Saturday, September 15, 2007

This job is finished and ready for a party

I'm so shocked at how perfectly these banquette benches came out! The fabric is Sunbrella outdoor marine grade and beautiful! I had the cushions custom made by Foam and Futon (they were near my office on Houston, but have recently relocated to west 12th - and they are great to work with!) out of outdoor safe (non moldy/mildewey) water repellent foam. And I can't get over the fact that they fit absolutely dead on. Even the piping on the seams is fantastic! The occasional furniture, several ottomans that can also be tables are from (yikes!) Target online. The lanterns are from Pottery Barn, they have LED bulbs and batteries, so they can just be switched on or off. The lanterns are just for the party since they would be messed up in the wind there on the 13th floor.




Another view, this time South/West towards Central Park, in the bottom corner you can see one of the buffet units I designed, this one holds a refrigerator and trash, the other is all storage. The kicker with these custom units are the beautiful granite tops, they match the color palette of the furniture fabric exactly! The fountain is a silly spitting lion, it took some finessing to figure out the right proportion of water so that it's not just dribbling and also, not too much so that it shoots out past the catch basin! Below is a swatch of the granite from Red Hook Marble, there were some beautiful streaks of a rusty-peach as well...



This is a picture of problem solving... The problem was a gaping hole where an AC was once housed... Long gone, the hole had been patched with a yucky old board and some caulk. This is where the speaker wire needed to come out from inside the apartment, so I pried off the board and had a really ugly situation to deal with (one that had to have an 8" x 8" access panel for the speaker stuff). I asked the carpenter to frame out a piece of lattice and hang it over the whole thing and then I mounted a really beautiful 4' copper window box on it. Unfortunately the box can't be seen in this picture, it is all covered by a silk ivy and hydrangea arrangement I did for the party. You can catch a glimpse of the access panel middle right.




So my client was having a huge party to celebrate her son's engagement, and decided to use the other half of the rooftop, which is property of the building. Thursday night she had (another) nervous breakdown, this time because she realized there was no lighting in this space... This is where the caterer and half a dozen cocktail tables would be set up. I had the lighting tech whip out a rental proposal for the night, but she decided she didn't want to spend $3,000 for an evening... So she informed me at noon, the day before the party, that this was my problem to solve. She didn't care what it looked like, just so long as people could see and would not trip and sue her. she repeatedly called me to remind me how bright it needed to be. I went to a fancy upper East hardware store and bought 20 clip lamps and 150 watt clear bulbs and a zillion feet of extension cord and worked it out...

1 comment:

Pumpkin said...

This looks GREAT!!! You must be very proud.