Large and luxurious homes selling fast

With just four superb quality homes yet to be sold, discerning homebuyers looking for a property in one of Sheffield’s most sought-after locations should act now to avoid disappointment.

Situated in Ringinglow Road within the highly desirable S11 postcode, Ringinglow Gardens is an exclusive and intimate development of only 11 premium quality homes.

To showcase the high specification of the homes, award-winning Redrow has opened the doors to a five-bedroom Buckingham style house to complement the professionally styled and fully furnished Highgrove show home.

Patsy Aicken, sales director for Redrow Homes , explains: “At Redrow we take pride in all we do – from choosing the locations in which we build, to the high standard of craftsmanship invested in our homes and our commitment to customer service. Ringinglow Gardens has been popular since its launch, proving that there is a demand for superb quality homes in the right setting. We recently sold three of these high value homes in just two weeks which shows just how popular they are.”

An urgent visit to the Buckingham view home at Ringinglow Gardens is a must for discerning homebuyers.

All five bedrooms are doubles and, as well as the family bathroom, the Buckingham boasts four en-suites; all of them equipped with elegant sanitaryware, ceramic floor and wall tiles and high quality fixtures and fittings.

The combined kitchen, breakfast area and family room at the heart of the home is ideal for those who love to entertain. The kitchen area boasts silestone work surfaces as standard, plus integrated top brand name appliances, including oven, microwave and fridge freezer; while floor to ceiling cabinets and extra wide drawers offer plenty of storage space.

There’s also a separate dining room for more formal entertaining, plus a spacious lounge, a utility room and a generous double garage that can be accessed from within the house.

The Buckingham is on the market at 799,999.

The remaining homes at Ringinglow Gardens are all five-bedroom properties, priced from 649,999.

“The size of our homes and the level of investment they represent means that many potential customers will have homes of their own to sell. The availability of part exchange at Ringinglow Gardens means moving day doesn’t have to be a dim and distant diary date,” Patsy added.

“Instead, we may be able to accept a customer’s current home as part payment for one of our final four fabulous homes and speed up the whole process.”

Ringinglow Gardens is close to the popular shops and restaurants of Ecclesall Road, whilst heading out of Sheffield towards the equally popular Ringinglow village and, beyond that, the beautiful countryside of the Peak District National Park.

The semi-rural setting means residents have the potential to enjoy stunning views of the surrounding countryside and easy access to the wider outdoors; while also benefitting from the convenience of having a wealth of amenities nearby and easy access to the M1 for commuting.

Xaar Brings Inkjet Technology to Latin America Ceramics Decoration Market

From March 6-9, 2012 at the 10th edition of EXPO REVESTIR in Sao Paulo, visitors to the Xaar stand #190 will have the opportunity to see why the Xaar 1001 industrial inkjet printhead is transforming the decoration of ceramic tiles. Xaar's revolutionary printhead which incorporates TF Technology can be found in a number of digital inkjet ceramic tile printers throughout the show floor.

Xaar's booth will feature a display of printheads and related products, as well as a number of 3D animations explaining Xaar's technology, viewed using Augmented Reality. In addition, a range of the creative and high quality effects that can be printed on tiles using the Xaar 1001 printhead will be on display.

Technical staff will be in attendance to answer questions for OEMs about how to best implement Xaar printheads into their machines. They are also available to explain the benefits of using digital inkjet to print ceramic tiles. Xaar will also distribute Portuguese editions of its popular 'Guide to Industrial Inkjet.'

Digital inkjet decoration of ceramic tiles is a powerful manufacturing method, allowing creativity even with small quantities of customized or personalized designs. It also offers huge potential savings in inventory and distribution costs. Scope to vary the pattern is significantly increased and even the edges of the tile can be printed, including life-like patterns such as marble and wood effects. Inkjet printing also lets manufacturers print on textured and embossed surfaces. This extends the advantages that ceramic tiles can offer over competing cladding materials, such as stone, glass or metal - and at a far lower cost per square meter.

"The adoption of digital inkjet print techniques is transforming the economic viability of small batch production as well as the cost and time involved in ceramic tile printing. Break-even production runs are very short with digital printing," explains Edsel Lonza, Xaar Sales Manager for Latin America. "Sample tiles, identical to final production with batch-to-batch reliability, can be delivered through the distribution network. They can be printed in very small quantities as they are ordered by the consumer; perhaps with customized designs. This reduces inventory, raw stock, distribution costs and waste. These cost savings lead to an excellent return on investment for tile printers."

