The most important move you make in your day is that final turn on your drive home – the one that directs your wheels toward your front door, that final leg of your journey, up the driveway and into your garage. That short distance from road to threshold can be the greatest sense of accomplishment in your 24 hours – that point of wrapping up your days’ public life, settling into your sanctuary existence and finding yourself at home. You want to be welcomed home by a drive that has held up to the brutal weather, and is waiting, beautifully for your arrival, and that takes the work of an expert, some would say an artist. Looking for Leonardo is proud to welcome Asphalt Artistry to our blogging pages, where we attempt to give new ideas and great advice for making your home the castle you dream of. Asphalt Artistry provides that creative alternative that is best suited for your mountain home, and the name is no mistake. An Asphalt Artistry driveway is more than just laying asphalt, it is truly a work of art.
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Day to Remember
Memorial Day Commemoration 2008 (Photo credit: davidyuweb)
We call this day Memorial Day because we are meant to remember the people in our lives who have been lost to death. We deem remembering so important, in fact, that we have set aside a whole day, for thinking of the people in our lives who have crossed the threshold into eternity. The day seems to be spent, often with family and friends, cooking outdoors, sharing some pre-summer sun, perhaps working in the yard. All of those things are worth doing and we wish everyone safety and fun in their endeavors, but we wish everyone something else. If on this day you have a lost someone you are thinking of, we hope that your thoughts will be filled with joy, with memories of all they meant to you, with laughter for all the funny times that life throws our way, with tears for the days you wish you could talk to them just one more time, with contentment for knowing that you have loved someone enough to carry them in your heart always. Table Mountain Creative Concrete wishes you a happy and memorable Memorial Day!
From Which there is no Return
When I look at kitchen design of the last many decades I have to say that the invention of the built in cupboard is genius. Kitchens were formerly made to hold large pieces of furniture for storage that were charming, not especially practical. When kitchen designers began building storage right into the walls, or into a center island it revolutionized cooking, and in a sense, home life all together. Considering the sheer brilliance of modern kitchen design the question has to be asked – who came up with the idea of the deep corner cabinet that provides a tiny opening into a huge, dark chasm of space. It is the place in the kitchen where things continually disappear, large pans, cookie sheets, casserole dishes, neighbor children. Whenever I see someone crawling into that cavern like monolith to retrieve their 80 quart stock pot I ask myself why. Why, with all the innovative minds in this country can’t we do away with the abysmal corner cupboard? Some have tried to remedy the situation with a revolving storage apparatus that is also hopelessly deep and the keeper of strange foods that you receive as a gift and never intend to eat. Some places have moved the double sink to the corner, so that during dinner preparation it is possible to put someone’s eye out with an over-zealous elbow. Thankfully design is an ever evolving art and a solution to this worldwide dilemma will one day be found. Until then I am using my corner cabinet as storage for my old LP records. Useless things belong together.
Then there is This
Warm weather is the call of the day – the time when faces turn to the sun and hearts to the carefree days of late spring. Coffee on the porch in the early morning, a mid afternoon venture around the lake, the first taste of quiet, breezy evenings when the sun seems reluctant to sink behind the hills. We are determined this year to experience the moments instead of the seasons, to relish the whispers and cling to the reminders that life is a fleeting fancy that should be treasured for its possibilities. We are blessed with the wealth of family and friends and the joy of today and we wish all of you the wonder and warmth of the late, sweet spring.
Chronicles of the Outdoor Kitchen
As we venture into taking our cooking and eating outdoors for the warmer temperatures we have decided we want to do it in style. Lose the paper plates, put away the card table. We are stepping up to a bonafide outdoor kitchen, where we will all become grill masters, flipping and seasoning our way to a gourmet repast amongst the trees. It starts with the right patio, a textured concrete, flagstone patterned spread of gleaming elegance to hold all of our best “made for the great outdoors” furniture and our “just like on HGTV” kitchen. A built in grill is a must in this situation. A built in grill surrounded by an extraordinary work space. Your countertops should be poured concrete with leaf imprints, and glassy smooth glaze that will make you want to jump onto their glowing surfaces and trip the light fantastic. Sunk into the middle of the glass embedded work block is a built in grill that has a disappearing venting hood and enough grate space to sizzle half a cow to perfection. When you’re making your plans, remember that this is an outdoor kitchen, so don’t duplicate the one you have indoors. Think big, think beautiful, think best summer ever.
