Come See the Houses of Tomorrow!

Irwin Weiner ASID - There's a lot of Disneyland thinking in designing a futuristic home - and we're not talking your run-of-the-mill contemporary architecture. We're thinking of Tomorrowland, the Jetsons, Star Trek, and the house that just landed in your neighborhood from outer space!

I'm fascinated with what houses may look like in the future, and for decades there have been numerous attempts to design and build the future of family homes. Here is a sampling of my favorites; click on each photo to learn more about them.

For more futuristic housing wonders, see Design2Share's Scrapbook Collection of Photographs: Favorite Housing Innovations.

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Amazing Technology Turns a Patio Into a Pool

Irwin Weiner ASID - Thanks to our lovely designer friend Bev Kahn in Sydney, Australia for sharing with us the story of Hidden Water Pools. This is an amazing patent pending technology that turns a high-and-dry circular patio surface into pools of different depths (up to 6 feet deep, half that depth, and a kiddies wading pool with as little as an inch of water). The patio surface lowers and water magically bubbles up to fill the gap and create the pool area. Families with small children, in particular, will appreciate the safety features this type of pool offers - no more dangerous pool water for children to play around when they're unattended in the yard ... just raise the pool floor and the water disappears and the patio surface is back in play. Quite ingenious. Visit the Hidden Water Pools website for more information ... and enjoy the following video demonstration.

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Handmade Goods Elevate Design Beyond the Ordinary

Irwin Weiner ASID - It's not a rarity to find a young, talented, good-looking interior designer shooting a professional video like the one we're featuring today - but I'll be darned if the video only identifies him as "Andrew," a bohemian, globetrotting interior designer who spans the gap between everyday-yet-exotic handcrafted products and multi-million-dollar interiors. If you know who this designer is, please drop us a comment so we can amend this post and link to his website. Many thanks!

At any rate, Andrew and videographer Samantha Schutz have put together an entertaining show about introducing handmade Japanese pottery into a high-end NYC sushi restaurant's design presentation.
 

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MLK Day: Good Time to Remember Artist Romare Bearden

Irwin Weiner ASID - It's Martin Luther King day, and we're reminded as a nation of the important dream of civil rights for all people and the historic struggles of African Americans to gain equality in everyday society. An artist who plunged wholeheartedly into the struggle was Romare Bearden, perhaps the most significant African American artist of the last century, and many galleries and museums have recently been celebrating the centennial of his birth. Our friend Russell Goings, co-founder of Essence magazine (among many, many other accomplishments), was a close friend and collector of Bearden's work - see photo above for Russell with Bearden's 1977 mixed-media work Conjur Woman. Read more about Bearden's Centennial here - and click here to watch Design2Share's exclusive video interviews with Russell Goings as he talks about Bearden's amazing work. And always ... always! ... keep the dream alive.

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