Knowing More about Binary Option

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The Binary Options trader has several options to exchange the binary option. First, the trader can do direct binary options trading in the market place and second, a trader can do the exchange by entering an affiliate program for the binary option. However, each method has its own strengths and weaknesses and trader should be able to identify those things for the sake of their own advantages. To learn more about the Binary Options, just go to 301binaryoptions6.com.

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Best Replacement for Regular Cigarette

Both women and man can get the fatal risks by smoking cigarette. This can be worse for women as the effect will be clearly seen when they reach 40s. It also can be worse when they do not do regular exercising. So, this is good to know that you really can find some replacements to be free from regular cigarette. As we know that there are so many dangerous diseases that you can get by consuming regular cigarette for so long. You might want to try another thing such as the e cigarette to reduce your regular cigarette consumption. This is a really good thing for you to check out the information about the e cig which can be a perfect replacement so that you still can smoke but in healthier way.

To overcome your confusion, you can just check out the Firelight-fusion.com. This website is a good site that you really can check to get the e cigarette information which you will love to have. This thing is absolutely a really good idea because you still can smoke without getting serious health problem from the tar and nicotine. You need to know that this product doesn’t contain tar ad also nicotine. It also doesn’t cause the burnt tobacco. So, you will not put other’s health into a dangerous situation because it will not cause burnt tobacco. This is also good for you to check out the Smokersutopia.com to find out the e cigarette reviews. This will guide you to know better about this e cig and sure you will simply find out why people like to have it.

So, just simply check out this website as soon as you need the best replacement for the cigarette. This is going to give you the very best solution and you will soon get what you really need.

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The 30-Minute Interview : The 30-Minute Interview: Albert Rabil III

Last fall, Kayne Anderson sold 19 such properties to American Campus Communities in a deal valued at $862.8 million.

 

Interview conducted and condensed by

VIVIAN MARINO

Q. Is there an Albert Rabil IV?

A. I have two sons. There is not.

My parents weren’t very creative: they named me after my father and my sister after my mother.

Q. So why the focus on student housing?

A. We saw a huge opportunity — it’s a very niche space, not a lot of competition. One of the things Kayne looks for generally is specialized niche spaces where you could take knowledge and capital and create an arbitrage, and we have felt that that has existed in student housing for the last 10 years and continues to exist today.

Q. Do you own any other property types?

A. We have done multifamily in the downturn of ’08 and ’09 and we did some self-storage, but now we’re just focused exclusively on student housing.

Q. How large is your housing portfolio right now?

A. We just sold 13,000 beds, so we own about 13,000 beds now.

We previously owned 45 properties, and now we own approximately 20. They’re across the country, primarily near a variety of public universities.

Q. What are you doing with the proceeds from that sale to American Campus Communities?

A. We sent it back to our fund investors.

Q. Where is your biggest presence?

A. It’s hard for me to figure out with what we just sold, but we typically won’t own more than two to three properties in a market.

We’re about to build a property at the University of Minnesota and at the University of Oregon, and we’re just finishing building a property at the University of Indiana in Bloomington. We’ll own anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 beds at a specific university.

We have 40 target markets that we’re focusing on; there are two of those markets in New York.

Q. How do you choose your sites?

A. One of the things we look for are universities that are just housing their freshmen and they only ever want to house their freshmen. With financial constraints, you don’t have a lot of public universities that have the capacity or desire to house additional students. It’s not a moneymaker for them.

Q. Are there plans to move into New York City?

A. We would love to have something in New York. We are definitely morphing toward the more urban markets, because we want “very high barrier to entry” markets, and New York is about as high as you get. The trick is being able to build, buy or rehab something that’s affordable.

We’re looking at a deal right now in New York City, on the Lower East Side. It’s a building that’s been vacant for 11 years — it was a former school building. We are now in negotiations.

This property is zoned such that you would have to master-lease the housing to two universities. You couldn’t lease directly to students.

