The kitchen has become a multi-faceted living space and many specialists in the kitchen and bath accessories market are delivering innovative new products and technologies to meet the needs of homeowners, contractors, engineers, and designers. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, ETNA Supply Company has been serving industries since 1965 as a plumbing products distributor with six state-wide showrooms and a suite of products and services that aid designers and homeowners in creating their ideal kitchen and bath. As consultants for these spaces, the representatives at Infusion Kitchen & Bath Showrooms by ETNA Supply—the company’s series of showrooms—are familiar with the ways they have and have not functionally changed alongside the current…
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The Michigan Adirondack lodge
Found near Torch Lake along the Rapid River in Kalkaska County, this nearly 5,500-square-foot family retreat is an authentic portrait of Adirondack Style architecture set on nearly 400 acres of natural landscape. Inspired by the vernacular of the Lake Placid Lodge and the National Historic Landmarked Great Camps in New York, this secluded residential home is similarly designed as a gathering place and an escape for family and friends. It is a style characterized by its use of natural elements, such as whole, split, or peeled logs, roots, and burls, complemented by native granite fieldstone and massive fireplaces, and displays of Swiss Chalet, Shingle Style, and Arts and Crafts elements.…
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Restore in residential
Throughout the 20th century, The J.L. Hudson Company, or Hudson’s, department stores were fixtures in Detroit’s history as a fashion and design capital, and played a major role in holiday shopping traditions and style development alike. Opened on Woodward Avenue in 1911, the Hudson’s department store in downtown Detroit would eventually grow into a massive, 25-story structure that was the world’s tallest department store until 1961, commanding the downtown corridor with a multitude of restaurants, a groundbreaking deliveries system, more than 700 fitting rooms and roughly 50 passenger elevators. On the tails of economic downturn, the store was eventually demolished in 1998, but not before one of its long-time appreciators…
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Detroit style
Between the mass production of accessible, timeless car designs, and the artistic innovation that pushed the automotive industry into each new age, Detroit’s influence on American car design, technology, and manufacturing has remained since the turn of the 20th century when Henry Ford touched down his Detroit Automobile Company and Charles Brady King test drove the first self-propelled carriage along Woodward Avenue, reaching speeds up to five miles per hour. In homage to this remarkable past, the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, or DIA, is unveiling a special exhibition, “Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City, 1950-2020,” which will capture groundbreaking, artistic, and transitional moments in Detroit car design…
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The Custom Build: Mapleridge/MPN
For contact information and more go to Mapleridge Construction and MPN Builders. Photography: Speckman Photography
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Systems of design
“People find their own ways of using things regardless of how prescriptive it can be,” said Lee Fletcher, principal and co-founding partner of Fig40, an award-winning, multi-service, industrial design firm based in Toronto, Ontario. “We need to have a sensitivity to that.” This intention to the intrinsic human nature of design underscores the Fig40 portfolio, which Fletcher has been building with fellow principal, designer, and co-founding partner Terence Woodside since the design studio’s launch in 2008. It is a craving for pure understanding of systems, both human and mechanic, that has driven Fletcher’s exploration of the design realm, whether it involved creating LEGO® shock absorbers during his childhood or recent…
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The Custom Build: Derocher/DesRosiers
For contact information and more go to Custom Homes by Derocher Inc. and DesRosiers Architects Inc. Photography: James Haefner Photography
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The Custom Build: Eastmark Construction
For contact information and more go to EastmarkConstruction.com Photography: Ashley Avila Photography
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Gallery in the woods
A well-travelled summer destination in northern Michigan, the small but vibrant township of Glen Arbor rests in the crook of Lake Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Bay, offering walkable shoreline and sunsets second-to-none, and thick pockets of forested areas that cool active summer months. It is one of these areas a gem of revived architectural prowess sits. The Glen Arbor Arts Center, formerly the Glen Arbor Art Association is a unique, multi-dimensional space between a nature preserve and the commercial center of town. Its original building had housed several programs from gallery exhibitions and lectures to art classes for several age groupings and even an art residency program; in all, an enduring…
