Love this eco-friendly bedding from Unison. Curl up in one of their organic blankets and celebrate Earth Day all year long! Be sure to check out their pillows and table linens as well.

Happy Earth Day!

More about Unison:
Unison was formed by Robert Segal + Alicia Rosauer with the vision that modern design can be a livable, breathable, everyday part of life. After four years of designingliving in Finland, they decided to bring their design sensibilities back to America. Robert and Alicia combine their extensive background of textile design and photography to creaand te products that offer a minimalist style with emphasis on color and innovative print design.

Bedding and Linens from Unison available from Design Public: $24 - $220

At our house we are counting down the days until our second child is born. While we have a lot of great gear from our first, there are still some things we would like to pick up. One of the things we never got around to getting on round one was a good mobile. Elsewares has some great wooden mobiles like the two from Petit Collage shown above. They are laser-cut from sustainably harvested bamboo plywood and are priced at around $68. My wife is very fond of the Birds of a Feather mobile by IGE shown below. They are also laser cut, but this time out of walnut. While the price of the IGE mobiles is about the same ($65) the bonus is that you get to pop out the pieces yourself and save the sheet for stencils or whatever else you can think up. In the end I suspect that we will probably go the DIY route, although it will be hard to make something as cute as these two.

My wife is an amazing cook, and I almost always have good homemade food to take to work for lunch. I have been looking for some decent glass tupperware for a while now for a couple of reasons. First I worry about what sort of plastic grossness is being leached into my food every time I microwave it, and second I am getting tired of tupperware stained by tomato sauce. The big problem is that many of the glass food containers don't have a tight seal, which would lead to a disaster in my bag. These Glasslock food containers from organize.com look like they might just do the trick. They have a silicone seal and snap locks to keep things were they belong, but are mostly made of glass.

Has anyone tried these? What do you put you leftovers in?

Available from Organize.com $6 - $12 each.

  

Not all of us can have a green thumb, but luckily if you are the type that could even kill a cactus there is still hope. The Delta 20 planter by Lechuza is a self watering planter that is designed to keep your plants happy and green, even when you forget about them. Just fill it up and you are good to go for multiple weeks. To take the guess work out of it, the planter even includes a little reservoir that shows you when you need to refill. A winner of the red dot award, the Delta planters are available in several different sizes and colors, can be used indoors and outdoors and to top it all off, it's affordable with pricing starting at $29.

Available from Emmo Home starting at $29.

Check out these eco-friendly, prefab homes from Michelle Kaufmann Designs! I think my favorite of the bunch are the mkSolaire and the Sunset Breezehouse. Along with these great homes, MKD recently published a 176-page book highlighting these sustainable designs. In Prefab Green, Michelle talks about her design process as well as the importance of sustainability. Prefab is definitely looking more and more tempting every day! More about the Sunset Breezehouse: The Sunset® Breezehouse™ home was thoughtfully designed by Michelle Kaufmann Designs and Sunset Magazine for green, healthy living. The key feature of the Sunset Breezehouse is the BreezeSpace at the center, which is situated under a distinctive butterfly-shaped roof. This room, a glass-enclosed breezeway or porch, allows you to “let the green in” to your main living and dining areas, blurring the boundary between interior and exterior. Courtyards, terraces and decks are placed at the front and rear of the home to further integrate nature with living. By borrowing space from the outside, the home feels much larger than it is.

Pick up a copy of Prefab Green from Michelle Kaufmann Designs for $30.

Remember those awesome acrylic bird feeders I wrote about before? Well, I just got word from Jenny of Red Yellow and Blue Ink that she has some new designs up for sale! These new feeders are inspired by the bright, cheerful colors of Spring. Jenny has also developed several new designs using re-purposed traffic signal lenses. Very cool! Be sure to check out the mini feeders/catchalls made from the scraps that accumulate during fabrication - a very creative solution, indeed!

Modern Acrylic Bird Feeders from Red Yellow and Blue Ink - $24 - $85.
Partial proceeds go to the National Audubon - www.audubon.org.

It's been a while since I have posted about anything from CB2. I was glancing through their website the other day, and found myself quite smitten with the Draper sofa. It has all the ingredients to be an epic sofa, removable cover for cleaning, certified sustainable kiln dried hardwood frame, soy based polyfoam seat, simple lines and it's made in the USA. My only complaint about it is the lack of color choices.