Q. How many projects are you working on right now?

A. We probably have 35 properties on our pipeline right now — in various stages of probability. There are things that are under contract that we’re developing, there are things that have a high probability of developing.

By the end of this year we expect to invest about $300 million in equity, which translates to about $1 billion in total acquisitions. So we’d be adding probably this year 12,000 more beds, which would be about doubling the size of our existing portfolio. We expect by the end of the year to be back exactly where we were presale in terms of beds.

Q. What’s your current occupancy portfoliowide?

A. About 97 percent.

Q. And your rental rates?

A. Our typical rental rates are $650 to $800 per bed per month. But it has been as high as $2,000 per bed per month, in California. We’ll typically have one-, two- and four-bedroom units. And every bedroom will have its own bathroom.

It’s all 12-month leases, all parentally guaranteed.

Q. Those prices seem to suggest higher-end properties?

A. We offer high-end amenities and very high security. One thing we can say for sure: students when they leave school, are going for housing downgrade if they lived in our units.

Q. Is it expensive maintaining student housing?

A. It’s a very operationally intensive business.

People think you have a lot of capital expenditure and people think of “Animal House.” We have very little in the way of deferred or recurring maintenance or expenses, because we do a lot of vetting of our tenants on the front end and we have very strong security measures in place.

You have the parents co-signing and you have kids living in a very high end. We make sure the kids are aware of what the rules are.

Q. I heard you’re a pretty good golfer.

A. I enjoy playing golf, and I play in a lot of little tournaments. My handicap is zero. And 65 is the best I’ve ever shot.

From a country club perspective, I’m a very good golfer. On a more serious level, no.

Golf is a very humbling sport.

 

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Property Values: Real Estate for $2.5 Million

WHAT: A former plantation, with a five-bedroom main house, two guesthouses and outbuildings

HOW MUCH: $2,500,000

SIZE: 5,138 square feet (in the main house)

PRICE PER SQUARE FOOT: $486.57

SETTING: Bracketed by a country road on one side and the Staunton River on the other, this 825-acre property is near the edge of Brookneal, a rural town of about 1,100 residents in south-central Virginia, an hour from Lynchburg. Neighbors are large-lot country estates and agricultural land. The house next door, for example, is on more than 1,000 acres; nearby properties produce cheese and wine. In the river, one can fish, swim, kayak and canoe. Basic shopping can be done in Brookneal; Lynchburg, a city of over 75,000, is the area’s commercial center. Charlottesville and Richmond, the state’s capitol, are two hours away.

INDOORS: The oldest part of the two-story main house was built in the late 18th century, while its front section, including a majestic horseshoe staircase in the entry hall, was added in the mid-19th century. The interior details are original, including heart-pine floors, brick fireplaces and mantles, and molding. The kitchen and bathrooms were last updated in the 1970s. Nearly all downstairs common areas have fireplaces, including the formal dining room, the living room, the family room, the study and the sun porch. The dining room has a detailed ceiling medallion. One bedroom is in an attached structure with arched stained-glass windows, used in the past as a schoolhouse and a church. The other bedrooms are upstairs. The master has an en-suite bathroom.

Several outbuildings dot the land, including the original pump house and smokehouse, now both used for storage. One of the two guesthouses was built by the current owners; the other is in what was the summer kitchen, with a large fireplace once used for cooking. Another house, used as a rental, is elsewhere on the property.

OUTDOOR SPACE: 360 acres of the property are cleared, while the rest is wooded, with mixed hardwoods and pine trees. An orchard near the main house has cherry and fig trees; there are also strawberry beds and a grape arbor.

TAXES: $7,855

CONTACT: Frank Hardy, Frank Hardy Realtors, (434) 296-0134; frankhardyinc.com

CHERRY HILLS VILLAGE, COLO.

