Post #405252 by Sparkle Mark on Mon, Sep 1, 2008 1:29 AM

I thought that I'd post some pictures of the remodel of our home bar.
Our house is a 1957 Palmer & Krisel design part of the "Living Conditioned Homes" built by Sanford D. Adler.
Originally the living room and the family room (there was no dining room) were divided by shoji screens. The original owners decided very early on to remove the shoji screens and build a bar to divide the two areas. The overhead cabinet that they designed and built, beautifully echos back the butterfly roof shape of the house itself. The bar was hand-built very carefully, and as the original owner was an engineer, it was built to last.
The workmanship is really nice and everything was in perfect condition, but the base of the bar is made of glass block which did not seem to go with the rest of the house. Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy glass block in it's place, but it just wasn't working for us. We liked the placement and shape of the bar, but the glass block was just not integrating with the rest of the house. After a multitude of discussions and drawings SparkleGem and i came up with the idea to just cover the glass block (non-destructively) with bamboo. Great idea, but I had not thought about how to attach bamboo to the glass block without ruining it. I came up with the idea of putting a mesh fence around the glass, making it rigid with a wooden nailer at the bottom and then, essentially sewing (with bailing wire) the bamboo onto the metal mesh. Below are some pictures before and during the operation.

I will add more pics of the bamboo facade later.

best
Mark

Here's the original bar

Here's the living room side

I bought all of the bamboo at Oceanic Arts as whole pieces that i split by hand using an Ikea chef's knife and a hammer.
(I still have all of my fingers and toes)

Here you can see the wire mesh before I nailed on the wooden footers.

Here you can see the bamboo making it's way around the glass.

More to come soon.