Two for the Price of One

Pivot storage bed frame; from $799 at West Elm, (888) 922-4119 westelm.com

Introducing multi-functional furniture

For those who have vowed to put their homes in order in 2011, Georgia Tapert Howe and Caroline Cummings Rafferty may be just the ticket. In 2008 these two longtime friends founded Carolina George, a line of furniture in which most of the pieces serve more than one purpose.

Read the article from the New York Times here.

Table Topic

Photo by gaioum

It's so much more than a table.

Growing up, my family's kitchen table was the sun around which everything in our home took orbit. (My apologies to Copernicus who believed the sun orbited the earth. To him, this analogy would be confusing. Can you imagine?)

Our family ate our meals at the table, talked on the phone at the table (alas, the phone was still connected to the wall by a long, spiral cord), did homework at the table, shared family worship at the table, and carried long-into-the-night conversations at the table. (I learned about both life-changing moves our family would make at the table--and I both decided to dump and marry in the same assigned spot--two different men, I should clarify.)

We each had assigned seats and--even when we weren't eating meals--we gravitated toward "our spot." So I could relate to a gravestone I once saw which read, "Your spot at the table is empty." It was more than a reference to last night's main course.

It is safe to say that much of what I learned, I learned at the kitchen table.

When I hear that families are avoiding the kitchen table--in lieu of fast food booths or paper plates in the living room while watching the favorite show--I wonder what will be missed. It isn't so much the chair or wooden construct itself that kept me grounded through the years.

But in so many ways, it was the kitchen table.

Trend Watch

Photo courtesy of the I Love Lucy show

It's one of the things about shows like I Love Lucy that is era-appropriate and utterly charming.

Yes, I'm talking about the double twin beds--television's decision to keep things as squeaky clean as possible, even in the homes of the married faithful.

But the fact that we've crawled planets away from that mentality in our 2010-era television is not the theme of this blog. (Though I am making a mental note to come back to that discussion sometime when my blood pressure is safely under control.)

Today, I'd like to discuss a growing trend--one that has me perplexed.

According to the National Association of Home Builders, they expect 60 percent of custom-built homes to have dual master bedrooms by the year 2015.

Other home experts have suggested that homes with one master bedroom will soon be considered outdated. Perhaps where we used to discuss homes without indoor plumbing, our children will someday discuss the fact that Mom and Dad only had one master bedroom in their house.

[Insert snickering and rolling of the eyes.]

I'm not sure what this trend should be chalked up to, but it's certainly one worth watching.