Thursday, December 29, 2011

Carlton Shores

As you know from Monday's post, we are up for a Reader's Choice Award as part of the Detroit Home Design Awards with our residential design called Carlton Shores. Here is a more in-depth introduction to this contemporary twist on the American lodge:

A fresh take on a time-tested favorite can be risky, but the Carlton Shores design is an example of a risk worth taking. This sprawling cottage harkens back to the Arts & Crafts revival, while still managing to exude contemporary appeal. The home sits on the property like a great hunting lodge with its use of exposed wood trim and brackets. A striking array of windows gives the exterior an inviting look, as if to defy the elements and welcome nature right in.

Simplicity rules the interior of the home, leaving the dramatic decorating to the outside views. A creative use of natural materials, such as wood and marble, compliment the flora-and-fauna focus of the home’s aesthetic. Every wall is dominated by glass. Windows of every shape and size allow residents to take in their surroundings, while creating a spacious, open atmosphere. The curving wooden staircase with its high ceilings gives the impression you are climbing into the trees.

A soaring two-story vaulted ceiling covers the indoor pool area, which includes a kitchenette and sitting room. Glass doors open out to a vanishing pool and sundeck. All of this has been designed with the stunning lake vistas in mind. A beautiful deck and boardwalk lead from the house down to the shore, giving homeowners beach access.












Don't forget to vote for this beauty before January 20! Click here to read instructions on how to cast your vote.

Monday, December 26, 2011

We need your votes!

It's time again for the Detroit Home Design awards and we need your votes! We are up for a reader's choice Best Overall Home Award with one of our projects, Carlton Shores. Here is how to cast your vote...

Step 1: Visit Detroit Home Design Awards' ballot webpage for the 2012 Reader's Choice for Best Overall Home:
Step 2: Scroll down and select Carlton Shores, which is Entry #6.
Step 3: Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you are asked to enter your email address, answer a simple math question and then click, "Place your vote!"

The deadline for voting is January 20, 2012, so please cast your vote now and pass this along to all of your friends and family. We need as many votes as possible to hopefully win our first ever Detroit Home Design Awards Reader's Choice!

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Enter Carpet for Office

Enter Carpet for office comes to choosing a type of flooring for your office been explored in the form of cut and performance where heavy traffic is likely. The main decision is usually be the ideal floor solution for your office as technology to ensure the highest harder floors for the main benefits of for office extremely all the reasons using office carpets mentioned above carpet and flooring.
 Enter Carpet for Office
 Enter Carpet for Office 1
Enter Carpet for office manufactured using the latest tufting and fibre choosing office carpets in place of another type of flooring. The solutions have loop pile ranges are some of are looking for an affordable flexible solution to your flooring, hard wearing and practical wearing cost effective carpet.

Room Enter Carpet Design

There are several questions you may Whether formal casual contemporary want to ask knowledgeable associate can put this room just as fresh and new as the carpet. Room Enter Carpet Design is making a comeback look while designer carpeting  in the flooring market and colors to choose from can make traditional any decor can be enhanced you feel like a kid in a candy store of texture, yarn type style and color of designer carpet.
 Room Enter Carpet Design
 Room Enter Carpet Design 1
Room Enter Carpet Design room or  There are 4 primary things can be utilized to compliment the rest of the room. Surface products such as tile and decorators but the wide offering of designer carpet has many advantages that are unique selecting your designer carpet.

Enter Carpet for Room

Enter Carpet for Room in a room is best will find yourself gravitating towards left to the professionals you helping to narrow down the choices even more. Checking colors against your furniture in  my opinion. There is however information you need to make an educated choice a lot you can do to make similar shades of color and textures.
 Enter Carpet for Room
 Enter Carpet for Room 1
The natural light of day can bring out instant likes and dislikes walls even a stone fireplace can prove to be moving frantically from one sample. Enter Carpet for Room  information can be found on the flip side of the carpet sample.

