'Girls' on HBO has a breakout star: Charlie's apartment

Sorry, “Girls.” When it comes to home design, the latest breakout star of the HBO series belongs to one of the guys: the apartment of Marnie's wet-noodle of a boyfriend, Charlie.

“It looks awesome in here,” Marnie says upon seeing the studio for the first time, even though they have been a couple since 2007. “It looks like a Target ad. It's perfect.”

“A Target ad?” an annoyed Charlie responds, showing a hint of an emerging backbone. “It's not quite a Target ad, but whatever.”

Whatever, indeed. Charlie's apartment turns out to be more complex than Marnie could imagine. Conceived by production designer Laura Ballinger Gardner, submitted to series creator Lena Dunham for her approval and then built from scratch — all in just four days — the fictional 12-by-12 studio set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn is a character unto itself.

“We knew from the script that he lived in an older, not good apartment, but he had taken a small studio and done something wonderful with it,” said Gardner, who also is production designer for “Veep.”

2012 restaurant design award finalists announced

Some familiar names popped up in the list of finalists for the annual Restaurant Design Awards, announced Wednesday by the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Nominees include A-Frame, the Sean Knibb-designed restaurant in Culver City whose look we previewed before its opening, and Maximiliano, the Italian comfort food joint whose red spaghetti wall by the firm FreelandBuck we blogged about in January.

Also on the finalist list: Beachwood Cafe, the Hollywood spot whose design includes the Granada Tile cement designs we've been writing about for years, and Sushi Noguchi, a Yorba Linda restaurant where Poon Design created a smart look with the simplest of materials.

2012 AIA housing design winners announced

The American Institute of Architects announced the winners of its 2012 national housing design awards, a list punctuated by a Hollywood Hills home dubbed the Nakahouse, pictured above, by XTen Architecture. Other winners include a wood and glass retreat in Carmel, an apartment complex for the formerly homeless in San Francisco and a steel and glass prefab in the Arizona desert. You can see them all in our 2012 AIA housing winners photo gallery.

Photo credit, top: Steve King

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2011 AIA housing design winners

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Open house or pop-up shop? In Highland Park, it's both

There’s thinking outside the box, but what about selling outside the shop? Sarah Brady and Alex Cole’s Highland Park home decor store, Platform, is turning the art of staging homes for sale into a shopping experience: The open house is a pop-up store.

Platform, known for mostly locally handmade house wares, attracts what Brady calls “a pretty decent stream of customers.” But Brady, a former trend forecaster, says she was looking to sell the store’s linens, tablewares, decorative accessories and artwork beyond the perimeters of the 900-square-foot shop. Opportunity came calling in the unexpected form of the neighborhood's home flippers.

“Highland Park is one of the areas where flipping has continued, and one day, one of them asked us if we would stage a home that she was looking to sell,” Brady says.

Buddha's hand citron: like lemon, but zestier

One of the most exotic-looking items in high-end produce departments is Buddha’s hand citron, a palm-sized fruit that sells for as much as $10. It’s a steep price to pay for something with no juice, no pulpy flesh and just a mild-tasting white pith. The appeal here is all in the highly aromatic rind: The fingers of the fruit can deliver eight times the surface area for zest compared with other citrus.

Buddha’s hand (Citrus medica) is thought to have originated in India or China, but it's ideally suited to Southern California's climate -- a fact noted more than 100 years ago by B.M. Lelong, the secretary of the state Board of Horticulture, who included a recipe for brined candied fruit in his 1888 report.

Only now is Buddha's head starting to catch on, with commercial growers as well as with rare fruit fans. Marsha Fowler, a member of California Rare Fruit Growers in Altadena, says it’s ideal for putting in the frontyard because most people don’t know how to use the fruit, so it doesn’t get picked by passersby. She put in one plant a few years ago after a chef introduced it to her and enjoyed it so much, getting fruit in two years, that she got two more.

“Anything you can use lemon peel for, you can use this,” she said. “It has multiple culinary uses, savory and sweet. It pairs well with lavender and basil. In a crème brûlée or the crust of a cream pie, it’s exquisite.”

Cardborigami foldable shelters move closer to launch

Sometimes it takes an eye-catching design to bring attention to society’s most pressing issues. At least that’s the idea behind Cardborigami, a temporary, portable and recyclable shelter made by an L.A. nonprofit hoping to serve the city’s 51,000 homeless people.

“I thought making something more lighthearted and kind of fun and playful would make [homelessness] easier to deal with and get people involved who wouldn’t normally be,” said Cardborigami designer Tina Hovsepian, pictured at right. She showcased her work at the recent Altbuild show as well as last year's Dwell on Design show, and she recently said she plans to launch the product later this year.

