Metropolitan Home is being put to bed for good.

I suffered reflux trying to digest the death of Gourmet, one of four Condé Nast publications closed recently. I didn’t sample the food bible much but felt nostalgic about it as an American institution. I only picked up Modern Bride a few times when plotting my wedding. (I had the main prop but needed flowers and a dress.)

Now, achy-breaky heartburn ensues from Hachette’s news about dumping Metropolitan Home.

Set to fold after its December issue, the loss of the treasured shelter guide is another casualty of the ad recession – in fact, the biggest casualty to date.

It has taken about 30 years, but the ultimate collapse is what my harshly prophetic broadcast journalism teachers at Northwestern predicted in the early 80s, proclaiming, “Print is dead!”

The grim forecast prompted many of us grad students to seek careers in television, only to make our way back to print eventually. Dying or not, it offered dignity. Print was where the rubber met the road in terms of writing acumen. The words didn’t always have to match the pictures. Imagine that.

I had a personal connection to Met Home, the uber source of swank urban nesting. I began as a fan, dovetailing pages challenging us to uplift our rooms with color, modern accessories, innovative gadgets and accessible art. It had a soft spot for small spaces urban dwellers could afford. Make puny pads bold, we were told.

Later, I became a contributor. When I first hooked up with Met I was a burned-out CNN writer and reporter, frustrated by the network’s ranting, mediocre producers, sensational live coverage and zero commitment to covering visual art.

I got up the nerve to phone Met one day from the Omni to pitch a few story ideas. I was merely a fan. A fan with a good resume: I worked at CNN. I had grown up in the housing design business. I desperately wanted in.

An erudite senior editor, John Sweeney, was happy to bite when I suggested a piece on world-famous pop artist, Kenny Scharf. The magazine was going through that we need hot celebs on the cover phase and my timing was excellent. God, I miss the 80s!

Nevermind that I hadn’t spoken to my college friend in years; that didn’t keep me from exploiting the connection. After all, Kenny and I had slow-danced together like Fred and Ginger in our dorm elevators, singing Cheek to Cheek. He owed me.

I called Kenny and boom, kismet! He graciously invited me to his upstate Hudson Valley Charles Addams-style manse which he had transmogrified into a graffiti palace with his signature cartoon aliens, atomic whirls and swirls. He was even producing ancient-future furniture that was an extension of his art. Right up Met Home’s alley. Lucky, lucky me.

I never turned back after that, and Met Home invited me to continue on as a Southeast editor, contributing cutting-edge articles on inner city housing projects and urban architecture.

I found Met was always on the cusp of all that is modern and functional, all that enhances our visual world, and that happened to include good green living.

The magazine should be proud of its April 2009 eco issue, which, like many of its best editions, entertained and informed while sharing valuable decor resources. This, in addition to consistent annual coverage of “the best little green houses,” and other examples of how the world of design is making strides in sustainable living.

But pride won’t keep you afloat when the dollars go down the drain. The biggest and most prestigious victim of the ad recession has fallen. Thirteen editorial staffers will join the growing list of unemployed journalists, including Donna Warner, the editor-in-chief for the past 17 years.

Warner, who replaced wonderful Dorothy Kalins, worked at Met Home for 26 years, joining shortly after it was founded at Meredith Corp, where it was introduced in 1974 as Apartment Life.

“I created this baby and loved it a lot,” said Warner. “It’s very sad. That’s what happens when you lose one of your children.”

My journalism instructors would boast “We told you so!” And now, I must admit, I  finally believe them. Print is dead.

While I know we will save paper, it just won’t be the same not being able to tear out pages of great sofas and chairs when I’m in the dentist waiting room or at the beauty salon. Saving them on the old Crackberry just isn’t the same kind of tactile experience.

This is the latest installment in Luanne’s column, Life in the Green Lane.

Porcelained out? Carve your niche with an alternative sink for soaking up greener materials like certified teak, bamboo, recycled metal and glass and friendly painted ceramics. You can even experiment with poured concrete with 50% recycled fly ash, as seen in the striking orange basin by Jeremy Levine Design.