There is the cotton "flame" cover shown above, or a poly blend "pearl". I'm not sure I could pull of the flame, and the latter is a little boring. Either way it looks like a great value for only $799.

Draper Sofa available at CB2 for $799.

Has anyone ever sat on it?

Since we're on a green kick today, I'll show off Umbra's new pulp bulletin board. I've never really been a fan of bulletin boards in general, but there is something appealing about this one. The black and white patterns are a result of stacking reprocessed paper and each one board will have it's own unique look. It has a paperboard frame which makes the entire board recyclable when you are done with it.

Available from Umbra for $24

Here's one for the Eco camp! These screen prints by Ork Posters are made from 100% recycled paper and are printed with soy based inks. On top of that, should you actually reside in the same city as the print you're purchasing, you can opt for local pick up (to reduce the carbon footprint of your transaction, of course). So, pick up some green art to hang over that low-VOC paint of yours!

If that doesn't persuade you, perhaps your love of typography will. These clever prints make bold use of typography to illustrate all the lovely neighborhoods of your favorite city. Current prints include Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Great Lakes, Los Angeles, Manhattan, NYC, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington DC.  

I'm crossing my fingers for a Salt Lake City version. Hey, a girl can dream.

Earth-friendly prints, with a healthy dose of graphic design and urban appeal, by Ork Postsers from $20 - $27.

I keep hearing that our current economic recession is going to spawn a new decade of affordable design. While the jury is still out, one can always hope. Luckily with projects like the i-House it looks like there just might an air of change in the wind. The i-House is a prototype to be manufactured by Clayton Homes, the largest builder of manufactured housing in the U.S. Sure if you look to close you can tell it's just a single wide house with a butterfly roof stuck on top, but for $100,000 what do you expect? The interior also sports some nice Ikea cabinetry and what looks like a fairly open floor plan. With a smorgasbord of eco options available it looks like a pretty good deal. Let's just hope that the projected pricing doesn't get to inflated before it actually makes it to market.

Check out a virtual tour here.

Via our friends at Jetson Green

It's been another great week over at Utahmodern.org with some wonderful contributions from our members. Laine of Interior Renovations is on a roll after making a kids desk last week. This week he made a full sized desk that has a nice contrast of stainless steel and wood. Make sure you drop by and let him know what you think of it. He's always looking for feedback. Jory shared some more of his great eye for art and talks about what Wassily Kandinsky and Chalupa's have in common. I also posted a video of a remodel in a downtown loft that looks like something more out of So Cal than Utah. Last but definitely not least Preston signed up for his free blog and shared some ideas about sustainable design.

In case you haven't heard the news, we found out over the holidays that we will be having a little girl this spring. Something tells me that our home is quickly going to be invaded by all sorts of wonderful pink things. Lucky for me, boon is prepared for our little girl with their new Pink Bug Pod and Flow Water Deflector. We blogged about the frog pod almost three years ago, and it was one of the first toys we had for our son. Boon is a favorite around our house for their ability to make affordable and good looking toys and baby accessories.

Speaking of toys, it looks like Boon has a whole bunch of fun new bath toys coming to market soon. The collection includes several squirt and scrub toys as well as some floating toys and a net to catch them. Parents will be happy to know that all the toys are BpA-free, PVC-free and Phthalate-free. Head over to their Facebook page for more pictures of their new line of toys. I haven't heard pricing on the bath toys yet, but historically their prices are quite reasonable.

Pink Bug Pod is available exclusively at Babies R Us for $24.

For all those iPod/iPhone lovers out there, there is a new radio alarm clock out that is as good looking as your coveted music player. The Vers 1.5R is the little brother of the Vers 2X stereo that was released a while ago. Just because it is the little guy in the family line doesn't mean that it has any less features however. The 1.5R adds a alarm clock and radio to the previous design and is still available in a range os sustainably styled wood casings. Unfortunately all that high style and technology puts the price close to $200. The good news is that you can currently save $50 by using the discount code "wood" while checking out.