WHAT: A four-bedroom midcentury modern with four bathrooms, and a guesthouse

HOW MUCH: $2,500,000

SIZE: 4,949 square feet in the main house and approximately 1,000 square feet in the guesthouse

PRICE PER SQUARE FOOT: $420.24

SETTING: This house is in Cherry Hills Village, a residential community 12 miles from downtown Denver. The village developed during the later part of the 19th century. Some of its oldest houses, including Tudors from the 1930s and 1940s, stand next to large, newer single-family houses on large lots. Schools are a big draw to Cherry Creek Village: in 2012, 15 received awards for academic excellence from the state. (The private Kent Denver School, a highly regarded 6-12 program, is nearby.) This house abuts a popular biking-and-pedestrian path running alongside the High Line Canal, a trail cutting through several suburbs with small pocket parks along the way.

INDOORS: The house, a single-level midcentury modern with views of Mount Evans, was designed by Steele Wotkyns and built in 1962. Primarily cinder block, it has tongue-in-groove wood-beam ceilings and walls of windows facing old-growth cottonwoods and pasture. The foyer has polished flagstone floors, a small Moorish-style pool under skylights and a live bougainvillea tree. The long living room has floor-to-ceiling windows and a six-foot-wide fireplace; according to the listing agent, the original owner had jokingly requested something “big enough to lie down in.” The galley kitchen has sliding glass doors and an 180-degree view facing west. A butler’s pantry (with additional cooktop) and a wet bar are off the kitchen, as is a dining nook added in the 1970s.

Three bedrooms form a wing of the house. One, used as an office, faces a pebbled garden with a crab apple tree. This wing includes a recreation room and a family room with a built-in desk and shelves. The master suite, off the foyer, has southern exposure, a wood-burning fireplace, a sitting area and sliding-glass doors opening to the pool. The guesthouse has an office with a gas fireplace and built-in bench seats; its bedroom has a wood-burning fireplace.

 

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At Home With Peter McGough: To Peter McGough, Living in an Earlier Era Is Art

At a time when appropriation was one of the many art strategies of the moment, David McDermott and Peter McGough took that practice (among others) to its extreme. “Time maps,” they called their work, which tackled themes like sexuality, bigotry and the AIDS crisis.

Even their habitats were in the past tense, with 19th-century furniture and wallpaper, illuminated by candles and often without heat or plumbing. (Mr. McDermott, the more dogmatic of the two, had a habit of ripping out all the modern appliances, even if the apartment was a rental, to the extreme dismay of many a landlord.) But as specific as their lifestyle was, Mr. McDermott and Mr. McGough fit right into their neighborhood, the polymorphous cultural soup that was the East Village art scene in the early 1980s.

Glenn O’Brien cast Mr. McGough as an extra in his New Wave movie, “Downtown 81,” with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Fab Five Freddy was a friend. They worked in studios discarded by Julian Schnabel. They fought over an apartment with Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. Their work was collected in the 1987 Whitney Biennial.

Nearly three decades later, Mr. McDermott, 61, and Mr. McGough, 54 — otherwise known as McDermott McGough, to give them their art world tag — are still collaborating and performing, which is another way of describing their period-perfect lifestyle, although they are now on opposite sides of the Atlantic. They’ve racked up two more Biennials. They have moved from painting to photography and film, and back again. “Suspicious of Rooms Without Music or Atmosphere,” a series of paintings of scenes from old movies in which the actress is caught in a moment of extreme emotion, biting her knuckles, eyes welling with tears or wide with fear, is at Cheim Read through Feb. 23. The show’s title, from a Rod McKuen poem, is an appropriate manifesto for what is still the two men’s worldview.

Mr. McDermott has been living in Ireland since the 1990s (until recently in a highly atmospheric house in Dublin made even more so by his removal of its kitchen appliances). But Mr. McGough is here in New York, in a one-bedroom apartment in a 1930s rental building in the West Village. He has fitted it out with 1930s furniture — “in the Continental style,” as he put it — much of it Italian Moderne and taken from a house in Milan. There’s a foot-high vintage radio, two telephones from the 1930s and a cubist lamp with an elaborate handmade shade. The light switches have been replaced with vintage plates; the contemporary kitchen is hidden by a curtain.

