Coastal Style Sisal Rugs

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the Blizzard of ‘78, and I began this morning with an hour and a half shoveling snow. The forecast (shown below) shows warm weather with highs in the low 30’s, but with snow on three of the next four days. Sunday is racing day for me with the Cape Cod Frosty sailing fleet, and weather forecasts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are predicting winds in the low 20’s with gusts above 30.

February can be a cruel month in the northern hemisphere, and round about this time every year I start dreaming of summer again.

Right on cue, we announce a new border collection called Espadrille. The designers consider this collection to be the perfect border collection for the beach house or summer cottage with its bright, asymmetrical stripes reminiscent of women’s summer handbags and shoes. I agree. I can see one of the small boucle sisal rugs above brightening up my folk’s summer house after returning from a long, hard day at the beach…

Espadrille is woven in Spain of 100% Cotton. It is available in 6 striped patterns to show between 1″ and 5-1/4″ on face (our widest available), and is applied with a blind-stitch and hand-sewn mitered corners. A thin rubber pad is applied between the binding and the rug to protect the binding fabric from contact with the rug’s surface so that it will hold its good looks.

Before jumping into your next decorating project, ensure you have the right lighting

Our eyes are designed to work in sunlight, and we are naturally happiest and most productive in sunlight. A study performed by Pacific Gas and Electric found that retail shops with a skylight recorded over 40% more sales than stores without natural lighting. That same study found students were performing 10-20% better on tests in rooms with natural light.

In terms of decorating, sunlight will represent colors differently than most indoor lighting. In the picture below, I put my digital camera into manual mode, and set the white balance on the white background in the sunny picture. I then used the same settings indoors under a warm white light (around 2700° Kelvin)

To test this in your home, select two objects that appear to go well together (for instance a paint sample card that you would consider for your wall color, and for your trim). Hold them first in the middle of the room away from sunlight. Then bring them to a well lit place like a sunlit window.

The two color cards will reflect light differently in the sunlight then the room lighting. The dark may appear much brighter and different hues, while the lighter colored card may have changed only slightly.

What to Do…
I want to take advantage of the sun. I think it makes me feel better to be in the sunlight, and the first thing that I want to do is try to make my room lighting as close to natural sunlight as is possible. From there, I will get a much better idea of the room’s potential.

Without major renovation, I am stuck with my windows, and what natural sunlight I get in my rooms. Instead, I change all of my lighting to full spectrum light bulbs (5,200°k see below) -including my overheads, sconces and lamps.

Full spectrum is often measured on the Kelvin scale. Kelvin was a scientist who in the late 1800’s developed a scale to test color hues at certain temperatures. He took a piece of black carbon, and started to heat it up. At different temperatures he recorded the apparent color hue. 0° Kelvin(k) is pure black while around 5,200°k represents noonday sunlight. On the Kelvin scale, standard incandescent lighting is usually around 2,500 – 3,000° and standard fluorescent lighting is usually around 3,200°.

For more information do a search on Google for full spectrum lighting. I have been seeing more and more full spectrum or daylight bulbs locally in shops as well.

Back when I was in boarding school, laundry was only a matter of stuffing clothes in a washer once a week with a cup full of cheap detergent. Sorting was for sissies, and folding was almost as rare as ironing. I never hung certain clothes to dry to prevent shrinking –I just bought them a size large, and preshrunk them.

Laundry is a much more involved task these days, now that I have a family.  It seems to be an almost continuous task, and is much more complex then I remembered. One wrong step and I’ve shrunk a pair of designer jeans, or tinted everything a lovely shade of pink.

Loads of time is spent on the task, and it is definitely more pleasant when your laundry room is set up well. There are a few things you can do over a weekend to help make the room more cheerful.

Painting
Paint the walls and ceilings a light color in a semi-gloss paint. This will help to brighten up the room which will look good, and make it easier to sort clothes.

Trash can
Make it easy on yourself, and put a dedicated trash can in the laundry room. Cleaning the lint screen or emptying pockets is quick and easy with a bin near at hand.

Lighting
Make sure that lighting in the room is adequate. You may need to have an electrician add or move the light fixtures, or you may be able to just step up the wattage of the bulbs in your fixtures. We were concerned about drawing too much power by adding new fixtures, and so changed our incandescent 60 watt bulbs with fluorescent 100 watt equivalents that use only 23 watts of power.

