I know Michael Graves takes some grief here, and occassionally deservedly so, but he has now designed a second thing that I would not live with out.
Note: the first is my artillery shell shaped pepper mill with the peanut on top.
The lastest is the dish drainer tray he makes to do with a dish drainer rack. The rack is just so-so. But the drainer tray is wonderful, because it is sufficiently elevated, and sufficiently inclined, to allow the water to actually drain to the corner nearest the sink AND GET THIS exit out a hole with an articulated spout that channels the water into the sink where its been supposed to go all these years but which it hasn't because of sinks with rim levels above the height of the counter!!!!!!
Michael Graves, you post modern sonnuvagun, you improved my life the way a designer is supposed to do. And I don't care if its been done before, yours is the one that was out on the Target shelf when I finally went looking for one after years of frustration with similar solutions that didn't work!!!
And the trey is pleasing to look at, it feels good to the touch when cleaning (which is important because I hate cleaning things that don't feel good), and it is so far easy to clean.
At first I did not like how BIG it was. It seemed to take over my counter top. But now I am grateful for the occupation. It is that rarest of rare things, the good occupier. It is helping me keep my kitchen in order, at least, until, some designers wake up and start building integral draining wracks into these state of the art kitchen sinks today.
Next time you're talking to someone who is smug about human accomplishments and the notion that we are god's only chosen creatures, mention to that person that, whether chosen or not, it has taken about 10,000 years of washing dishes to come up with a workable dish drainer tray with a spout that actually delivers the drained water into the freaking sink!!!!
Michael, I owe you one, buddy!
Post Script: Pssst! Michael Graves is a closet modernist. He could easily have put a peanut on this dish draining trey and he refused. It iis wonderfully simple and elegant, MUCH more so than the baroque dish draining rack, which I am only continuing to test out because I owe him for the draining tray.
Post Post Script on the Graves Draining trey...
It is a perfect expression of heavy modern actually, even though I dislike heavy modern. Heavy modern is post modern shorn of ornament but retaining the post modern emphasis on surfaces, rather than re-embracing the sense of space indicative of modernist design.
How to we get Target to hire Arthur Erickson to do a kitchen line? Or better yet Renzo Piano!!!!
Wouldn't it be huge fun to see what Konstantin Grcich would come up with for a dish draining rack?
What I like so much about Koen is his willingness to design anything that he might be able to improve on that would help a human being rather than hurt him.
Contemporary modernist design that continues to respect and advance the notion of space over surface is way too confined to architecture and furniture, if you can find it at all. We need to promote it into everyday appliances and artifacts, where MOST people can actually get the benefit of it.
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