Here is a handful of other options we rounded up:

From William Garvey’s Fusion Line of handmade sinks from certified teak grown in the mixed deciduous forests of South Asia.

Spotted at the Story Hotel in Stockholm, these decorative ceramic bowls make brilliant bathroom basins.

Recycled aluminum and brass vessel sinks from ECO round out the eco bath and are paired well with a bamboo plywood or stone tile counter top.

Handblown recycled glass emerges as sensuous craft for the bath with the clear tortoise trim Classic design (above) and Ocean shell (below) from Bear Creek Glass.

Main Image: Jeremy Levine Design

Organic, textural and highly ornamental, cabbage is an ideal crop to plant in your garden during those fall and winter months when falling leaves can be the only color abundant in the garden.

Planting rows of the cabbage was a great solution for my own raised veggie bed (below), which is very challenging to maintain this time of year. I long for pumpkins but we never seem to get them going in time.

A garden designer friend suggested the purple, low-water use option of the Cruciferea family (from the same family as cauliflower, broccoli, kale, collards and Brussels Sprouts) as a way to fill in the blank bed.

I love how they look, rather modern and clean as a design feature, plus, they actually like living in my San Francisco yard (not one has complained about the morning fog).

As a cool season crop with color that can be enhanced by cold weather, they can tolerate chillier temperatures of nearly 32 degrees, according to Vegetable Garden Suite 101. You can keep them as a lovely design feature, or cook them in a variety of dishes, from savory soups to simple steamed side dishes and  wonderful, healthy slaws.

Still, many prefer ornamental cabbage and kale as low water use plants rather than food, finding other members of the family of plants are much more tasty as food crops.

Apparently, the cabbage originated as a wild crop along the Mediterranean and Western Europe where it was used medicinally, and was one of the first Cruciferea crops to be domesticated some 2,000 years ago. Part of the popularity is the fact ornamental varieties need virtually no maintenance.

There are many sites for buying the flowering cabbage seeds, including Park Seed and  Neseed, or you can find them at a local nursery that deals in organic plants.

Park Seed recommends starting the seeds indoors and covering them very lightly before transplanting when the leaves begin to shoot.  The color evolves around 3 1/2 months from sowing to form a rosette of colorful leaves with cream rose, pink and purple shades, 10 inches high and 12 inches wide. To dig up hints and growing rich and ruffly cabbage as borders or in containers, visit Garden Blaze.

Tell them Peter Rabbit sent you!

Main Image: Raelene G

Image One: Luanne Bradley

Image Two: Garden Blaze

There’s a sad sight. After they’ve lugged your belongings from one corner of the world to the other and obviously won’t last another mile, the final stop for your careworn companions is the trash. There’s no alternative. It’s a fact.

Nonsense, says the team at Junktion!

If you’re keen to make your life a trashless one (particularly on Tuesdays), there are many ways to upcycle your garbage – but there’s a limit, surely? There are some items that you can’t do anything with – like empty gas bottles…?

No trying this at home, please. Junktion are professionals and know how to get into gas bottles safely!

Based in Tel Aviv and founded in 2008, this upcycled design company is interested in all the everyday things folk leave behind (rather like the Wombles, then). They’re keen to challenge our concept of “junk”, and they think there’s quite enough stuff in the world already for their creative purposes.

A car trunk door becomes a sofa. A chopper bicycle reforms itself, Transformers-style, into a stool. Metal piping becomes a classy-looking towel rail.

And if it’s attention-grabbing decor you’re after, how about this industrial-style octopus of a lamp, made from a metal cooking pot writhing with swarms of illuminated teapots? Or desklights make of bakelite-style phones?

Junktion trades out of their shop in Tel Aviv, asking locals to supply them with the raw materials. If they opened near you, would you be a regular customer?

Images: Junktion (via Haute*Nature) and Phineas H.

“When you watch the commercials you can tell they’re made of cheap stuff,” says my astute oldest daughter about the fleece blanket sensation known as the Snuggie™. “The people wearing them are just so cheesy, like the man in the leopard one who says he’s so glad he found a fun designer print that suits his personality.”

