Brad Pitt’s Shopping Spree

By the time you read this, may have finally ended the media speculation and popped those twins out, but it seems her equally-gorgeous partner is the one who’s nesting. Pitt was spotted picking up a few items – likely for the growing family’s new pad in the South of France – at the Design Miami/Basel event in Basel, Switzerland. And while most dads-to-be concentrate on the staples like cribs, changing tables and rocking chairs, Pitt’s spree had a decidedly modernist twist. And a price tag that could probably put his soon-to-be brood of six through college – twice.

Pitt started with an appropriate choice for a man with a houseful of kids – a pair of lamps representing a family by Atelier van Lieshout. The lamps are made of foam and reinforced fiberglass, so they’re not only good design, they may also be baby safe! The perpetual Sexiest Man Alive also scored a pair of Ron Arad chairs from New York’s Sebastian + Barquet, and a rug from New York’s Cristina Grajales that retails for a whopping $175 a square foot, possibly because it’s woven from aluminum thread. The piece de resistance, however, was Dutch Designer Jeroen Verhoeven’s Rococo-style coffee table fashioned from hollow white marble. The cost of this creation – supplied by London’s Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery? A whopping $293,000.

KMPfurniture.com  Modern Furniture

Finally — A Room with a Real Ocean View

If you really, really, really love the ocean, some of the world’s best and brightest minds are working on a project that could create your dream home. The Seasteading Institute, founded by Google’s Patri Friedman and a former Sun Microsystems programmer named Wayne Gramlich, is investigating the idea of building entire communities in the ocean. People will work, live, play and govern themselves in what are essentially “city-states” located, in, under and on the sea.

It may sound like something out of a science-fiction movie, but the Institute is serious. They’ve already secured $500,000 in funding from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, and plan to break ground – or water – on a prototype to be launched within a few years in San Francisco Bay. The structure is based on the design used in oil rigs – which are often small floating cities in their own right – but with gardens, solar panels and wind turbines added to the above-ground platform space to make the “city” sustainable and pleasant to live in. The living space, meanwhile, will be located inside the underwater tube that will anchor the platform to the ocean floor. Which means your ocean view will be a real ocean view – no sky, no sand, only water. It sounds like a perfect pad for a mermaid.

KMPfurnitur.com Modern Furniture