Avant-Garde Modern Furniture Blog: A Couple Interesting Things

About Alexander Calzadilla

Alexander Calzadilla is a Cuban male originally from Philadelphia, who has happily called Miami his home since moving here at the age of 15. He attended Southwest Sr. High School and Florida International University, ultimately receiving his Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration. While in college, he began working as a paralegal for the Law Offices of Jeffrey E. Reichenbacher, a position he kept for seven years after graduation. He subsequently worked at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius Associates before landing at Costa Nursery. After distinguishing himself with many accomplishments, he was promoted to the position of Director of Specialty Products, which included the orchid, bonsai and lucky bamboo departments. When Alex was first put in charge of the three departments, they ranked near the bottom. By the time he left Costa after seven years, Alex had transformed the floundering departments into unqualified successes, posting record earnings, sales and profitability. In 2008 Alex was named the Costa Employee of the Year. Alex now puts his formidable prowess as a businessman into his newest venture, Avant-Garde Home Furnishings, LLC, serving as Managing Partner.

About Avant-Garde

We offer home furnishings and decor for every area of your home,both inside and out, always striving to bring you the most current design elements being used by today's top designers, at a fraction of their retail cost. Whether you are completely redecorating an area of your home, looking for the perfect accent piece to finish off an existing room, shopping for a unique gift, or simply "window shopping" to get design ideas, Avant-Garde is the place to go for everything modern & contemporary for your home.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

A Couple Interesting Things

A couple interesting things...

Today I am writing about two things that caught my eye while going through various blogs.. One a very interesting chandelier and the other an amazing design on a staircase in the oddest place you could imagine.. Mumbai, India..

Enjoy the pics and post.....

An Interesting Chandelier

Canadian design studio Castor has taken up-cycling to novel and ironic heights with a chandelier made entirely from burnt-out light bulbs. Designers Kei Ng and Brian Richer, who founded Castor in 2006 with the intention of recasting common and discarded materials in unexpected ways, keep things interesting with a range of products that straddle a line somewhere between art and design (and a dollop of theatre)—the obvious goal being to inject some much-needed fun into function. To that end, Castor’s Invisible Chandelier is an illuminating solution, a sumptuous collection of spent, seemingly useless, light bulbs forming a sparkling, light-emitting canopy overhead—every bit avant garde art piece as much as lighting solution. Invisible Chandelier and other lighting models by Castor are now available throughout the web...

A Staircase with a statement in Mumbai India

SDM-Apartment-Mumbai-Arquitectura-Movimiento-Workshop-1

Attention-getting staircases aren’t exactly a novel concept in contemporary architecture, but, by any measure, this ultra refined apartment scheme offers up one of the more astonishing staircase designs in recent memory. Aiming to create vertical continuity between each of the 3 duplex apartments that comprise a 6-story family home in the city of Mumbai, India, the architectural firm of Arquitectura en Movimiento Workshop arrived at an ingenious visual device, both practical and esthetically compelling—with a staircase that’s as much art piece as segue.

Occupying the heart of each duplex’s floor plan, a composition of thick horizontal wood treads, gently bent at both ends, snakes upwards, connecting each floor to the one above, while creating a delineating element in the wide open spaces below. “It was designed as a sculpture in the space with more light and natural ventilation,” say the architects, of their esthetically weighty, but visually poetic design. An awe-inspiring creation, not surprisingly, that they’ve positioned to be visible from most anywhere in the apartment—and who could blame them for that?