Snuggie consumers proudly wear the Made-in-China label on their sleeves, not considering the synthetic polyester fabric they’re breathing in all the while they’re adjusting their thermostats in the thin, robe-like throws. I find they leave me as cold as those stinky, plastic sealed airline blankets gifted to us on flights.

I’m not the only one with a chilly view of the blankets. There’s the YouTube ad that parodies by Snuggie™ haters, such as one done in the mockumentary format of The Office in which an employer forces her people to wear the wraps at work, despite their protests. A piece in Time shares one young man’s review: “It’s a bathrobe. That is really long. That you wear backwards.”

So far, five million and counting have bought into the ads depicting gray-haired ladies knitting on the sofa, moms reading on the sofa, great aunts chatting away on the phone on the sofa. One thing is clear: Folks just don’t get off that sofa when they’re folded into a Snuggie. Call it a straight jacket for polluted planet!

Allstar Products Group, Inc., the maker of the blanket, set up a Facebook Fan page and attracted 5,000 users in addition to an official online fan club site. That’s a lot of fleece.

Among the enthusiastic takers is my 10-year-old daughter, who went behind her green-leaning parents to ask a relative to buy her one for her birthday in the original royal blue.

She’s a big infomercial hound, my youngest, often repeating lines from the ads when we are out buying necessities for the house. “Mom, you should get the Ped Egg because it’s like having a professional spa treatment right in your own home,” she advises.

She had a fever over the weekend and taking away that Snuggie was harder than wrestling a cheese stick away from my pug. Pugs have little teeth, but they’ll take you down over cheese, and so will Lauren over a cheesy blanket.

“My friend Simon had one and I thought it would be warm for camp because I sleep right near the window,” says my daughter. “I also like it when I’m sick cause it makes me feel all snuggie.”

We don’t buy polyester bedding and we don’t want our kid dragging around a toxic security blanket. Yet burning it could create a micro Valdez. Which begs the question, how do you safely dispose of Mr. Snuggie™?

Because of the questionable chemicals in the fiber, I find it ironic how American Allstar Group’s publicity machine has tied in “the country’s favorite blanket with sleeves” with one of the country’s most pernicious diseases – breast cancer.

In May, they introduced the limited edition pink blanket for breast cancer. The company says it will donate $50,000 to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation on behalf of the product.

I suppose the irony is that many of the questions posed to researchers at Cancer.Org relate to the link between toxins in textiles and breast cancer. One reader was wondering about her mother who had he worked at a chain of stores in which she cut cloth materials containing the kind of junk that is used to produce my daughter’s favorite throw.

If the Snuggie is such a mega hit and has made tons of dough for Allstar, why hasn’t an organic textile company made their own version of a healthy fleece blanket with sleeves?

“The Snuggie is a safe product, as it is approved and certified by all relevant industry standards,” I’m told by Anne Flynn, Director of Marketing at Allstar. “Snuggie is currently in the process of evaluating other materials, including natural, eco-friendly options, to meet consumer needs.”

Until we meet the eco Snuggie, the only newly unveiled additions introduced for the coming winter are styles for kids, dogs, a more plush version of the current design, and black and purple tie-dye fashions for the holidays.

I did find a few greener options, such as a Bear Adventure Warm Me Up made of recycled synthetics from Blankets and More (being introduced November 1st), and a cozy kimono for the preemie baby. There’s also the 85% recycled materials Peekaru, shown above (top left), for mom and baby.

Otherwise, the market is wide open for a healthier blanket with sleeves. My friends at Chia better get right on it!

This is the latest installment in Luanne’s column, Life in the Green Lane.

Images: Bread and Sham, All Left Turns, SFGate, MomLogic, Snuggie™ Fan Club

Nothing goes together like a recession and a paint brush.

If you can’t afford to remodel (and who can?) and are stuck with a peeling, fiberglass clawfoot tub, tap into some ingenuity and resource non-toxic paints and supplies, pure shower curtains, an organic floor mat and go to town.