Shelves
Shelving can be a great clutter control device. A quick fix can be had with a simple laundry organizing shelve system like Contico’s laundry organizer. That’s a quick fix, a better and more permanent solution might be a series of base cabinets with a linoleum countertop. Most coin operated Laundromats have a counter where customers can sort and fold their clothes before carrying them home. A countertop in your home’s laundry room can do the same thing.

Flooring
This is where I tell you about our new rug line. Our laundry rooms require a lot of space to sort clothes prior to the wash, and this is usually accomplished on the floor. We have a line of woven vinyl rugs designed to mimic natural fiber weaves that are well worth a look at.

They are as good looking as they are functional, and make perfect laundry room rugs Have I piqued your interest? Let me list some of the practical attributes:

• They can be installed wall to wall or crafted to any custom size as a rug.
• They are waterproof, easy to clean and slip resistant.
• The rugs are backed with a soft non-skid backing so no further padding is required.
• There are over fifty colorways available to match your new paint work
• They are soft underfoot, but can take abuse. They carry a 5 year commercial use warranty (which is considered heavier use than residential), and are used in retail shops throughout Europe which are very demanding locations because of the high traffic, and constant exposure to dirt from the street.
• The rugs can be cleaned in place with a regular carpet cleaner, or washed with a hose, and hung over a railing to dry.

In a word, these rugs are truly practical for just about any spot in your home.

My daughter is a teenager and we have a lot of fun together. We share a lot of interests, but one area I am not allowed input is fashion.

She’s allowed to comment on mine at will, and has shown a certain fondness for doing so. In fact, she’s hone it down to such a skill that what once took two to three disparaging remarks has now been concentrated into an arched eyebrow accompanied with a slight frown. In this regard, she has become a true artist.

Imagine my surprise the other day when she asked me to look at a purse she found on the web. The bag was the Prada Jute bag with snakeskin trim being sold at Saks Fifth Avenue for $1,890…I know now why she doesn’t ask for my advice.

Jute traditionally has been a working fiber used in ropes, bags, and carpet backing material. In recent years, though, appreciation for the jute fiber has grown, and designers have taken notice.

My daughter fell in love with the jute handbag on the same day that we received a letter from a customer in Northern California that she absolutely loved the new jute rug she had just received. I thought it might be time, therefore, to look into how we market these weaves. 

I searched on Google for the term “jute rugs”. Today we are in position #75. No one who is looking for this type of rug is finding us in the search engines. Instead it seems that people who come to our site looking for another type of rug, stumble across the jute and fall in love.

So let me tell you a little about our Jute rugs. Jute has warm, honey tones that blend well with just about any interior style. We carry four weaves in jute which are woven in India. Our jute rugs are big, chunky weaves which, to me, are visually very interesting. I like big, bold weaves, and I think they make a design statement which you don’t get with a knockoff oriental. They are definitely eye-catching.

One of the areas where we excel is in our border collections, and jute definitely looks its best with an elegant frame. The customer that wrote in today had hers bound in our pigskin suede collection. The picture above is our boardwalk braid weave in a soft cotton twill border. There are over 120 borders available in seven collections of cotton, wool, linen, suede and leather bindings- enough to fit most styles.

Give us a call if you want to know more about this fiber, or its suitability for a particular location in your home.

We are in the process of negotiating to carry Bolon® woven vinyl rugs. We reviewed a number of lines of woven vinyl rugs, and chose Bolon from Bolon AB because we thought they had the best product line, and a very stable company backing that line up.

Bolon AB invented woven vinyl flooring. The company is from Sweden, and is family owned. They have been in the flooring business since 1949, and are recognized as the world leader in woven vinyl flooring.

Aboard Giorgio Armani’s Yacht in Italy. The rug is from our Bolon RIPS collection in the Cocos Plain Seagrass Colorway

Bolon is well known in Europe where it has been used for some time in challenging locations such as retail, hospitality and office applications. Bolon has been used in Armani’s flagship store in Milan as well as on Giorgio Armani’s private Yacht, Cartier’s premier store in Monte Carlo, and Le Meridian Hotel along the French Riviera, and here in America in Trump’s national golf course in Westchester county, New York.

Bolon is designed to look like natural fibers, but can be used in locations where natural fibers just aren’t suitable - like bathrooms, mudrooms, laundry rooms, basements and covered porches.