The Cardborigami shelters have been prototyped in a Mondrian-esque design as well as traditional cardboard brown. Though Cardborigami was originally designed to help the homeless, just 38% of whom have access to a shelter, Cardborigami "can be used for so many different things,” said Hovsepian, 25, who works at the Venice firm Duvivier Architects. She said she intends to sell Cardborigami as an educational toy and possibly as an alternative tent for camping or as disaster preparedness equipment.

Sheditecture: Vote for your favorite cabin design

  Minutes before the three cabins were to be unveiled, 17 exhausted architecture students in Woodbury University's design-build program raced to finish like a construction crew awaiting a city inspector. Ladders were still propped against the structures. Tool belts and Skilsaws lay about. "They were drawing and redrawing until the end," said architect Jeanine Centuori, chairwoman of the undergraduate program.

As we reported earlier, the challenge had been daunting: Take the components of a hardware store shed kit and build a cabin that can sleep two, with light, ventilation and insulation. Read our full story on the process and click through a photo gallery of the finished projects, then tell us: Which team created the best cabin?

 

 

Vote! We'll keep the poll open for a week and will share the results.

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Photos: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Artists open studios for Venice Art Walk & Auctions

Venice artists and architects will open their studios and homes to the public this weekend for the Venice Art Walk & Auctions, the 34th annual fundraiser for the Venice Family free Clinic. Artist Jesse Hazelip will be working on "Hearts of Oak," a live painting and mural installation throughout the weekend on the Red Fort, a Venice landmark built in 1922 and located at 901 Pacific Ave. Other painters, sculptors and photographers will be part of a self-guided tour from noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. (That's painter Gary Palmer pictured in his studio at the Distillery.)

Painter Isabelle Alford-Lago, known for her human-like gorilla portraits, right, will be featured inside the building at 1320 Main St. The show will include her signature artworks on large oil canvas along with several new pieces.

Alford-Lago's work will be among 400 items donated for a silent auction on Sunday, held at Google Los Angeles, Hampton Drive and Sunset Avenue. The auction runs from noon to 6 p.m. followed by a party until 7:30 p.m.

Self-guided architecture tours run from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday. They will highlight homes designed by architects including Neil Kaufman, Steven Shortridge, Molly Reid, Steven Ehrlich, John Frane and David Ritch, whose update of a 1906 bunaglow we featured a few years ago.

Tickets to the Art Walk are $50. Architecture tour tickets are $125. Buy online or register at the Westminster School, 1010 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice. For a full schedule of studio and architecture tours, silent auction and family events, consult the Venice Art Walk website.

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-- Lisa Boone

Photo: Gary Palmer

Painting: "Grandmaster" by Isabelle Alford-Lago

 

Woodbury architecture students turn sheds into cool little cabins

The challenge for three teams of architecture students from Woodbury University in Burbank: Design the coolest, smartest cabin that you can dream up. The catch: Your building materials have to come from an ordinary, not-so-cool shed kit from Lowes.

“There was a lot of grumbling at the beginning,” said Jeanine Centuori, chairwoman of the undergraduate architecture program at Woodbury. Each 10-by-10-foot shed had to be transformed to accommodate two people for sleeping. The template had to be tweaked to provide light, ventilation and insulation. And though the teams each had a budget of $1,500 for additional supplies, they also had a mandate to experiment with one assigned material — paper, plastic or wood.

PHOTO GALLERY: Woodbury students tweak shed kits into mini modern cabins

POLL: Vote for your favorite cabin design

Just how much can a simple shed be transformed? The answer becomes apparent before you're even off the driveway at the Shadow Hills Riding Club, the San Fernando Valley equestrian center where the three cabins were built.

The paper team's bright orange cabin practically glows, its exterior pop-outs borrowing an idea from motor homes (imagine dresser drawers left open). The pop-outs provide seating on the outside and space for luggage racks on the inside. Two beds are cleverly hidden under removable floor panels. Colorful hammocks from Craigslist hang from the ceiling, prompting student Sunny Lam to claim (as only a college student could) that the cabin “sleeps four.” (That's Lam in the photo hanging out, with Colin McCarville holding a floor panel that, when lifted up, becomes a privacy screen.)

BuBees beehive: modern architecture for the urban bee

Backyard beekeeping is the buzz of urban farming, with some wanting to replenish bees disappearing through Colony Collapse Disorder and others simply wanting to harvest home-grown honey. Now a Malibu business called BuBees is making beehives that are as fashionable as the city dwellers keeping them.

Designed by commercial artist and Art Center College of Design graduate Steve Steere, the $300 hives are a blend of form and function. A so-called top bar design, BuBees beehives mimic the way bees live in nature. The 36-by-18-inch living space is equipped with 24 bars, under which the bees build their combs. Two solid boards that run the width of the hive can be moved to make the space smaller or larger depending on how many bees adopt the hive. A viewing window lets beekeepers see inside the space, which can accommodate thousands of the pollinators.

For beekeepers who want honey, the top bar system allows easy harvesting. Just lift out one of the bars, cut off the comb and smash it in a bucket.