“Of course, McDermott wanted me to rip it out,” Mr. McGough said of his kitchen. “It’s my first grown-up apartment in a long time. I spent a lot of money decorating it” — easily $75,000, he estimated. “It’s expensive to live in the past.”

And yet, a 1930s building? That’s awfully modern, given the appetites of Messrs. McDermott and McGough. Has Mr. McGough lapsed?

“I didn’t lapse,” he told a visitor the other day. “I just moved to a different period.”

On that recent morning, Mr. McGough was reflecting on a life in houses, which also happens to be a story of lost houses.

“And we lost a lot of houses,” he said. “I think of that line from ‘The Maltese Falcon.’ ‘This is the stuff dreams are made of.’ That’s what we do. We were never just old-timey twee queens sitting with teacups, although we were doing that, too. With McDermott, you had to enter the past, you had to walk into another dimension. When he was a teenager, he made a conscious decision not to live in the present. For him, it wasn’t decorating, it was an installation and an immersion. Who’s to say, if you were sitting in our 18th-century house, on our furniture, that you hadn’t been transported to the 18th century?”

 

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Inviting the Garden In for the Winter

ROXBURY, CONN. — Tovah Martin can’t live without plants, so in the winter, she makes her garden indoors. Even when it falls to zero outside, as it did last week, there is a forest of pale green ornamental kale flowering in the east window.

And the fern in her bedroom window upstairs has vigorous green fronds, loaded with spores. Meet Polypodium formosanum, the grub fern.

“Look at its caterpillar feet,” she said, parting the fronds to reveal the fat blue-green rhizomes at the base of the fern. “That’s how it creeps along the ground.”

Ms. Martin, 59, has devoted her life to houseplants — not to mention the hundreds of hardy ones outside, now in deep freeze on this little seven-acre remnant of a dairy farm. The author of a dozen books, including “The New Terrarium,” published in 2009, and her most recent, “The Unexpected Houseplant,” out last year, Ms. Martin spent 25 years tending the citrus, herbs, scented geraniums, begonias and a mind-boggling jungle of other tender plants crammed into Logee’s Greenhouses, in Danielson, Conn. The renowned growers hark back to 1900, when William G. Logee fell in love with a Ponderosa lemon tree that still grows in one of the glass houses. (Plant people go in and out of this place like squirrels in an oak woods; if you can’t find it at Logee’s, why bother to grow it?)

She brought a few favorites with her when she left in 1995, but the rest of her plants soon found their way here, like strays to a good home. Once, Ms. Martin tried to count how many plants were growing in her house. “I gave up at 200,” she said.

Most of them go out in the summer and come back in before frost. Others, like Asplenium nidus, a bird’s nest fern that thrives with a plain old philodendron (one of those plants nobody can kill) inside a terrarium made from a giant apothecary jar, are permanent indoor residents.

What strikes the eye right away is that these are not just single potted plants. Each one is flourishing inside something interesting: here, an industrial metal container; there, an ancient-looking clay pot with an unusual shape or patina; maybe some old trunk serving as an indoor window box; and even a kitchen colander (great drainage!) for succulents.

And they are grouped, with an eye for complementary shapes and textures, leaf patterns and colors, as well as their need for light. That flowering kale, for instance, whose trunks have taken on the look of palm trees, is illuminated to near transparency in that east window.

“White Peacock is the variety,” she said. “I didn’t want to let it go, so I potted it up and brought it inside. Then I watched it flower, and now I’m addicted to it.”

These kale plants march in a line, in a weathered wooden window box. They share the window with a jasmine, its tendrils curving toward the light, higher up, thanks to its position on a tall Arts and Crafts plant stand in the corner of the living room.

The room looked too dark for a jasmine to bloom. (West, not east, is the best exposure for houseplants in winter.) But this jasmine was a vigorous dark green and full of buds.

“It’s got a lot of windup time,” Ms. Martin said. “It probably will bloom in March.”

So how come my jasmine plants never bloom, before they shrivel up and die, inside the house?