If you’re opting to go the DIY tub redux route you will want to bone up on stripping off the old finish first. You can visit many good how-to tutorials at sites like ehow. Or,  if you have the budget, hire a tub refinishing service, like Bay Area Coatings. Either way, you are salvaging an old treasure that adds oodles of character to the modern bath.

Here are a few cool designs to inspire:

Steal this teal kids’ bath design from Canadian House and Home.

Basking in blue is oh-so-country French. Eating a baguette in the bain is nice, too. From Apartment Therapy.

How succulent is this cool citrus desert palette from Decorology?

Some lemon aid to brighten the old friend from Country Living.

Basic black is tres chic and sleek, from Happy Living Design.

Stripes to center the mod energy of the citified clawfoot, from Apartment  Therapy.

Check out other DIY ideas at this cute site.

Main Image: Fixer Upper

We have long sung the praises of Midwestern textile designer, Amy Butler, who introduced an exotic, Indian-inspired organic bedding collection of five designs this year. She even rolled out rugs to match!

The lovely and much needed bedding (still can’t find organic in many of my favorite haunts) includes 400-thread count sheeting, elegant embroidery and paisley flourishes woven without harmful dyes.

Among my faves is the Bucharest motif (above) with patterns found in Romanian embroidery and the flourishes of formal gardens. While modern and bold, the charcoal gray and ivory palette imbues the collection with understated warmth. The duvet would be at home in many environments – perhaps even yours.

Leave a comment here and you could be sleeping in the bedding soon as part of our decor give-away.

I would even repaint my master boudoir gray to complement this lovely duvet. Hey, that rhymes! Lemon yellow would work well as a backdrop, too, don’t you think?

Image: Amy Butler Design

I live in Los Angeles and yes, I love my car. Not because it’s a symbol of my status or a prized possession, but because I’d get nowhere without it.

In a city known for traffic jams and empty carpool lanes, you’d think locals would be begging for ways to avoid our cars. Such is not the case.

In fact, we finally have our Metro but it’s a sad fact that not many people ride it…or know where to catch it, for that matter. It will take something bigger, something cooler to convince this LALA to leave her CarCar at home.

Is it possible that this bigger and cooler something is simply better design? Could a cool concept do what a plea for better air quality could not?

Michael Lejeune and his creative team definitely think so. Their campaign for the newly expanded Gold Line (running between Pasadena, downtown and East L.A.) began this summer and they’re hoping it will cause a stir.

“Our goal is to make Metro cool. To compete in one of the most media-saturated cities in the country, we’re trying to inject a sense of fun and personality…” says Lejeune.

Colorful, graphic t-shirts and “typographically beautiful” weekly passes printed with a different green tip on each are just the tip of Lejeuhe’s iceberg of design ideas. The online Metro Store sells mugs, model buses and even a tie with tiny metro icons.

All this in the name of public transportation? If it will convert the car-addicted to go cold turkey, then I say more please. Because I’m tired of traffic and exhausted by rising gas prices.

What do you think? Can good design have this much influence?

via Fast Company

image via StepInsideDesign

They’re already talking about their costumes, those candy-crazy girls of mine. That’s how I know fall is here, just a wink and a nod after packing them up for summer camp.

Design-wise, it’s one of the easiest seasons for stylists since it involves scavenging for leaves and twigs to tweak our vignettes for free. Ah, there’s that “F” word, again, a favorite at EcoSalon.

Want to spruce up your rooms for autumn without much of a budget? Take one of the following paths most traveled by the frugal M. Stewarts among us:

The Centerpiece: Leaf it Alone

The Toast and Tables blog gathers no moss but plenty of leaves for centerpieces (images below). The simplicity is enticing. You can also make your own wreath with bundles, or layer them along the mantle to be set aglow by beeswax candles.

The DIY Twiggy Cabinet Door from Apartment Therapy

Bring the outdoors in by assembling twigs to embellish the typical cupboard cabinet (image below).