In researching the product, I came across an HGTV video featuring a homeowner installation of Bolon wall to wall in a bathroom. The video gives a fairly good overview of installing Bolon wall to wall in a small room, and goes over cleaning and maintenance issues as well.

Hopefully we’ll be up and running with the product this coming weekend. In the meantime, please let us know if you have any questions about Bolon or any of our natural fiber rugs.

Most natural fibers will readily absorb whatever is spilled on them. A good sisal rug is an investment, and you should be prepared to do a quick cleanup.

The key to handling an accident on a natural fiber rug is to have the appropriate tools readily available. There are instructions for most stain cleaning on Coastal Style’s website, but that requires having a lot of cleaning agents on hand.

Most stains can be effectively cleaned with just a few items that are easy to keep as a kit.

The kit is easy to set up, and quick to find when you need it. It includes the following:

1. Clean, white terry cloth towels to absorb as much of the material as possible as the first step.
2. Dry carpet cleaning powder to absorb the stain with the minimum amount of liquid. The powder consists of tiny, absorbent sponge-like particles that contain trace amounts of water and cleaning agents that clean by dissolving and trapping greasy, oily dirt.
3. A clean, household brush to scrub the powder into the stain.

I have had good luck with the Host® Brand Dry Carpet Cleaning kit. The kit contains two and a half pounds of their cleaning powder, a little bottle of spray on spot remover, and a carpet brush. All you need to add is some towels and you’re ready for most spills.

I have seen the Host® Kit at local stores for around $20. If you have trouble locating one for yourself, feel free to give us a call. There are other dry carpet cleaning kit brands on the market, for instance Capture® brand. I don’t have any experience with these.

Finally, you might want to review and print out our carpet cleaning suggestions to have on hand as well.

We believe we are the lowest price source of the highest quality brand of sisal rugs in the United States.

We are not the cheapest supplier on the internet. There are many producers of sisal in the marketplace. Most inexpensive rugs are cheaply produced Chinese broadloom that is imported then cut and bound here in the United States. Most of these same weaves can be bought at stores such as Target.

The market for these rugs is driven by price point, and it is difficult for a person searching for a high quality rug to discern the difference.

Photos on the web do not always show the true picture

Pictures on the web can are not as clear and defined as printed images. The file size of a high quality picture takes too long to download, and so photos are compressed. This results in a less clear picture that downloads quickly. Because of this, and other limitations of cameras, it is difficult to visually compare products with 3 dimensional depth and lots of textures.

If you are not familiar with the brands of sisal, then we highly recommend that you GET SAMPLES.

Searching for clues on quality
It is very rare that a good quality product can be made from inferior raw materials, and natural fiber rugs are no exception. Here are a few points to keep in mind when comparing products.

Sisal Grading

Sisal for export has for long been “graded” for both length and color. International grading standards have produced 6 distinct grades for sisal which allows for easier trading of the fibers. Our rugs are produced solely from the highest grade sisal in that country.

Country of Origin

Sisal is grown in various areas of the world including Africa, Brazil and even China. Sisal is derived from the Agave Sisalana plant. We source sisal fibers used on our rugs exclusively from either East Africa or Brazil – widely regarded as the highest quality source, and second highest quality source for sisal in the world.Many rugs sold on the internet source their sisal from China, or mix a small amount of higher quality sisal with Chinese sisal. A report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on Sisal Production and Marketing in China states “Sisal producing enterprises, with only a few exceptions, are all of small scale typified by low production, inferior quality…”. 

Binding Materials and Applications

Natural fiber rugs, like a fine painting, require an elegant frame to reach their true potential. Spend some time here, and make sure you are getting the border that will work best for your situation. A cotton canvas corner is not your only option.Our binding collections are unmatched in quality or selection. We offer collections in cotton, wool, linen, suede, and leather sourced from suppliers in France, Belgium and the United States. Our options include choices in border width, hand-sewn mitered corner options, double bindings, linen piping, and customers own material applications. 

I recently went into a store carrying our rugs. They had recently picked up a competitors product line as well, and it was immediately apparent how poorly made the other company’s rugs were. The weave was thin and flimsy, and the binding was a cheap material. The binding appeared as if it was applied by a very inexperienced worker – there were several puckers and a wavy appearance. It was easy to see the difference in our rugs there in the store, but it would have been harder to discern the differences in a tightly controlled environment like the internet. Do your homework, and don’t be afraid to ask questions.