The trick, she says, is to leave the plants outside through the fall, as long as possible. They will form their buds in the cool weather; bring them inside just before frost.

Granted, Ms. Martin and her plants have an advantage. They live in a converted barn connected to a 1790s cobbler shop by a glass corridor — the greenhouse, where a hundred or so potted plants bask in the full light, on a three-tiered bench painted sky blue.

The little 18th-century dairy barn was thankfully not mangled by its former owners, who turned the east side into a great room that has 30-foot ceilings and its original two-foot-wide chestnut floor boards. They also opened up the east wall with large paned windows that now look out over Ms. Martin’s extensive summer gardens (which include a shed and pasture for her goats, Flora and Beatty). But the west side of the barn, which is now the kitchen, retains its original cow-eye-level windows.

They are just the right height for Ms. Martin. “I’m the only one who doesn’t have to lean over to look out,” she said. “I’m under five feet.” (Exactly how tall she is, she won’t say.)

But the most remarkable thing about this house is the bone-chilling temperature.

 

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On Location | Chicago: Inventive Renter Expands on Personal Space in Chicago – On Location

“It’s all about atmosphere,” he explained. “There’s nothing better than a house full of interesting people.”

That’s why Mr. Hopkins chooses to spend his money on entertaining and decorating rather than rent. The 32-year-old interior designer has come up with an unconventional arrangement to make that possible: He sublets both of his one-bedroom apartments.

Where does he sleep? In the closet.

To be fair, it’s a 36-square-foot coat closet, with (barely) enough space for a twin bed. And Mr. Hopkins has covered the walls and ceilings in vintage paneling he found on Craigslist and has lacquered a dark gray. The effect is that of a warm, dark cocoon.

Some might find it claustrophobic, but as far as Mr. Hopkins is concerned, the smaller the space, the better. “If the ceiling were a couple of feet lower, I’d be happier,” he said. “I prefer a sort of enclosed feeling of security at night.”

Mr. Hopkins, who works for Interior Elements, a Chicago firm that does high-end residential design, has taken a similarly bespoke approach to decorating the rest of the living space, which includes not just the two apartments, but part of the basement in this courtyard building halfway between Wrigley Field and the Boystown district.

Since he rented the first apartment in 2007, Mr. Hopkins said, he has spent thousands of dollars on decorating and renovations, most recently installing a 1,200-pound commercial range in one kitchen, which required constructing a wall in the basement to support the extra weight. On paint and wall coverings alone, Mr. Hopkins estimated, he has spent more than $11,000 so far. “It’s a compulsion,” he said. (By comparison, his monthly rental costs come to about $2,100.)

Aaron Brown, 29, who works for a regional coffee chain and moved into one of the apartments in 2009, said that when it comes to the design of the common areas, Mr. Hopkins calls the shots. “There’s definitely a relinquishing of control,” Mr. Brown said. “When I pay my portion of the rent, I’m really paying for my room. That’s where I’m allowed free rein.”

But even there, Mr. Hopkins’s taste usually prevails. When William Sullivan Cooper, 23, a personal stylist for J. Crew who moved into the other apartment early last year, told Mr. Hopkins he needed a side table, Mr. Hopkins went down into what Mr. Cooper calls “his hoarder’s storage room” and returned with an end table, a lamp and a piece of artwork.

“Since I’ve lived there, we’ve had new wall colors, new wallpaper, new carpets and new artwork,” Mr. Cooper said. “It’s a continual rotation.”

How does the landlord feel about this?

Jim Bishop, the administrative operations manager at Krenger Company, which owns and manages the building, described Mr. Hopkins as a one-of-a-kind tenant. “The quality of the materials that he has used is far above what we would do on a normal basis,” Mr. Bishop said. “If we were to lease those apartments as they are now, the monthly rent would be much higher.”

Mr. Hopkins has his own ideas about that. “If I were to move, I would take the kitchens with me, leaving the building with a freshly drywalled white box,” he said. “The paint falls into the category of personal indulgence.”

