Author Archives: Nichole L. Reber

About Nichole L. Reber

Nichole L. Reber is a writer experienced in journalism and marketing communications, especially with an emphasis on architecture, sustainable building, residential development, and interior design. Her career further includes non-profits, publishing, education, and public speaking. Available for speaking engagements and to lead seminars, she currently seeks employment in or around but not limited to the vicinity of Phoenix.

Podcasts Provide Entertainment for Travelers

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Terry Gross’s soothing voice murmurs into my ear. She’s talking about Project Nim, a new documentary about a chimp named Nim. This chimp had  served as a scientific experiment that evidently played out more like Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan than a permanent child. One of the women charged with both mothering him and remaining objective as a scientist suffered tremendous physical violence at the hands of Nim. She describes a violent episode in which her face was deeply torn, exposing the inside of her very body, and immediately I look for the safest, closest place to vomit.

I’m listening to a National Public Radio podcast of FreshAir.  It is one of many NPR podcasts I’m grateful for. NPR is a vast source of  information beyond the architecture and urban planning, the social media, the travel that I write about. The 100 episodes awaiting me amongst the 25 free podcasts I subscribe to offer a world away from my own. They provide continuing education. They provide stellar ambiance when I’m writing posts such as this one. They’re with me at the flick of my mouse in India or Costa Rica, Hong Kong or Peru.

In 2005 I wrote an article about a guy in Sarasota, Florida, who was single-handedly making podcasts a household term.

“Podcast? What’s a podcast?” an editor asked when I pitched the story.

“That’s exactly why you’re going to pay me to write this story,” I responded.

Within the week I had sat in the podcaster’s house and watched him before his high-tech recording gadgets that looked like an at-home recording studio. Afterward, I hurried home in a flurry of excitement, went to PodcastAlley in search of topics I’d like to listen to, and downloaded them for on-demand listening on  an iTunes account. Joy! There were psychology podcasts such as Australia’s All in the Mind, film shows such as Chicago’s Filmspotting, even news shows such as NBC Nightly News and MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann (who now has only bits of his Current TV show available via podcast) and The Rachel Maddow Show. These are mostly mass media podcasts, of course, but there are also the type like my original newspaper article. I’ve found several on comedy, meditation, and travel.

Now let’s answer my previous editor’s question, “What is a podcast?” A podcast is a video and/or audio recording that’s uploaded to cyberspace for your access at any time. You set them to download automatically and they’ll remain fresh until you click on the show for a listen or a viewing. Some last two, others last ninety minutes. They are commercial-free. Viewers and listeners can enjoy them on a computer, iPad, or smart phone.

By now I suppose it sounds passe to say I listen to and watch podcasts, as I haven’t heard the word mentioned in conversation more than a year. Then again, they’re fairly high tech and exemplify the very democratic purpose of free speech. That’s why I make a point of exposing friends and clients to them in whichever country I’m living in. More on that in next week’s Media Mondays department.

Podcasts are weightless, digital, and usually free– three words a world traveler likes when contemplating entertainment from home.

Writers Need Editors Like a Man Needs a Maid

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Neil Young once sang that a man needs a maid. In literary parlance, a writer needs an editor.
Consider this:
“I never had to finish sentences because he would finish them for me, … I never got why,” Joan Didion wrote in Biographies & Memoirs)” target=”_blank”>The Year of Magical Thinking about her fellow writer husband John Dunne. “What was good for him was good for me. What was good for me was good for him.”
Irrefutably that’s the best thing anyone could say about a husband, let alone an editor.
I have developed one romantic relationship in which we seemed to speak poetry to each other, but usually those who I trusted to massage my written words became my best editors, my mentors. They strike my highfalutin vocabulary. They ameliorate my structure. They slow me down for better transitions. They have all positively influenced my speech as a result.
Writers I have only loved from afar, as a reader caressing their books. I dated a writer once– once. It left me scarred deeply enough to rule it entirely out of my life. It comes as no surprise to me, however, that many authors marry their editors— someone in the house has to be stable and logical. My best editors have filled me with a feeling of safety, with the knowledge that my baby words would grow well in their hands. I’ve never known an editor whose writing I admired, though. Somehow it’s usually stagnant, dispassionate, lacking in literary merit though perfectly suitable for periodicals.
No one edits my blog posts. There’s very little editing used in my journalism anymore. And for my book, my first professional book, I haven’t yet met my editor.
Here’s to hoping that what’s good for him is good for me, and what’s good for me is good for him.