Xaar printheads are found in more than 50% of the world's digital inkjet ceramic tile printers, from manufacturers such as Technoferrari, Cretaprint, SITI - B&T, Sacmi, Kerajet, and others. The Xaar 1001 printhead ensures the most reliable operation with minimal maintenance because it uses Xaar's unique revolutionary TF Technology and Hybrid Side Shooter printhead architecture. This technology enables higher pigment-loaded ceramic inks to flow directly past the back of the nozzles, keeping them continuously primed - resulting in maximum printer uptime for exceptional production output. The printhead can run for hours in production without maintenance depending on design and quantity printed, enabling digital to seamlessly integrate into a manufacturing line alongside traditional printing methods.

Tile producers want the flexibility to produce both fine detail and strong colors. The Xaar 1001's ability to jet variable-sized drops allows tile manufacturers to select small dots for smooth tones and sharp lines. Larger dots are selected to provide high ink coverage to intensify color density and saturation.  The result is a stunning replication of natural materials. In addition, the digital process means that patterns can be reproduced consistently from one run to the next, and on-demand.

Some of the world's foremost ceramic ink companies have designed their inks and certified them for optimum performance in use with Xaar digital inkjet printheads. Examples are Chimigraf, Colorobbia, Esmalglass-Itaca Group, and Ferro.

"Xaar is an authority in industrial digital inkjet and owns numerous patents. In fact, many inkjet manufacturers license Xaar technology for their own printheads. Xaar's local sales and support office has helped Brazilian industry adopt industrial digital inkjet technology since 2005. We are also a sponsor for the Graphics University, helping to train graphics technicians in digital inkjet technology," adds Lonza. "Xaar is ready to support the ceramics industry as it adopts digital printing and inkjet technology. We look forward to sharing our knowledge with visitors at REVESTIR."

Planning for Profit

If you operate serviced offices, you do so for one very good reason: to make a profit. The greater occupant density you can achieve, the better. But it's not all about cramming people in like a 1950s typing pool. You have to make people want to work there too.

Let's look at the 'density' factor first. If you can comfortably accommodate 100 people on a floor rather than 80, that's more bottoms on seats, which reduces risk, and brings more cash through the door. With a little planning that should be possible.

If you are lucky enough to be starting from scratch there are more options open to you. Firstly, consider the positioning of the partition walls and the access corridors. These should be located to create the optimum space in the working areas. The space should consider the size of the furniture, the area that is really needed at a workstation for a comfortable environment, and the availability of light, natural or otherwise. Getting this wrong can have a serious detrimental effect on the practicality of the floor area.

Door positioning is critical too. Put the door in the corner, the obvious place perhaps and certainly the preferred choice of many builders, and you immediately lose the space on the adjacent wall. Put the door in the middle of the wall, where there would probably have been a walkway anyway, and that space is released for profitable workstations. Even if you are moving into an existing building it might be worth the modest expense of moving the door position to create a more usable space.

The choice of desk size should be made before locating partition walls and door access. Everyone likes the idea of a large, sweeping desk to make them feel like the managing director but, in practice, a few centimetres here and there makes little difference. By simply using a slightly smaller desk (that won't affect the practicality of the work station at all), and planning the dimensions of the room accordingly, you can easily achieve 10% or 20% greater density without significantly affecting the aesthetics of the room.

The image of the place is important too if you are to attract people into your business centre both today and in the future. Being a little creative with the floor layout can create an airy, welcoming feel to the office without any loss of density. Careful use of natural light too is important to help provide an environment that people will look forward to using.

Of course, fashions change. What is attractive and desirable today, becomes dated a few years later. Again, it is possible to take precautions to, in effect, future-proof your serviced office for when the fashion for pinks and purples gives way to greys and black. Choosing a steel-framed desk with a replaceable top, for example, means you can easily refurbish your space to reflect fashion preferences without spending a fortune. Similarly, the clever use of carpet tiles will allow you to replace worn walkways, with complementary-coloured flooring, at little expense.

