September 2008
Geoff Daly, who owns a company that sells wine preserving systems to restaurants, called to tell me about his new home system. The N2Vin uses nitrogen gas and temperature control to keep five bottles of wine fresh for up to a month. Open bottles don’t last very long in our house, but we did think this little guy was stylish and practical for oenophiles who like to do tastings or flights at home. The company is based in Holland, Michigan, and is looking for a distributor in the Chicago area. Until then, you can buy from the company direct.
—Jan Parr
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I went to a swell cocktail party recently at Lumen to celebrate the first of three finalists Nate Berkus chose in the Basil Hayden’s Tastemakers Design Chicago competition. The event was a joint presentation of Chicago Home + Garden and Out magazines, and Basil Hayden’s bourbon. The gal of the evening was Sarah Tranum (pictured above with her entry), a Chicago design grad student who has envisioned a curvilinear lounge chair that evokes the BH packaging (that’s the criteria for the contest—design whatever you want, but use Basil Hayden’s as the inspiration). The other two finalists will be feted at events coming up at Stone Lotus (RSVP here) and Angels and Kings, before Berkus puts the prototypes up for a vox populi judging on Oct. 16 at Crimson Lounge, over at the Hotel Sax. The bad weather didn’t stop the stylin’ crowd from coming out for fun Basil Hayden’s cocktails and passed pupus. I chatted with Project Runway alum Steven Rosengard, Oscar Tatosian from Oscar Isberian Rugs , Anthony Almaguer and Steven Burgert from I.D., and my neighbor Bryan Lump, who designed a table that earned him one of the other two finalist slots. His wife is hoping he wins, so they can spend the $10K prize on fixing up their basement.
—BRADLEY LINCOLN
Photography by Frank Failing
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List Price: $1.995 million
Sale Price: $1.91 million
The Property: Michael Sears, the former Boeing chief financial officer who was imprisoned for a conflict-of-interest violation with an Air Force official, has sold a Gold Coast condo he had bought after serving his time. The 3,737-square-foot condo on the second floor of the Regent (at 190 East Walton Place) has four bedrooms, each with its own private ...
Fashion week is strange. Months and months of work go into a show that happens once and lasts 15 minutes. (After Calvin Klein, I saw some PR girls dramatically collapsing into each other, saying, "It's over, it's really over."). Seeing celebrities starts to feel quite natural, and the fashion people you see every day start to feel like family—albeit a strange sort of family that follows you around every day but rarely speaks to you...
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I haven't spoken with Barack Obama this week, but I'm certain that he's shaking his head with disillusionment at the current state of his presidential contest.
On Tuesday, he delivered a well-crafted, thoughtful speech outlining, in great detail, his many proposals for education reform. But instead of political experts on CNN and MSNBC dissecting his new promise to double the funding of charter schools, the week's news was dominated by the McCain campaign's charge that Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark was sexist and aimed directly at...
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Poor old Hamlet may not have been the picture of stability, but then again, neither was crime-fiction writer Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled hero Sam Spade. Put them together, and you’ve got one tongue-twister of a nod toward the dark and the stormy: Dashiell Hamlet, a new play cowritten by the 84-year-old stage and screen vet...
We just finished writing up an item on the Toms-Price sale this weekend when news came of a sale at Design Studio’s new outlet in Elk Grove Village. Find savings of 50 to 75 percent on Design Studio’s high-end contemporary furniture, as well as on art, furniture, lighting, and rugs. After this weekend, the outlet, which stocks discontinued items, odds and ends, and customer returns, will be open Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., or by appointment. We’ve shown a bedroom here from Design Studio’s Web site to give you an idea of the sorts of things the store carries; these items aren’t necessarily available at the outlet.
—JAN PARR
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