Poltrona Frau: A Classic in European Furniture Design

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Could Renzo Frau have anticipated in 1912, when he founded Poltrona Frau in Turin, Italy, that his furniture design company would enjoy a centennial? Would he have envisaged showrooms across the planet, accessorizing the world’s most luxurious automobiles, or generations of design enthusiasts handing down his company’s pieces like heirlooms? What would he have thought about broadening furniture’s dimensions into cyberspace?
It’s impossible to know what Sardinian-born Frau hoped to achieve with Poltrona Frau, surely. His ideas grew into armchairs, sofas, and beds in hues of charcoal, gold, ocean blue, and wisteria for homes of the aesthetically discriminating. They became tables, chairs, and desks designed with sleek surfaces that offered flexibility in the workplace. By the 1920s, the internationally acclaimed furniture design company had quickly catapulted up the ranks, becoming essential to celebrities, politicians, and the elite class.
Let’s step back into 1919. It was then that Poltrona Frau released the “128” chair. An instant classic now known as Armchair Model 1919, it remains a staple of the design company’s catalogue to this very day. Within a decade, the company earned the designation of “official designer of the Royal House of Italy”, and the 118 chair, known today as the Fumoir chair, joined the 128 as an automatic classic. Next in line for acclaim were the Vanity Fair, the Lyra, and the Tabarin.
The organization of Poltrona Frau changed between 1945 and 1965 when Nazareno Gabrielli Group and Franco Moschini acquired the company. Yet its Gio Ponti-designed Dezza chair took first prize at Genoa’s Tecnhotel, and in 1968 Luigi Massoni’s Lullaby bed made headlines for its perfectly unique circular shape. The bed rotates clock- and counter-clockwise and bears a winged leather headboard. In 1976, the company introduced the Petronio couch, a first of what would become numerous iconic designs by Tito Agnoli. Installing its Thema 8:32 in a Ferrari, it entered the world of luxury automobiles in 1982.
Poltrona Frau expanded to include a Contracts division in 1984. Its contracts meant it was now officially collaborating with architects of international ilk. To date, more than 500 design projects in 20 countries comprise this prolific expansion that manifests as theatres, cruise ships, hotels, airports, museums. Its first project in 1984 entailed restoration of the Church of St. Gregoriuccio at the Synagogue of Spoleto, now Frau Hall. In 2002 another project entailed furnishing concert halls within Renzo Piano’s Parco della Musica in Rome. The contract group also delved into ultra first-class chairs for Japan Airlines and commission work with Richard Meier & Partners on design of the West Coast chair for the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and with Avant Travaux on design of the Monsieur Pol chair for the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
Changing times obviated themselves again in the corporate structure of 1990 when Franco Moschini bought all stock shares. The company later grew to acquire Gebrüder Thonet Vienna. More corporate changes were in store when the Charme Fund acquired 30 percent of Poltrona Frau’s capital in 2003, followed the next year by the acquisition of Cappellini. Not long afterward, Cassina and Nemo joined the expanding group.
Poltrona Frau, meanwhile, didn’t lose sense of its origins, individual furniture pieces. New classics such as the Kennedee chair by Jean-Marie Massaud kept the company at the forefront of international design. A giant step lead further into the future in 1998 with Wing, a new line of furniture made entirely of carbon fibers. The forward propulsion continued a few years later with its modular seating system, Quadra, designed by Pierluigi Cerri. Meanwhile, the Lullaby bed made a much-celebrated comeback in 2006 as Lullaby Due.
Distinctions seemed to accumulate as the company rapidly evolved. Publicity campaigns, furniture designs, and environmentalism earned Poltrona Frau awards. Flagship stores popped up in Rome, Milan, and Naples, and an Abu Dhabi design center added to the list.
Today, Renzo Frau’s idea has blossomed into more than 120 showrooms worldwide and collaborations with over 1,400 renowned designers, engineers, artisans, and architects.
It’s charging ahead by giving designers and devotees a compelling online experience. The vast online catalogue offers an almost first-hand experience. Products can be rotated, observed from all angles, and colors and finishes changed according to taste. Chairs, sofas, tables, and bookshelves can be manipulated online in rooms replicating spaces to be designed by professionals or aficionados. Virtual tours of Poltrona Frau laboratories and factories are available online to witness artisan attentiveness and product testing. Finally, the Poltrona Fray Group channel on YouTube streams special interviews and videos for a still more personal connection with the supreme Italian leather furniture design company.
It’s been a century since Frau made the “Made in Italy” tag internationally desirable. He set the benchmark in Italian leathers and luxury furniture design quite high. What will the next century bring?