Rio Designs is one of the UK's leading designers of office environments specialising in helping its customers make the most of their serviced offices. The company provides its expert design services free to its serviced office customers and supplies a wide range of leading-brand furniture and office accessories throughout the UK.

Last call for Watertown's Orchard Park Grill?

The Orchard Park Grill will be closing for three days on Feb. 28, Feb. 29, and March 1 for repeated health code violations, and it may not be long until it closes its doors for good.

Owner John Stathakis said he is currently looking for buyers to sell the business he opened in 2005. Since that time, the Orchard Park Grill has received numerous Board of Health violations, including but not limited to soiled food contact surfaces, rodent droppings, uncovered food products, raw food stored above ready to eat food, dish and bar soap machines not working, soiled drink dispensers and rusty beer taps.

Before coming to Watertown, the Belmont native and Waltham resident operated a deli in Waltham. The son of a “good cook,” Stathakis said serving food came naturally. His father, Demos, learned to cook from line chefs in a Canadian restaurant where he worked as a busboy after emigrating from Sparta, Greece.

When Demos Stathakis came to the United States, he switched industries and opened a laundromat in Belmont. John Stathakis worked there through high school and after graduation until he saw a vacant storefront up for rent in Waltham.

“I was coaching high school football and while I was driving home, I saw this little place for rent,” Stathakis said. “It just seemed like a great place to put a deli.”

Patronized mostly by a neighboring computer-hardware company and the Waltham Police Department, Stathakis said business was good. Then the 100-employee company relocated, Stathakis said, and it was time to move on.

“My buddy knew a guy who owned (the site of Orchard Park Grill), and we took over in September, 2006,” Stathakis said. “I wanted to keep it simple.”

Stathakis said he put roughly $15,000 worth of work bringing the bar up to code. He added televisions, replaced the flooring, bought new stools, painted the outside, replaced the indoor lighting, replaced the ceiling tiles, and put in new kitchen equipment. The old place was nothing “like it is now,” Stathakis said.

“It needed some real updating,” he said. “I have no idea how it ever passed inspection before.”

It wasn’t long until the Board of Health served Stathakis his first status hearing in January 2006 for health code violations, including not posting permits, soiled food contact surfaces, potentially hazardous food kept at an unsafe temperature, rodent droppings, uncovered food products, a malfunctioning bar dish machine sanitizer, soiled ash trays, and an incomplete consumer advisory.

While the items were corrected in the short term, a 2007 inspection found two of the violations repeated. One inspection in 2008 revealed five of the violations repeated, and a second inspection revealed nine violations, some repeated and some new.

Stathakis said he has always been accommodating to inspectors and the requests from the Board of Health to bring the establishment up to code. When the dish machine wasn’t working properly, he’d call the company to fix it. Sometimes they took longer than the Board of Health might have liked, Stathakis said.

“I lease to own the machines,” Stathakis said. “If something breaks down, I call the company up and have them come in to fix it, but if they tell me it’s going to be a week, what can I do?”

When a Board of Health inspector found expired seasonings, Stathakis said he threw them out. When they discovered beer residue buildup inside the taps, he called the beer company to replace the lines.

But a review of the establishment’s history reveals a total of 59 critical violations and 51 non-critical violations in the restaurant’s six years of operation. As a matter of policy, the Board of Health inspects food establishments twice each year, and in some cases they will return if recurring violations give them cause to keep a more vigilant eye. Since April 2008, the Board of Health has found both critical and non-critical violations every time they inspected the restaurant.

Still, Stathakis said he “runs a pretty good kitchen.” The violations appear worse than they are, he said. Stathakis also said he has been unfairly singled out.

“I try to keep the restaurant and the kitchen clean and do everything they ask me to,” Stathakis said. “I’m just trying to make a living.”

The father of three kids, and football coach at Watertown Middle School, Stathakis said he’s worked hard to be a good neighbor and give back to the community. For the past three years, the restaurant has sponsored a “Toys for Tots” drive that is distributed to children in Watertown, he said.

After six years in Watertown however, Stathakis said he’s had enough.

In recent months, Stathakis said he has not been able to pay the electricity bill, causing power outages that in turn, create more health code violations. He was also called to come before the Licensing Board for failure to show proof of workers compensation insurance. The hearing was continued until next month.

