Child safety, roller blinds, and New House

Like everyone in the blind industry, we've been shocked each time we've heard of some poor child being hurt or strangled by a roller blind side chain. A few years back no one could have imagined that this could ever have happened, so I'm pleased at how fast our trade has responded, worked with governments, the EU, and safety bodies like RoSPA to create new regulations and new safety standards that ensure blinds will be much safer in the future.

New House has never been fans of blind cord loops (which have caused the blind fatalities), and have always prefered the traditional spring mechanisms with a well designed blind pull.

Yet New House has certainly played it's part, and the information website make it safe was styled by me :

If you have a blind side chain, one of the best ways of making it safe is to fix it to the wall with a cleat or 'cord tidy'. You'll still be able to pull your blind up and down easily enough, but by having no loose cord loops, no toddler can get entangled.

At New House we have designed a number of cord tidy's:

We have added 'Halo', which is a solid carved-from-aluminium, strong and solid device, and made in Gloucestershire.

Yesterday we launched it at the BBSA child safety conference in Coventry and had a great response.

  

Halo is not on our website yet as we're awaiting photos - but it soon will be!

Congratulations to Nathan Filer for winning the Costa Prize, and to Charlotte Farmer (who's handwriting is on the cover)

As a big-time reader I always keep a close eye on the literary awards, and this year are especially happy that Nathan Filer's first novel 'The shock of the Fall' won the Costa Prize.

 

At New House, we are also very pleased as our clever illustrator, Charlotte Farmer wrote the words for the front cover and contributed towards making the book such a powerful read.

Maybe you can judge a book by the cover - especially if Charlotte has had a hand in the design!

The BBC  made a short film about the making of the cover, and Charlotte appears towards the end. Please click on the image  to watch....

Paris, New Year and le Musee du quai Branly

When my good old French friends invited me for New Year, there could only be one answer. So on New Year's Eve I found myself walking along the Seine with my old chum Thierry, who runs an exceptionally innovative engineering business near Limoges.

I've always loved African indigenous art. Once called 'primitive art' as it's materials are basic, yet Picasso was a big collector and it had a huge influence on him, as well as European modernism and design worldwide. Because of this we went to the Musee du qui Branly which has one of the Worlds greatest collections of ethnological art.

Located just a few 100m from the Eiffel Tower, the site was originally selected for one of Francois Mitterand's grand projects. However it was Jacques Chirac who took an interest in the project, and the museum opened in 2006.

Musee du quai Branly divide their collections into four geographic regions, Asia, Oceania, Americas and Africa and I took a few photos in each :

The last looked like an effigy of Homer Simpson.

Every great city needs an iconic building, and Paris has the greatest of them all, the Eiffel Tower. It seems strange today that people hated it when first built and wanted it demolished. It only stands because the money ran out after the 1889 Paris World Fair, yet no visitor like me can avoid taking pictures. Here are a few of mine :

 

Phew, just finished another article, this time on trends

It's well past my bed time, but thats normal when there's an article to write and the deadline was yesterday.

As New House is pretty up-to-date on all things colour and trend wise, I often get asked to write these sort of articles. To illustrate it I've also been playing about with images that show how the designs in our roller collection didn't just happen by magic (although we do use quite a bit of that), but fit into the wider 2014/15 trends. these are a few of my images :

Brights :  in 2014 slightly artificial brights are key colours. Bubblegum pink, turquoise, tangy orange and glowing yellow are all strong colours in the NH range.

 

Craft Colours :  Temby braid by Laura Fletcher and our hessian fabric with pewter starfish pull.

 

Slate tones :  Deco braid, again by Laura (with a little colour influence from Melanie Darwin if I remember rightly), and Tea & Coffee roller print by Charlotte Farmer.   

There's more I could add, but I did say it's past my bed time.....

*    By the way, the central image comes from the Heimtex 2014 Trend book. They allow the press to download and use them for publication and they will appear in my article with credits. So I guess it's ok to use them here too.   

Go to Glasgow

I've often been to the outskirts of Glasgow, but never gone into the City Centre before - what a mistake eh?

I found Glasgow more fun, vibrant and amazing than I ever imagined. Everyone was friendly and I enjoyed every minute. I loved St. Georges Square with it's traditional fairground :

Unfortunately I was too full from breakfast to eat anything in the fantastic Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed Willow Tearoom on Sauchiehall Street, but next time I will :

I ended up at the Kelvingrove Museum that's famous for it's Impressionist and Glasgow Boys collections amongst many other things.

 

I loved Lowry's seascape  as it is so different to his other busy matchstick-people paintings but uses the same base colours.

 

The Kelvingrove has great sculptures too :

 

My favourite was a dog made from wellington boots that didn't just capture how doggy a dog is, but did so in the style of one of those African naïve sculptures that influenced Picasso so much :

The Spitfire strafing visitors was pretty good too :



The girls took some great images the other week....

Experimenting with the camera on their ipad, Melanie and Charlotte took some good images for our website on their ipad the other week.

The advantage is that they could see instantly what they'd taken, while my little Panasonic has a tiny scratched screen and I never know if my pic is any good or not until it's loaded onto a bigger screen. Mind you, they take a million times better pictures than me anyway :

These are just a few images, and M & C's photo session with their ipad will fuel our website for a little while to come. Maybe it's time I got an ipad too??