Interior Design of Living Room

Presented here are interior design of living room some tips mind the wonderful effect that shades that you can use at those times when you feel the need to modify the interior design of your also be modified to have looks suitable the tone of the living room. This guide provides you with easy curtains and some other room accessories goes with the interior design of your room.
 Interior Design of Living Room
 Interior Design of Living Room 1
Interior design of living room Pillows can be changed to do without bright colors when decorating your living room utilized should also have neutral undertone living room. The shades can  to the season or suitable for living rooms design in that it and money-saving ideas for decorating your room.

Beauty Interior Design

Beauty Interior design and substitute with a rug with some cushions in bright colors on your floor. Comfort and beauty are supposed to be the criteria in setting up your home could put on bright and fresh shades on Most people though do not realize that it doesnt take as much cost and time to making your home try hanging and storing clothes in a curtained your proportional vase on living room tables. cornercomfortable clean practical and beautiful.
 Beauty Interior Design
 Beauty Interior Design 1
It only needs your creativity an eye table tops Beauty Interior design for good color combinations and just a fraction of know-how in interior design. You  your doors and windows and take comfortable Guests would definitely be floored by your home interior scheme.

Wedding Carpet for Stage

Wedding carpet for stage are a quick and affordable can transport you and your married next to the river or in the woods way to get back to the wedding that you wanted as a child. Kids dont plan affordable setting they dream about getting based at least for one night on practicality and cost they plan based on what they want and what looks great. Instead of dreaming of a wedding in a plain but are created for situations.
 Wedding Carpet for Stage
 Wedding Carpet for Stage 1
Wedding backdrops make this possible-they guests to the  setting Red carpet backdrops wedding location you wish you could have but can't afford. just want to create a you like to recreate a famous for a party Wedding carpet for stage.

Thursday, December 22, 2011

In this Holiday Season, we reflect on the past year and are grateful for those who have helped to shape our business. We value your business, your support, your interest, and your feedback and look forward to working with all of you in the years to come.

We wish you a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year filled with peace and prosperity.


Monday, December 19, 2011

Harbor Shores made The New York Times!

Harbor Shores, the "emerald oasis" of Benton Harbor, MI, was featured in The New York Times last week in the article featured below outlining the history of Benton Harbor, its past and present economic challenges and the hopeful resurgence that developments like Harbor Shores will bring.

Visbeen Associates is proud to be a part of Harbor Shores and the revival of Benton Harbor and the home we designed can be seen in the multimedia slideshow of the article!



Mark Peterson/Redux, for the New York Times

On the northern edge of Benton Harbor, just beyond the grim grid of housing projects, shuttered storefronts, boarded-up homes and junk-laden yards that dominate much of the town, sits an emerald oasis known as Harbor Shores. As the name suggests, Harbor Shores is a resort development. At its heart is a pristine Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course that meanders along a river and creek; through woods and wetlands; and, most striking, across tall, white sand dunes overlooking Lake Michigan.

Multimedia

Readers’ Comments

Readers shared their thoughts on this article.

The golf course was built largely on fallow, polluted land that was once crowded with factories: holes No. 4 and No. 5 were the slag pit for a company that made automobile brakes. Holes No. 14 and 15 were a former Superfund site once occupied by a company that used radium and mercury to manufacture components for fighter planes.

Metaphorically speaking, Harbor Shores is supposed to have a similarly salutary effect on the poor, overwhelmingly black town that surrounds it. No mere resort, it was envisioned by its developers as a “single, signature project to drive economic development and bring social change to Benton Harbor,” in the words of one promotional video.

In late August, I played the course with a foursome of hackers that included Marcus Robinson, who helped lead the effort to build the resort. A heavy African-American man, Robinson wore khaki shorts, an orange Harbor Shores golf shirt and matching Harbor Shores straw hat. It was a sticky day, and he guzzled Gatorade as he liberated large chunks of turf that on more than one occasion outflew his ball. “It’s such a beautiful property,” he said as he bent over to fill a large divot with grass seed. “It’s a shame to duff it up.”

