Kohler Reve Bathroom Furniture Collection
24 November 2008
“Simple Wonders”
One of my favorite childhood memories is a book I read in the third grade, I believe, a social studies book geared for children. The premise was an elderly couple—just a few years younger than I am now!—who retired and too
k a cruise around the world, thereby learning about, and teaching the reader, about other peoples and lands. From that day to this I have viewed books as ships that could take me to any place and time, which is, I know, an analogy that is often used, but because I read that book at such an early age, I’ve always felt I was the first to think of it. I mention that, though, because the Internet, as it turns out, is—well, I was going to say a ship, but if it is, it’s a spaceship!
I have long since lost track of my many trips to Europe, but all it’s cost me is a little electricity, and the wear and tear on an aging tochas. But I bring that up because it is now possible to get the cutting edge European designs that have become s
uch a staple on these pages without leaving this country—or this study, for that matter, because face it, a few clicks of the mouse, and you can order anything you want. But I digress.
I’ll tell you, I’ve written about so many innovative European designs that I’m starting to get a complex. “Only in America” is quickly becoming replaced by “Over there, over there.” Although it’s probably more a case of Simple Simon meets Einstein. Did he design things?
But to get to the subject of this blog, Kohler promotes themselves as “the bold look of Kohler,” which sounds like hyperbole until you look at their designs, and then you find yourself marveling at their modesty! Kohler’s new Reve Bathroom Furniture collection is very much a case in point. This collection has a wonderful simplicity of line and cleanness about it that I find myself particularly liking. Maybe that’s just a manifestation of my own frustration with the clu
tter that one seems to accumulate in decades of marriage (32 years and counting), but the idea of something with clean lines just always seems to get my heart to pumping. And at my age that’s a good thing!
But to return to Kohler’s Reve Bathroom Furniture collection, I find myself particularly drawn to the blocks of right and angled lines which have been fashioned into wondrously simple silhouettes—if wondrously simple does not seem like too much a contradiction in terms. We live in amazing times in which everything is moving at the speed of light, which is good and bad at times. Both the technology that makes this website possible and a fair number of the tools I now use in my shop did not exist when I first learned how to type. But, on the other hand, I can no longer watch an HGTV show these days with their flash cuts and speeded up film for more than a half hour without getting a headache. In that context—and in our world—the simple really is a wonder.
Joseph
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