My daughter Kate and I were home alone Friday night, and decided to watch a movie. We have digital cable, and were able to find “Nancy Drew Detective” circa 1938. Nancy is able to solve this mystery with the help of a mysterious message attached to the leg of a homing pigeon. Nancy wires the International Federation of American Homing Pigeon Fanciers to find the owner of the pigeon. This proves to be one of the keys to solving the puzzle.

Saturday, Kate and I went to the Moffatt-Ladd House in downtown Portsmouth to celebrate the 230th birthday of a Horsechestnut tree. The tree is often called Portsmouth’s Tree of Independence as it was brought back from Philadelphia in 1776 by William Whipple, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and planted to commemorate his trip.

I learned quite a bit about chestnut trees, and we were given an actual chestnut from the tree to plant ourselves. The chestnut, if protected and planted well, should begin producing little chestnuts of its own in eighteen to twenty years.

While there, I noticed that the barn had been altered to house pigeons. After watching Nancy Drew the night before, this was too much coincidence for me. It seems that pigeons were an important source of food back then –much like chicken is today. The barns were altered to provide roosting places for pigeons that were actively raised.

According to a Mother Earth News article, a pair of breeding pigeons can produce 12 -14 chicks in the course of a year. The chicks are generally allowed to grow for about a month. At that point it is considered to be a “Squab” weighing close to a pound, and just about ready for the oven. The Squab, when prepared, is generally one serving.

I counted 128 holes in the barn. Pigeons are monogamous and retain the same mate for life, so there was capacity for 64 breeding pairs. If you consider the low end of squab production to be 12 chicks per year, then these folks ate something like 768 squab per year.

By the way, Homing pigeons are capable of sustained flight for up to thirteen hours at speeds of up to 40 to 45 miles per hour. Philadelphia is about 335 miles “as the pigeon flies” from Portsmouth, and so is an easy 8 hour flight. General William Whipple could have been sent a message via pigeon back to his wife at 9 in the morning, and his wife could have read about the newly declared independence while eating the tired pigeon for dinner that night.

Update:
I was worried that my calculations on the amount of squab served at this house may have been overstated. I therefore contacted an officer of the National Pigeon Association to verify my calculations. His response:

If there is holes for 128 pigeons and there is a space behind each one of the holes there could have been 128 pairs of pigeons using the building. If they open into an open space there could have been even more pairs of pigeons, if they were serving 700 squabs each year this would be easy from 128 pairs of pigeons since they do raise the numbers you mention.

Both birds of a pair would normally be using the same hole.

The pigeon holes did open into an open space in the barn, and so, it seems that I was conservative in my estimate with a potential ceiling in annual squab servings of 1500-1800 birds.

Seavey Island on the Piscataqua river houses one of the largest structures in the seacoast area. The building is actually a former U.S. Naval Prison with some pretty cool history. The prison was commissioned in 1908, and by the time it was decommissioned in 1974 over 86,000 naval inmates had served time there.

The prison is often referred to as “The Castle” by locals for its obvious architectural merits. In fact, a lot of folks who are visiting the area mistake it for a grand hotel. The original structure consisted of a central tower with two wings. It held a maximum of 2300 prisoners in the early 1920s. With the outbreak of World War II more space was required, and an eight story building was erected which was quickly dubbed “the Fortress”.

The prison was also known as “Portsmouth University” by local folk who were evidently disgruntled at the educational and job training opportunities afforded the inmates. In 1917, command of the prison was given to Lt. Commander Thomas Osborne who had a very progressive viewpoint on the treatment and rehabilitation of prisoners. His policies were the forerunners of many of our current procedures in dealing with prisoners which showed an appreciation of the importance of psychological procedures in dealing with prisoners and put an emphasis on rehabilitation back into active service.

The prison is famous for another reason as well – in late 1918, a prison escort guard was assigned to accompany a prisoner from Boston to the Castle for internment. Along the way, the prisoner attempted escape by hitting the guard across the face with his shackled hands. The convict was quickly brought under control, but the guard, Humphrey Bogart, was left with massive facial injuries that left a scar across his lip for the rest of his life and caused the trademark lisp in his speech.

The Castle is currently in mothballs. It is available for long term lease from the Navy Department for development. Hopefully it will retain its character.

At left: USNavy prison guard Humphrey Bogart posing in front of the Castle in 1918.