Available from Vers Audio for $150 (after discount)

It's been a while since I have looked at Amenity's collection, mostly because we are pretty pleased with our budget Ikea duvet. This week however I was browsing the Amenity line over at Design Public, and I was surprised to see that Amenity is a lot more than bedding these days. Sure they still have their gorgeous (and somewhat expensive) duvets and sheets, but they also have a whole slew of other cloth goodies. The line includes everything from bedding, to wall hangings and prints to table runners, place mats, and even modern Christmas decorations. Pricing ranges from $9 for modern ornaments to $400 for a duvet. Available from Design Public.

I have to admit that in the past I have been less than optimistic about modern prefab houses. Very few of them end up being priced at less than $200 a square foot. To me $100 a square foot is the magic number to try and hit before you can really claim it's "affordable". The 100k house is proving that it can be done with fairly typical building practices and a little creativity. So where does that leave prefab? Well not everyone has given up on it like I have, and the NY Times had an interesting article about a prefab modern home built in the Los Angeles area for $125 a square foot. The home shows some obvious influence from the Eames Case Study home and shows that using prefab techniques to achieve an affordable modern home might still be a possibility. NY Times Article "Prefab, High-Concept and Green" Via TreeHugger

I've always loved the all aluminum Emeco chairs, but the $400 price per chair has always kept them in the distance. I ran into these, um interpretations, (read: knock off) called the "Style Oceanic" over at Stack Chair Depot for $112. At that price, I can almost imagine myself getting one. Made completely of aluminum they are quite bomb proof, they won't rust or tarnish, they are super sturdy, and if you ever wanted to get rid of them they would be pretty much 100% recyclable. Man, the Navy really was on to something when they had these made.Available from Stack Chair Depot for $112.

Last week was the start of West Coast Green, a yearly conference on green building design and construction. There were lots of big names there like David Suzuki, Sarah Susanka, and Al Gore. Perhaps one of the most significant things to happen this year was the showing of the SG Blocks container house. Constructed of used Shipping containers, the house was erected on sight in just four hours and 47 minutes. In following with the theme of the conference, the home was thoroughly green throughout with FSC certified woods, solar panels etc. Besides the amazing rate at which the home was built, I was amazed at the stated per square foot price of $150, which includes "all the bells and whistles". If that number is true, then this shipping container home is truly an amazing combination of aesthetics and affordability. I would love to see if the interior is as well designed as the exterior.

Via Inhabitat SG Blocks website Designed by the Lawrence Group

I'll be the first to admit that this isn't the cheapest water pitcher on the market. While the $85 price tag may be hard to swallow, there is no doubt in my mind that it looks $50 better than my old Brita water pitcher. The clear glass pitcher uses Iouseki stones come from the mountains in Kanazawa, the capital city of Ishikawa Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast. In addition to the stones the pitcher uses Binchotan charcoal to filter your water. The combination of the two leave it pure and mineral fortified. The charcole and stone filtration system can last up to six months, and save all those plastic filters from going to the landfill. Oh, and did I mention it's absolutely beautiful?

Available from DWR for $85.

I have always like the idea of making my own one of a kind t shirts, but the thought of learning to silkscreen seemed too intimidating, and the iron on things just didn't seem quality enough. Now there is a new option for creating custom t-shirts, SKREENED. Sure, there are lots of online design-your-own t-shirt shops. What makes SKREENED different is the equipment they use to print your shirts. It's basically a highly modified ink jet printer, which allows them to do one of a kinds at a much lower cost. They also use all American Apparel shirts, so you know your getting a quality product. Best of all the prices are great. A custom organic shirt will run you under $17. Very nice! Design your own, or choose from some great designs at SKREENED.

I'm always trying to think of great recycled materials that could be used for making affordable modern furniture and lighting. While cardboard doesn't seem like the most likely medium to create great lighting, the folks over at Graypants are out to show that it absolutely works. Using salvaged cardboard they sculpt beautiful modern lights that have a wonderful natural glow to them. You can purchase their wonderful lights from Velocity Art and Design in either a hard wired or plugged version with prices starting around $135, which is pretty reasonable. Of course if you are feeling a little more daring, and have access to some scrap cardboard then the possibilities are endless.

Available from Velocity Art and Design starting at $135 Via Shelterific