowhere else in the project. This place isn't gonna match a damn thing anywhere else.

Oh, and here's an open letter complaint to ICI/Dulux Paints: hey dumbasses, what's the idea behind renumbering and renaming every single paint in your catalog? Paints I used two years ago have been rendered unfindable and therefore unspecifyable in my new project. And there's not even a feature on your website that would allow me to put in an old name and number and get the name and number it is now. Why the hell not? Oh, 'cuz there's a metric crapton of paint colors in your catalog, you say? Well, imagine being a design professional trying to figure out what the hell ever became of A1817 Fawning Mist when all your color descriptions now look like NORAD launch codes. Bite me. I'm specifying Benjamin Moore.

Anyway, the fun part is that I get to go to the top floor of our building and look through the Interiors Library. It's a well-lit room with skylights and shelf upon shelf and row upon row of carpet squares, VCT samples, paint card books, ceramic tile sample drawers, fabric swatches...oh, Lawd, 'tis a strange little heaven up there. I was late picking up Guy from work on Friday because I spent 15 minutes looking for one plastic laminate sample. Oh, for the glory of looking at interesting linoleums! I really like digging around up there because it's a whole world I'd love to know more about. Sometimes, I run into the interiors part of the office and ask a couple of interior designers, "These colors are going in a CT scan room. Should my accent wall be a saturated green or this lighter green here?" Four women stand up in their cubicles, squint their eyes, and proclaim the lighter green for a patient treatment area. I get along pretty well with interiors gals. I've covered for them and shielded them from the wrath of many a project manager, so they're pretty amenable to helping me pick between two colors or find something that works better with an existing tile. A little silly, some of them, but their hearts are in the right place. Would that the same could be said for my eye for color.