> Make Sure You BBQ/Drink/Play/Smile/Laugh/Frolic Today

Canada Day is July 1st of every year. It’s the day that all Canadians enjoy relaxation while spending time with family & friends. It typically involves outdoor activities such as BBQ’ing, drinking alcohol, sun-tanning, rafting, weed smoking, skateboarding and most importantly, fireworks! Many communities across the country host Canada Day events to commemorate the birth of our beloved country that incorporate some, but not necessarily all of the previously mentioned activities.

> We’re In Business For Your Business

Summer has finally decided to show up at Calgary’s front door and in light of the great weather weve decided to pass on some great savings to you, our valued customers. Check the rest of this post for more great deals and give us a call if you have any questions. Happy Rafting Season!

Contact: 403.228.1808

> Check Out The New Website

After the decision to overhaul the website, we sat down and did some brainstorming to come up with a look & feel that better reflected our business as a modern, forward-thinking company. Let us know what you think of the new look!

> The Importance of Vibrant Surroundings

Black and white are the safe choices in the design world. The color of luxury is elegant and subdued. Yet, at the same time, even top-tier designers, artists and luxury brands have always used bright colors as well. It is not about either or. It is not black-and-white or color. Just try telling those who love Dale Chihuly’s art, Versace interiors, Karim Rashid’s Corian eco-house or Renzo Piano’s Central St Giles facades in London that the “designer look” is always predominantly black and white.

And although bright color is often associated with being a sort of primitive, wild, folk-art aesthetic, and therefore black and white would seem the serious and civilized alternative, color is not just wild, frivolous, and primitive. Just think of your favorite brand’s logo and you will most likely visualize some color. Imagine a weekly market at a Peruvian mountain town, an Indian wedding party, a Norwegian fishing town, Marimekko fabrics, a Cirque du Soleil show or Avatar, and you cannot avoid feeling uplifted and happy because of the colors. In fact, we are seeing a clear increase in the use of color in the broad design world. We see more color in commercial and residential architecture, interior design, art and installations, events, retail and hospitality. We also see more color in products — from aircraft to fashion to everyday items — and in marketing and communications as well. All you need to do is click through the various categories on this site – architecture, design, art, kids, Lifestyle, fashion etc. – and you’ll get a sense of how color is gaining ground.

> Summer Opener Promotion!

For the month of June we are offering a promotion of 1000 business cards @ thick cardstock, full color, one sided, gloss finish for only $69.00 – Better get in on that before it’s too late!

[p.] 403.228.1808
[e.] start@honeypixel.com

> Individuality Through Architecture

This may not be your idea of a home but it is bold and fun, and it has certainly attracted wide media attention. The 8,500 square-foot Casa Son Vida is a cooperation between three powerhouses: Luxury residential developer Cosmopolitan Estates, eclectic Dutch designer and founder of Mooi, Marcel Wanders,, and award-winning Los Angeles, Switzerland and Hong Kong-based tecARCHITECTURE. Casa Son Vida is located in the Balearic Islands off Spain, on the Island of Mallorca, where humans have lived since 6000–4000 BC and where more recently, tourists have over-crowded every beach. But Casa Son Vida avoids the touristy kitsch and aims much higher. It is in the exclusive Son Vida community, just 15 minutes from the capital of Palma.

Casa Son Vida is in fact a reno of a 1960s Mediterranean villa, but it has been turned into an fantastic, sprawling luxury residence, designed to attract the young, discerning and bold, who are confident and design-savvy enough to know what they are looking at. The handiwork of Marcel Wanders is evident everywhere in the Casa that looks a bit like an unruly movie set with its dino-bone exterior staircase, and various bits and pieces that remind you of Tomorrowland, Mickey Mouse, Finding Nemo and, of course, Alice in Wonderland.

> A True Design Haus

Vitra Haus, the new home of Vitra’s Home Collection, has been covered widely by design media, and not in vain. It is a beautiful example of Jacques Herzog’s and Pierre de Meuron’s ability to take the ubiquitous stacked-houses concept and still make it look new, interesting and inviting. Reaching five storeys in height and containing 12 separate houses, Vitra House is geared toward the general public, design-aware consumers who will appreciate the building as well as the Vitra products inside. The entire contraption appears both grandiose and intimate at the same time, with the gray exterior disguising the disheveled heap within the site, while the open glass-walled ends and stark, white interiors facilitate the presentation of residential-scale displays.