Basket Cases for Giving Thanks to the Autumn Bounty

Most of us have a caterer’s supply of baskets stored in the house. Fill a few with aromatic apples, Indian corn, leaves, pumpkins and other colorful objects for a cornucopia of delights. Don’t forget to toast your pumpkin seeds and put them in a bowl on the coffee table for another tasty treat of fall.

Scatter Bowls of Fall Potpourri with Old Fashioned Living’s Blend of Earthy Balsam Scents

Collect dried leaves and flowers from the ground, blend with fragrant oils and make your own yummy potpourri. Follow the DIY recipe and bring the woods and celebration of the equinox into your nest.

Image: J. Charpentier

Felt Leaf Napkin Rings and Placecards for Your Fall Dinner Party

Design Sponge has the skinny on these orange and brown napkin rings and cards (images below), easy to make with felt, scissors, glue, buttons, thread and your imagination. I love the chic, homemade texture of these festive gems.

Main Image: Design Sponge

If you haven’t heard, fancy-shmancy cupcakes are stealing the hearts of America as we downsize our celebrations with treats that fill us up, not out.

For a growing number of sweet teeth, four bites and one candle do the trick as we replace the wasteful sheet cake of old with an indulgent Red Velvet vegan confection made to order at your chic neighborhood cupcake boutique.

Call it theater in the round for the bakery hound!

The new stars are the vegan assortments  introduced by bakers such as Yummy Cupcakes in Los Angeles, which sells from its healthy alternative menu three days a week at its shops in Burbank and Santa Monica.

Yummy’s flavors include Almond, Blood Orange, Chocolate Chili,  Brown Sugar Cinnamon, and my favorite, the Arnold Palmer – black iced tea and lemonade.  They sell for around $3.25 a pop for the classic size and $1.50 to $1.65 for the mini size. Of course, you can buy them by the dozen, as well.

Tiffani Soforenko, one of the three partners at Yummy, says the vegan menu was  inspired by an offer to prepare cupcakes for talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and her crew. “We knew Ellen was a vegan and hadn’t done vegan recipes yet, and figured it was the perfect time to figure out how to do it,” she recalls. “We brought the red velvets for her and her staff and they were a huge hit.”

It took off from there. “We thought if we can make that, what else can we make? Our normal menu is 156 flavors and we do 43 as vegan,” says Soforenko.

What sets them apart? No animal-based products, eggs or butter or egg replacers. They are also topped with raw sugar instead of colored sprinkles. People with food and dairy allergies are gobbling them up!

Another gourmet vendor, Kara’s Cupcakes in San Francisco (with four Bay Area locations) proudly boasts it is “green” on its web page, from its sustainable local and organic ingredients to environmentally-friendly recyclable and compostable packaging to its bakeries built with green certification standards. It even uses green cleaning products and delivers its treats in ultra low emission vehicles. Plus, the cupcakes are to die for, from Kara’s Karrot on Halloween night to Raspberry Dazzle and Milk Chocolate Ganache.  They look good and are filled with good stuff. What else would you expect from the daughter of a dentist?

While pure ingredients are naturally in high demand in buff California, the notion of a greener cupcake is just now making its way to glitzy Miami, where the founders of Cupcake Nouveau – Cristina Valdes and Shayrin Badillo – are getting in the groove.

“We are in the process of developing new recipes that are sugar, gluten and dairy free,” shares Valdes, who says her South Beach clientele is all about glamor and chic. These skilled bakers are known for the artistic detail they add to their specialized cupcakes for weddings and fundraisers, such as pearls and roses adorning the Vanilla Bean Madagascar creations. You grow, girls!

Rather bake em yourself? Many of these gourmet cupcake companies offer cupcake party baking kits for around $42 that ensure hours of fun and a terrible mess for moms as the guests go crazy stirring, blending, frosting and decorating their visions. Either way, the naturally beautiful end result seems to be taking the cake.

Main Image: Cupcakes Nouveau

Image One: Yummy Cupcakes

Image Two: Cupcakes Nouveau

Image Three: Luanne Bradley