Wow I’m behind today. SKIP DOWN TO THE THIRD PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ MY GENERAL COMPLAINTS. It’s a certain dealership who shall remain nameless’* Audi Service departments fault.* Why they give you an appointment for 10 and don’t even start on your car until 11:15, when all they need to do is pop in a part that is supposed to take 10 minutes, I don’t know. My doctor’s office is ten times quicker. It certainly seems like an eternity when they have Kenny G blasting over loudspeakers throughout the place (even outside), and the Montel Williams show blasting on the TV (I finally got up and turned it all the way down), and all the other people in the waiting room are talking on cellphones and the supposed “WiFi hotspot” computers never actually work. Then when they FINALLY give you your car back they have the nerve to beg your to give them a perfect score when “Audi” calls with a follow up survey. First of all, it’s not Audi, it’s a marketing company their owner hires. Second of all, even though they say it’s anonymous, if you give a bad review, the dealership calls you at home and asks you why (I should know). Also, they have framed reviews with the customers’ names on them on the wall, so that is another real subtle clue regarding anonymity. It was so annoying I had to go to Atlantic Station and see “Blades of Glory” with my friend Amanda. Nope, I don’t generally go see a lot of Sundance-y movies and listen to NPR; I listen to the Hip Hop Station and I go see Will Ferrell movies. Do you think even less of me?
Anyhoo, the usual awesome Thursday NYTimes was a little weak today. An article on “natural” pools (wow, a totally engineered swimming hole is all of the sudden called “natural” just because it doesn’t have a lot of chlorine in it? It’s about as natural as the Audi surveys are anonymous). Whatever. All I could do was think “EWWW snakes. Snakes! SNAKES! Algae! Snakes! Urine! Snakes! No thanks to the the natural not turquoise bottomed nor chlorinated pool. If I want to take a dip in a snakepit with a nice layer of algae on top, I’ll jump in some groady pond.

Alright, enough griping. The positives coming up. First, the crossword was easy for a Thursday so it made me feel falsely smart. Second, there was a great article about this townhouse owner, Markos Lambros Drakotos, who used a sculptor named Miggy Buck instead of an interior designer to redesign the space. The COOLEST thing was this screen made out of metal washers. Really, every move they made in gutting the building was pretty great – while I’m not wild about the foot sculpture outside for my own home, I’d enjoy stumbling upon it unexpectedly while strolling the sidewalks of Manhattan. I do think he could have said tah tah to the parquet floors and still kept the integrity of the architecture, but that’s a quibble.

Coolest room divider I’ve seen in a long time:

Maybe everyone should use a sculptor to help them design stairs:

Love the combination kitchen/library. The vertical and the horizontal play against each other perfectly in this space:

Parquet? I prefer butter, but it’s still a gorgeous bedroom, and they were careful about saving all of the original moldings. Check out those incredible doors on either side of the bed:

The controversial foot. Seriously, don’t the neighbors have ANYTHING better to do than complain about than a big foot? I wonder if this thing ever gets tagged. I wonder if it attracts foot fetishists. It reminds me of the four-toed foot statue on Lost:

I still haven’t had time to dig into the Design section that came in the Sunday Times. The cover alone is dreamy – I want to frame it! However, first I need to dish about Top Design. I’m still way behind. More on that in the next post.
Photos from:

Blades of Glory Official Site

Gross scary water snake from Tom Spinker

All the rest from Fred R. Conrad for the NYTimes.

*The Audi Dealership is in Atlanta and its initials are J.E., as in, oh, I don’t know, say, Jim Ellis.