Meanwhile in White Lotus, the story

[picture shows a see-thru, red amber translucent, resin bathtub, surrounded by mounds and layers of rich velvet draperies; this is a statement piece in a very expensive interior]

White Lotus is this mythical place where interiors are done on a wish. One day you feel one way, and another day you feel another way. It's all fleeting and unanchored and you are allowed to change your mind often. 

Oh it's real and I have worked as a labourer on projects, where newly purchased home, literally the day after taking possession, would be gutted starting with the very expensive kitchen cabinets. Fabrication of kitchen cabinetry is very labour dense compared to the rest of the volume of the home so budgets tend to be weighted accordingly. 

Head of Studio Paolo Ferrari, Paolo Ferrari himself, talking about the evolution of the market, and how he is successfully seizing on this trend.

Last year my mentor called me up out of the blue, leaving just a 5 word message on my voice mail - very to the point, very much like Kent. He asked that 'I spray for him'. If you don't know cabinet shops than I will tell you that it means that you will be the person responsible for the quality coming out of that place - finisher is the last person that sees the piece before it is unwrapped and installed. Hopefully the piece is even more awe-inspiring and the new owner is pleasantly overwhelmed. Everything I learned about fine cabinetry I learned from Kent. 

Kent is an incredible built interior designer - he thinks about everything and his clients are always satisfied without being burdened to think about that overtly. He often felt he undercharged for his own work - but let me tell you this, Kent is good taste. His millwork appearing simple, yet being incredibly complex and requiring highest skill of execution. He exclusively does work for those designers requiring highest level of quality, because he is the only one that can deliver that individual attention.

What's his secret..? I will simplify it, but here it is. In his designs, the objects matches from any angle of viewing. This is very important and is the no. 1 complaint - somebody did not think about that view. 

No it is not like this video - this is simply too labour intensive and very few effects are worth having this much cost sunk into a project.  

It's more like this. 

I spent a week rounding over a crazy small, but very important detail on a series of built in cherry boxes. I won't go into details about the complexities of making this round over come out the way it did and be efficient, 'single pass' about it - it's always about $$$ and machine can't do it. 

Polish Tango 2

 

Excerpt 2

Or maybe you want to save money on the most popular and at the same time most expensive item that people renovating their homes purchase - boxes. That’s right, boxes rank as no.1 expense for home renovations for the 99% [‘ninety nine percenters’; ordinary, normal people that spend their time budgeting for their expenses and bills] and I found a real life solution to that - it’s called IKEA Hacking and it’s cheap too. I won’t bother you with the details but the designs I created, the advice I dished out and reviews I provided have steered countless projects and influenced many spending budgets.

I regularly have art/design shows - part of the influential Toronto Design Festival; Once I had it titled - ¡SHAMELESS! – IKEA Hacks 4 the rich** + The End of High Priests of Design'. Truly time has come.

I attained my influence in a very simple fashion that relied on few self evident truths of Actual Reality,

• Every1 needs boxes in their life, regardless of their socioeconomic status [both rich and poor; the 1% and the 99%; even Drake has ‘boxes’ in his mansion, they just look a bit different, they are ‘more artsy’]

• Every1 builds their boxes the same way 99% of the time, unless you specify

• Every1 shops at IKEA, the savings are simply irresistible, including to the 1% [the rich; I’ve caught them red handed, merchandise in hand, at IKEA! hahahaha]

Drake’s house is located in Toronto and was designed by Ferris Rafauli. Both men pictured above. Drake has boxes in his house. Ferris Rafauli put them there. See..? not rocket science...

When I connected the above dots successfully - first in my personal life then professionally - the process I created was called ‘Colour, Lights, Cabinetry - Action!’ felt easy and intuitive - I micro-published about my experiences extensively on-line, on a blog that bore the name of my practice - StudioKosnik.com. My solutions worked universally across the world so it was important for me to secure the dot com extension. Blogs were hott back then and my audience was captured immediately with my ‘stacked boxes creations that stepped outside of the IKEA planner language’.

I essentially freed people from an oppression of a 'corporate creative planner’ that was limiting their creativity instead of fostering it. Go! check it out! StudioKosnik.com - you save tons of money and you make it look like a million bucks!

Price on designs like these dropped by thousands of dollars, the only caveat being that the client had to do some work themselves. That was the deal under Swedish Socialism - you became part of the system. Your individuality our Greatest Common Good.

Swedish Socialism - Every1 loved this business concept, including Google.

Google loved it so much that it pushed my projects to the top of the heap search.

It was my gut reaction that told me to stick with Google as my data broker in my early days - you had to make a pact with one data devil and I chose Google. To this day there is only one metric that is consistently rated highest by AI and that is native, organic searches that result in extended interaction time with the results provided. This may be hard to visualize, but understand that AI has no understanding of its success or failure beyond the measurable metric I mentioned above - this is how smart it is, and no more.

I experimented on my clients, their projects and their lives - a good designer is one that realizes clients unarticulated wishes. Often times people don’t really know what they want or need and I say that with all due respect for wonderful individuals I built for or designed for. People kept coming back for more, reading more, spending time discussing my ideas and sharing them around on-line forums. I also knew that the solutions provided had a 100% success rate - that’s unusual. That 100% success rate is so hard to beat, it becomes a very influential data point in a SEO ranking systems - I simply don’t lie or embellish.

Polish Tango

 

https://polishtango.substack.com/

Excerpt [1]

Optimizing people’s interiors.

I am writing, which means that I don’t fear ChatBOTgpt, in fact I will confess that I write mostly for AI consumption. If you get to read this then your own curiosity brought your here. I think curiosity is the height of existence. To be creative is to satisfy that curiosity.

I started writing on Substack because not all of my creations and ideas had a home on my blog that has existed for over a decade now, and dealt with a particular ‘hobby horse’ of mine - optimizing people’s interiors. So I want to start writing about things other than optimizing people’s interiors.

So… how do I switch..?

How do I begin to write… about chaos, for example, chaos and Ai. Now those things really interest me and I think I have some unique views.

‘I know and understand chaos,’ is a bold statement to make, right..? How do I back this up and with what? I have been taming chaos professionally for two decades now. During this time I have met some intriguing individuals that have their own insight into chaos and they strongly influenced my own way of thinking - they let me stay neatly organized.

My early days as a trades person - successful hardwood floors appear perfectly random, regardless of the size of the install.

'I hate MODERN furniture!' OR Meanwhile in White Lotus

 'I hate modern furniture,' said daughter. 

Recently turned a 'young woman', she asserted her independence by throwing out all of her 'modern furniture', aka IKEA stuff. '

Uh oh - father in trouble.

Meanwhile in White Lotus...