For this week’s Flickr fave of the week, I am loving these floating shelves from Jeremy Levine Design. I’m also digging the way they used the stacking shelves on the left side. Thanks for adding it to our Fresh New Spaces Group!

By the way, this was an addition and remodel to a residence. The house was built around three trees and includes: grey water recycling, storm water capture, recycled coal fly ash concrete, solar energy, recycled lumber, passive cooling, thermal rock wall, and mobile shade panels.

Photographer: Tom Fowlkes

Message Received Detroit. I love to keep track of what’s going on there, but the commercial is right, I don’t know Detroit. I haven’t been there since my 7th grade field trip to Greenfield Village, well, unless you count flying in and immediately jumping in a rental car and going to  Ann Arbor thirteen years ago, which I don’t. This commercial gives me so many goosebumps it actually almost makes me want to buy a Chrysler, and ahhh, tell ‘em Lee Iaccoca sent me. At the very least, it made me put 8 Mile in my Netflix queue, put on some Eminem (hope the city comes back like he has), and oh, it also makes me want to pull out my Chapelle DVDs and watch the one where he raps “Jokes and jokes and jokes and spaghetti…8 MILE!”

P.S. Does anyone know if the murals they show during the beginning are by the same artist who did the murals in Cincinnati’s amazing Art Deco Union Terminal (some of which are now in the Cincinnati airport)?

Design Public is proud to be up for a Cribsie Award! Particularly as “Easiest Place to Spend a Paycheck Award.” If you like us, if you really, really like us, please click on the badge above to vote for us and show us a little love. If you don’t, that’s cool, we’ll just go quietly into some corner and weep. Oh, by the way, we’re a teensy bit hard to find once you click on that link – our “category” is in the web, then the very last tab…and we are the very last company listed. Make a scavenger hunt out of finding us!

Thanks to A-List Mom, Stroller Traffic, and Diapers.com for bestowing this honor upon us.

I’m a huge nerd and I LOVE me some Smallville. First of all, I am so happy that Chloe is back, but even more exciting was realizing that Watchtower has a Patrick Townsend White Orbit Chandy, one of my all-time faves. I knew it was MoMA-worthy, but wow, to be Watchtower-worthy is even cooler! I swear I tried to take 20 pics of the TV and this was the best I could do…

Perhaps it’s so over exposed because Chloe is reopening the big oculus and letting the vigilantes bathe in “the light”… O.K. now I’m geeking out while also pulling out themes from my 10th grade five paragraph essay about Heart of Darkness. Anyhoo, here’s a better look at this beauty:

Is anyone else sad about the end of Smallville? I may have to start actually going out on Friday nights when it’s over!

My dear friend Marci and her husband bought a house about a year ago that was a combination of Grey Gardens (in its state in the documentary version/end of the HBO version, minus the cat food tins but complete with raccoons and a tree growing through it) and The Money Pit, only honestly, I think it was in worse shape than both of those combined. It was a fabulous wreck of a classic Shingle-style, unwinterized, “cottage” near the coast in a bedroom community outside of Boston. When I say cottage, I’m talking the big summer homes of rich people back in the days before income tax, not the cozy little caretaker-sized homes we associate with the word today.

Marci and the hubs have always been real estate adventurers, and they dove into planning all the details of the house with enthusiasm. Anyway, when she spotted some cool nautical chart coasters at a local shop that depicted the shoreline that her upper floors look out upon, a light bulb went off over her head. She tracked down the company and asked if a tile version could be made for a backsplash. Turns out, it was possible. Pretty cool, huh?

It’s a perfect fit for a home full of fun nautical touches. I’m excited to show you more pictures of this house after I visit again this summer, it was truly a labor of love. Marci, her husband, and their three young boys lived in the basement during six months of the construction phase and paid careful attention to every detail, to make sure their dream home respected the history of the architecture, would be family-friendly for their young children, and have plenty of room for their extended family to come stay. They even made sure to put in extra parking spots so that friends could come over and sneak down to the exclusive town beach down the street. I have one more little low-quality iPhone shot of the spindles on the staircase, which they had recreated to extend all the way to some of the upper floors. Apparently, using different carved spindles like this was a trend during the time the home was built:

Oh, by the way, I heard from Marci and she let me know that the tiles are actually printed as a reproduction of a nautical chart by Screen Craft Tileworks. If anyone wants more information on how to get this done, shoot me an email and I’ll send you the contact information – I’m just not that comfortable putting a phone number in a blog post