Vitra House is the latest addition to the ever-expanding Vitra Campus that started as an industrial park with the manufacturing facilities. Now the Vitra Design Museum–Frank Gehry’s first European building opened in 1989 — the Conference Pavilion by Tadao Ando (1993) and the Fire Station by Zaha Hadid (1993) already provide magnificent visual attraction. Vitra Haus and a new circular manufacturing facility by Kazuyo Sejima/SANAA are this year’s entrants to the site. Weil am Rhein is a German town and a community that is a suburb of the Swiss city of Basel in Switzerland. Weil am Rhein is located by the River Rhine, close to the meeting point of the Swiss, German and French borders. The Vitra Design Museum is the town’s biggest draw.

> A Family Friendly Marble Oasis

The architects of this stunning beauty are husband and wife, Masahiro (36) and Mao (33) Harada, who founded Mount Fuji Architects Studio in 2004. Both are avid mountaineers — so much so that they named their company after the country’s highest and most admired mountain, also located in the Shizuoka Prefecture. Plus House shows off their talents at being bold but not grandiose, and at involving the surrounding nature in delicate detail but without giving up the individuality and presence of the building.

A tactile sense of texture, a romantic play of light, and a reverence of natural beauty are all evident in this graceful, angular villa that seems monumental yet inviting. It brings up memories of hikes up a mountain on Crete where the white ruins of an ancient chapel cling onto the cliffs. But these ruins are on an entirely different island and they are brand new. With its two main blocks at 90-degree angles, the Plus House appears from above to form an almost complete cross or a plus-sign. The opulent weekend villa juts out of a mountainside in a popular holiday area known for its hot springs, in Shizuoka Prefecture on Japan’s main island of Honshu.

> A Modern Jungle Hideaway

Elegant, calm, minimalist, clean and beautiful are among the adjectives that can be used to describe almost all of Marcio Kogan’s much-publicized and much-awarded residential masterpieces. The magnificent, streamlined residences must serve as an antidote of some sort to the Brazilian architect who has been quoted as saying that he loves his home town of São Paulo and New York because they are similar in their chaotic ugliness, and because he likes “energy, chaos and a multi-cultural population in a city.”

Out of this chaos-, humor- and cinema-loving creative mind, an astonishingly lovely, peaceful balance is projected onto residential projects. Reviewers of Kogan’s work often mention Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright or their contemporaries, but Kogan has said that he is more inspired by Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Andy Warhol.

However, the 57-year-old Brazilian-born and educated Kogan does have a modernist approach, and he has described the work of fellow Brazilians of modernist ilk — Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Lina Bo Bardi and Vilanova Artigas – as incredible. The Paraty House, pictured here, is located on one of the hundreds of islands near the colonial town of Paraty, close to Rio de Janeiro. Before it was completed, Kogan predicted that it was to be his favourite house. Its simple premise is two large drawers pushed into the hill and connected by an internal staircase. Its elegance comes from the seamless link between indoors and out, from the use of native wood, stone and vegetation, and from the minimalist, sweeping vistas that make so many of Kogan’s houses appear as if they were either taking off or recently landed. And although the stacked-boxes style is starting to wear thin as style-du-jour, this is surely one of its best examples.

> A Modernist Wooden Palace

From the street, this Edwardian house might seem unassuming, undeserving of a second glance. From the back, however, the addition to the Trojan House by Jackson Clements Burrows, where three children’s bedrooms are cantilevered above a large living space, is anything but ordinary. The entire addition is wrapped in a seamless timber skin that conceals any obvious openings. Windows, covered by shutters that follow the pattern of the façade, reveal nothing of the interior space.

Incidentally the inside is just as remarkable as the outside. A thermal chimney and a breezeway corridor allow for passive cooling in the warmer months as each room was designed to allow for cross ventilation.  Additionally a rain screen provides extra shade from the hot summer sun, and also insulates the inside in the winter by forming a space for warm air. – Andrew J Wiener