Learning to be Leo
Leonardo da Vinci – Mona Lisa (detail) – WGA12714 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
There has long been a thinking that says we are born either good at math and sciences, or good at the creative arts, writing, painting, etc. We have been led to believe that our minds will most likely not be able to embrace both forms of discipline successfully. Then, just when we have neatly accepted this adage, we are faced with a man from the fifteenth century named Leonardo da Vinci. He is known for his painting, such famous works as the Mona Lisa, but then again, he is known for his great power of invention, his study and notation of the human body, his practical genius in weaponry and flight. Is he one of the few people ever to possess the ability to nurture both his right and left brain at the same time? He was known as a loner. Was his lack of human relationship because he was leaving room for all of his extraordinary thinking and emotion would have muddied the waters? Or is it that we put ourselves in a box, believing that the reason we struggle with physics is because we are an accomplished musician. When Bach was at his prime, teaching and composing at the speed most people were breathing, he made the statement that anyone who was willing to work hard and had a good grasp of mathematics could be a composer such as himself. This was certainly an overstatement, but it makes one wonder if our creative ability is limited by our lack of exploration in math and science, and our analytical abilities are limited by our lack of exposure to the arts. Leonardo da Vinci was good at almost everything he tried, and he tried almost everything.
20/20 Vision for the Colorado Home
Design concepts and innovative home refurbishment are driven by vision, but often times our vision can become clouded by what we see in front of us. Seeing day after day what we don’t want our home to be can destroy our vision for what it can become. Table Mountain Creative Concrete is in the business of restoring the homeowner’s vision, giving you the inspiration you need to turn your home into the castle that lies hidden in its walls. A walk through their showroom is a feast for the eyes and delight to the senses as each corner you round gives you yet another mind boggling idea of what concrete can do for your home. Textured concrete, polished concrete, stained concrete, stamped concrete, matte finished, or sporting a perfect sheen, inlaid with glass, or just showing the wonders of the aggregate, the TMCC showroom and offices will blow your doors off. You won’t want to leave, but when you do you’ll take with a new vision for what your home can be inside and out.
Jump In
With the warm weather comes the inevitable migration to the pool, that huge concrete chasm of wet wonder. The pools of my childhood are always remembered as masses of bodies, most of them around my age, screaming and splashing, acting as though being wet was a thrill of epic proportions. The concept of a pool, for actual swimming is something we dream of, long strokes in the cool water, not a seven year old in sight, no babies in those questionable swim diapers, never coming close to drowning due to an ill placed canon ball by the largest teenager on earth. A back yard pool can be a thing of beauty, the surface embedded with crystallized reflection, the surround textured and colored to an amber glow. One end can have a waterfall and the other a bubbly area for relaxing and sharing conversation with friends. A pool raises your property values and your joy meter, and it can provide the best cardio workout available. Forget the trip to Cancun, put in a pool. No passport required.
Oh Thou Chameleon
concrete texture 1 (Photo credit: coun2rparts)
The amazing thing about concrete is that it can look like so many different hard surfaces. Of course it can look like concrete, that’s a given, but when worked with color and glaze it can look like a glass countertop. When textured, colored and patterned properly it can look like mortared stone. When smoothed and mottled it can look like marble shower walls and with the right aggregate is can look like granite. It can be molded and textured to form huge boulders, and if the artisan is very good, and Table Mountain is indeed very good, it can be colored and hardened to look like expensive Italian tiles. So why would you go to all the trouble to make concrete look like those things instead of just using the actual materials? Because there is no waste with concrete, it is made of the things that usually get washed away, and because the expense is often much less, and because the time it takes to install it is generally shorter, and because when your friends come over and see it and you explain that “no it isn’t black onyx mined by nomads” but concrete rendered by a local artist they will look at you in a new way, and they will be thinking that you are way more brilliant than they ever realized. Concrete – changing the world, one opinion at a time.
Progress?
Stagecoach in Boulder parade (Photo credit: Jerry W. Lewis)
What were we thinking when we went from the Stage Coach as a main means of mass transportation to the “bigger than the state of Delaware” bus. Buses have gotten so big they have to put an accordion fold in the middle of some of them just to be able to get around a corner. Their size alone seems to give them a sense of entitlement, like ownership of the road, both their lane and yours, comes from the fact that they could run you into a ditch without even feeling it and the amount of fuel they use is heart breaking. In the era of the Stage Coach, the passenger traveled with three, at the most four other people, and most of them wore hats, so you didn’t have their dandruff falling on your shoulder if they dozed off on the trip, and a lot of them were carrying guns, so the fear of hijacking was pretty much alleviated. An occasional hold up, wheel break, or washed out bridge was inevitable, but it just made the trip fodder for the next letter home. The cost of fuel was minimal, water and feed, and during your trip you usually got to stop for a cup of coffee at a ramshackle but cozy place where they were glad to see you and happy to do what they could to make the rest of your journey a pleasant one. If you didn’t mind having your bones rattled and being covered with dust, the Stage Coach was a very civilized way of getting from here to there – not fast, but fuel efficient and these days that is the name of the game.
