Cranked-up Comfort -- can you get any more mainstream than this?

My in-laws pointed me to the article "Cranked-up comfort" in the Houston Chronicle this weekend:

We’ll take our wood unvarnished, finished only by time and years of hard use. We’ll take our metal unpolished, its strength trumping shine. Giant gears of metal or wood become wall art or table tops. Factory carts roll into family rooms as coffee tables.

The look wears many names — industrial chic, rough luxe, Belgian modern — for the rugged materials that pair with refined natural materials such as linen and leather on comfy, inviting sofas and chairs.

It's about mass retailers and designers adopting what we call steampunk:

Sarah Kammlah of Fredericksburg, a designer with the Carol Hicks Bolton collection for E.J. Victor (www.ejvictor.com), calls her twist on the look “steam punk.” “It’s like you took Matrix and Age of Innocence and mashed them together.” Her recipe for a post-industrial look: mix one part Victorian, one part industrial and a twist of punk.


(If you call it that, you must be reading this blog, right? So dish, Sarah Kammlah, and send us some pictures!)

Brown (a shop)

So I read about this shop called Brown in Domino magazine, and I thought "Hmm, it sounds like it could be steampunk." Since I was in Houston recently, I stopped by (twice, actually, since they didn't have hours on their website).

Their website describes their stock as lighting, furniture, industrial, didactic, and curiosities. There was a lot of lighting. It was very nice and very expensive, and not "raw" enough for me. There was not much industrial and the "didactic" (vintage teaching posters, mostly) leaned strong towards the biological.

That being said, there was one very steampunk find:



A French teaching poster with a voltage graph. I'd guess from around the 1930s?

Ben pointed out that for it's price of more than a thousand dollars, you could print many large format posters from images in old Scientific Americans. (More about that shortly.)

So -- if you happen to be in Houston Brown might be a good shop to stop by, but expect a store that has a little bit of steampunk tucked away in the corners instead of anything more substantial.