 

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Shopping With Richard Blais: Richard Blais’s Tips on Cutting Boards — Shopping With

Mr. Blais, who lives in Atlanta, is the chef and owner of the Spence and HD1 there, as well as the Flip Burger Boutiques in Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala., and he has fairly strong opinions about chopping blocks in general. As kitchen tools, he said, they are “invaluable and often neglected,” because many people spend money on showcase items like knives instead.

“You date knives, but marry cutting boards,” he quipped recently while in Manhattan on a whirlwind shopping expedition for the latter.

Professionally, Mr. Blais prefers heavy wooden boards because “they don’t slide around,” he said.

“And I like the way knives feel on them: I cut cleaner and chop better,” he said. For seafood, however, he uses rubber boards by Asahi (available at Korin in TriBeCa) because “fish do have the odor of the sea,” he said. “So I think something a little less porous is better.”

Mr. Blais found a number of boards he thought home chefs would like, for both cutting and serving. The Newton Prep Master by John Boos, at Bowery Kitchen Supplies in Chelsea Market, was a winner for its hefty weight, juice groove and built-in pan to capture juices.

“This makes it easy to save the juices that run off when you’re carving your roast chicken or prime rib,” he said. “Refrigerate them and use them the next day to sauté your asparagus.”

He also liked Joseph Joseph’s colored Cut Carve boards, because “a lot of larger kitchens use colored cutting boards for specific food items: red is for red meat, yellow is for poultry, green is for produce and blue is for seafood.

“For the health inspector inside everyone, or someone worried about cross-contamination, it’s a good way to stay clean and sanitized,” he said.

Online, he picked out slabs by Luke Bartels, a San Francisco-area furniture maker.

“I like the idea of this craftsman or artist making furniture, and then making cutting boards probably left over from a piece he made,” Mr. Blais said. “This doesn’t really look like a board, it could be a sculpture hanging in your kitchen.”

The same could be said of boards made in the shape of American states by AHeirloom, a Brooklyn company.

“Idaho? Nebraska? Great shapes to cut on,” he said. “California, Florida? You have to plate on those.” RIMA SUQI

 

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Market Ready: Adding Value With a Washer and Dryer

A. Installing a washer and dryer “certainly adds value,” said Adrian Noriega, an associate broker with the New York real estate company Core. “You could increase the asking price up to 5 percent.”

Particularly in Manhattan, where apartments with laundry equipment can be hard to come by, he said, “a washer and dryer are considered a premium.”

During apartment showings, buyers often ask questions about laundry facilities. And “if the apartment doesn’t have them already,” he noted, “they ask if they’re allowed.”

In many older buildings, they aren’t. “Their pipes just wouldn’t be able to stand it,” Mr. Noriega said. “You have to check with the managing agent first.”

If you want to add a washer and dryer to your unit, and the building will allow it, there are a number of issues you’ll need to consider. First, said Matthew Miller, director of StudioLAB Design in New York, is where to put them. “The washer needs to be located next to plumbing,” he said, so it can be tied into existing water and drain lines. In most cases, that means it needs to be near a kitchen or bathroom.

And in apartment buildings, he added, it’s a good idea to install a pan for the washer to sit in, in case the unit ever leaks, so you don’t flood the neighbors below. In addition, he suggested putting in an automatic water shut-off valve. “It hooks up to the hot and cold water and has a sensor that sits on the bottom of the pan,” he said. “If any water touches it, it turns the valves off automatically.”

The dryer has its own set of requirements. “You might not have enough power to run an electric dryer,” Mr. Miller said, but if you have a gas line nearby, you could consider getting a gas-powered unit. Either way, most dryers need to be vented, either “out of a window or through an existing vent.”

If there is no reasonable way to vent the dryer, however, you could try a ventless condensation model from a company like Miele or Bosch, Mr. Miller said. But “it’s not going to give you as good of a dry,” he warned.