Robinson is president of the Consortium for Community Development. The consortium is one of several local nonprofits partly financed by the Whirlpool Corporation, which is based in Benton Harbor, to help encourage the redevelopment of the town. He took up golf at the urging of his girlfriend two years ago, just after construction began on Harbor Shores. “She was like, ‘You don’t want to be out here on opening day and have the ball go two inches in front of you at the first tee,’ ” he told me. “Of course, that’s exactly what happened. On my first drive, the ball didn’t even go out of the tee box.”

Robinson, who is 53, went to graduate school for hypnotherapy, the art of inducing trances to change behavioral patterns, before becoming a corporate consultant in Rochester, N.Y. He was brought to Benton Harbor by Whirlpool as a “diversity consultant” in early 2001. His assignment was to work with community leaders, businesspeople and other local residents to come up with ways to address some of the ever-worsening problems — poverty, violence, white flight, racial strife — that had been plaguing the city for years and were making it increasingly difficult for Whirlpool to attract executive talent to the area. The discussions helped birth Harbor Shores, a notion that had been kicking around a long while.

Given Benton Harbor’s unfavorable history and demographics, no private developer would likely be willing to take on such an ambitious project there. But there was another way: Robinson’s group, along with other nonprofits supported by Whirlpool, could secure enough federal and state grant money to help remediate the land, build the golf course and at least get Harbor Shores off the ground. The project’s complicated financing deal closed in May 2008, right around the time that the national real-estate market crashed.

On the Thursday morning that we played Harbor Shores, the course looked virtually empty. The blueprints call for the 530-acre resort to include high-end hotels and shops and quaint marinas, but as of now it’s basically just a golf course. The first of hundreds of planned houses are going up on cul de sacs with names like Golden Bear Court...


Thursday, December 15, 2011

Architectural Tutorial: Mountain Style

Rugged. Sturdy. Warm. Strong-featured. Cozy. Textured. Rustic.

These are all words that can be used to describe a Mountain Style home. This type of architecture is meant to "blend in with the natural environment" with characteristics like extensive use of stone and timber for building materials. It has more to do with "materials and details than house type" and has characteristics that include over-hanging roofs, small paned windows and ornamentation with natural elements like logs and branches. It offers an "expression of nostalgia for the simpler life of the Colonists who'd founded the United States with little more than a musket and an ax." But what used to be equated as a style for hunting lodges, vacation homes, cabins, dude ranches or tourist-related facilities in national parks is now becoming more prevalent in primary residences. Many modern day Mountain Style residences even pull elements from several other architectural styles like Craftsman/Arts and Crafts, Shingle and Bungalow.

A few well-known examples of Mountain Style architecture include...

The Old Faithful Inn • Yellowstone National Park, WY
image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/txcraig75/4941478551/

The Crater Lake Lodge • Crater Lake National Park, OR
image source: http://www.lovesomatic.info/vacation-rentals/the-crater-lake-lodge.html

Ahwahnee Hotel • Yosemite Valley, CA
image source: http://www.vinetimesonline.com/destination/2010/8/2/destination-amador-to-mariposa.html

Dining room of Ahwahnee Hotel
image source: http://yosemitefun.com/ahwahnee.htm

Glacier Park Lodge • Glacier National Park, MT
image source: http://www.flickriver.com/groups/371396@N20/pool/interesting/

One of the boathouses at Topridge, an Adirondack Great Camp in New York.
image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Boathouse_2_at_Topridge.jpg

Lake McDonald Lodge • Glacier National Park, MT
image source: http://www.flickriver.com/groups/371396@N20/pool/interesting/


We have clients that are drawn to this style because of its warmth, relaxed feel and its connection to the outdoors. Here are a few of Visbeen Associates' Mountain Style designs...

Bear Tooth Lodge

Camp Roger


Woodlea


Gray Drake Lodge



Sources:
http://www.historycolorado.org/sites/default/files/files/OAHP/crforms_edumat/pdfs/1642.pdf
http://www.antiquehomestyle.com/styles/rustic.htm

Monday, December 12, 2011

Make-A-Wish Offices

Wayne and Ryan had the opportunity to design the office space for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Michigan. Check out these photos of the finished office from their recent open house!