Visually, he said, he tries to conceal the washer and dryer whenever possible, because “they’re utilitarian items that no one really wants to be looking at.” In one apartment, he put a stacked washer and dryer behind a frameless floor-to-ceiling door that disappeared into the wall when closed. In another, he tucked the units side by side beneath the kitchen counter, behind cabinet doors.

Sometimes, he gets even more creative. “I did one project in the East Village where the only place to put a washer and dryer was in the guest bathroom,” he said. “We created a 300-pound tiled door to hide it. You’d never know it was there because it looks like the rest of the bathroom.”

Questions about repairs or redecorating in preparation for putting a home on the market may be sent to marketready@nytimes.com. Unpublished questions cannot be answered individually.

 

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Currents | Q&A: Douglas Coupland on His Furniture Collection

“These are pieces that will unleash creativity, dopamine, high style and timelessness into their user’s world,” Mr. Coupland noted in a news release about the collection, which is geared to those with literary sensibilities and includes bookshelves, lamps, a chair and two writing desks or, as he prefers to call them, escritoires.

Phoning from his hometown, Vancouver, British Columbia, he offered additional thoughts to a reporter.

Q. In preparing this interview, I realized it would take days to brush up on your superhuman output, so I just read your Twitter feed. Do you mind if I base my questions on that?

A. Sure, give it a try.

Q. O.K., you tweeted you were away for three weeks. Where have you been?

A. I was staying with my cousin down in the Bahamas.

Q. You also put out a call for people in Vancouver who do high-end 3-D printing. May I ask why?

A. I’m doing a model for a client. There’s this tree that’s about 800 years old that got hit by lightning at the turn of the 19th century: the famous hollow tree in Vancouver. Now it’s on its last legs. I’m doing a mirror image of it to scale on the other edge of the city, sort of as a mirror of the past and the future.

Q. You didn’t tweet about your furniture, but it’s the main reason we’re talking. Whom did you design it for?

A. It’s for me. I use an escritoire every day of my life and absolutely love it. You close the lid; it looks great. The bookshelves are the ones I use all over the house. They come in three sizes: paperback, hardcover and oversized.

Q. The bookshelves in the pictures look metallic. What are they made of?

A. Lacquered plywood: simple, good materials. Wait, someone with the phone number 666 is trying to call me.

Q. Shouldn’t you get that?

A. No! The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them. But if you do it intelligently, they’re flexible, they’re portable, but they’re not Ikea-like. Is that Satan calling me again?

It is. I’m not answering.

Q. Let’s talk about the lamps. The aesthetic seems different from your other pieces.

A. It is and it isn’t. I was in Kyoto at the Ryoan-ji temple five years ago; it was a masterpiece of proportion. The pieces you see, collectively — in my mind, at least — evoke walking through rooms of the temple, with their sliding doors and shoji. They’re sort of visually and poetically connected in my mind.

Q. It all feels very 20th-century to me. This is furniture to read and write by, preferably in longhand. Was that part of the intention?

A. You can have holes drilled in the back of the desk for computer cords.

Q. But the desk has compartments for things like, what? Paper clips?

A. I usually put in laptop cords or coffee cups. Is it explicitly tech-friendly? People are still going to be writing longhand in a thousand years. That’s a weird product classification: writing-slash-longhand.

Q. Who’s manufacturing the pieces?

A. They’re being made locally in British Columbia, in a place called Roberts Creek. They’re made by hand, and the finishes are beautiful. When you open the desk up, it’s a leather surface you’re writing on, which matches the leather from the seating.

Q. I don’t mean to flog a dead horse, but now you’re going on about leather writing surfaces.

A. I’m a sucker for the big, shiny, high-tech thing like everyone else. But when it boils down to something you want to have infinitely, that’s where you’re designing a long-term relationship.

Q. Two days ago, you tweeted that people treat you differently when you have a small, vertical gash in the middle of your forehead. What happened?

A. Windsurfing wound. It’s like this line that goes right down: “Hi, do you want to join my cult?” People look at it and go, “Ahhhhh!” It really is unnerving. JULIE LASKY

 

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