“They’re forcing my hand and they’re winning,” Stathakis said. “We’ve had a good run here.”

Stathakis said he didn’t want to announce a new buyer until the deal is complete, nor did he want to say when the restaurant would change hands. Stathakis did say he has “a couple things in mind,” for when that day comes, but it won’t be owning a restaurant in Watertown.

“Behind the Beautiful Forevers” by Katherine Boo

Behind the Beautiful Forevers unfolds in a slum on the western edge of Mumbai ringed by luxury hotels and a gleaming international airport. Annawadi is a community of 3,000 squatters living in, or among, 350 shacks on the edge of a sewage lake. The town’s main industry is garbage. Every day, thousands of waste pickers fan out to from the undercity to harvest the trash of the overcity.

The author, Katherine Boo, is one of the foremost writers on poverty in the United States. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is her first book, based on years of field research corroborated with thousands of public records.

The title comes from a billboard ad for Italianate tiles, which promises a floor that will be “beautiful forever.” Floor tiles are a big deal in Annawadi. To replace a filthy concrete floor with tile is a status symbol.

Annawadi was settled in 1991, just as the Indian government began a program of social and economic liberalization. “Seventeen years later, almost no one in the slum was considered poor by official Indian benchmarks,” Boo writes. On paper, the Annawadians are counted among the 100 million Indians who are said to have been liberated from poverty by globalization.

“The Annawadians were thus part of one of the most stirring success narratives in the modern history of global market capitalism, a narrative still unfolding,” Boo writes wryly. It’s not clear how the Indian government measures poverty. Evidently, jobs, housing, running water, healthcare, sanitation, education, and police protection are beside the point.

Many Annawadians are significantly better off than they were before the Indian economic boom, but it is absurd to say they've been lifted out of poverty. Moreover, based on Boo's description, it is difficult to imagine how they could rise much higher.

Boo doesn’t say it in so many words, but the implication is clear. As far as Annawadi is concerned, the supposed neoliberal economic miracle is as much a fraud as the phony coroners’ reports that chalk up the bleeding corpses of teenage scrap metal thieves dumped on the airport’s manicured grounds to tuberculosis.

Everyone in the book is desperately poor, but, relatively speaking, the main characters come from the upper crust of Annawadi society.

Asha is the human face of corruption. Hers is a Horatio Alger story with less moral uplift and more realpolitik. Asha lifted herself out of grinding rural poverty, despite having been married off to a hopeless drunk. For her, as for many slum-dwellers, Annawadi represents opportunity compared to what they left back home.

Asha is proof that you can get ahead in Annawadi, provided you work hard and never play by the rules. When you think about how miserable Asha and her children would have been otherwise, it's hard to begrudge her success, even though she hurts a lot of people. Then again, it becomes clear that she's upholding the system that makes it impossible for anyone else to succeed on the straight and narrow.

The 40-year-old mother of three is nominally a kindergarten teacher, but that’s just a patronage appointment from her allies in the anti-Muslim Shiv Sena party. Asha’s teenage daughter Manju insists on teaching the neighborhood children, to her mother’s chagrin. The gig was supposed to be a sinecure, like a lot of public school teaching jobs in India. The children of Annawadi could go to free public elementary schools, but the schools are so bad that ambitious families scrimp to send their brightest kid to private school.

Asha dreams of becoming Annawadi’s first female slum lord. As the story begins in early 2008, she sees an opening: the current slumlord is distracted with his new business, which involves painting zebra stripes on horses and renting them out for birthday parties.

A slumlord is an unofficial of liaison between the authorities and the neighborhood. Amongst other things, Asha helps the police extort bribes from her neighbors in exchange for a piece of the action.

Asha has already done well for herself. She has a tile floor, a cell phone, and the first television set in Annawadi. But most remarkable of all, she is sending her daughter, Manju, to college. The girl is poised to become the first female college grad in Annawadi history.

Manju is a sweet and gentle young woman who is mortified by her mother’s crassness and corruption. “Manju was always relieved to hear of local scandals in which her mother played no pivotal role,” Boo writes.

Chowrasta and the traditional marketplace

THERE is a quiet back lane behind the throbbing Chowrasta marketplace of George Town where hidden from public gaze is a curious old signboard. Bent and worn by the elements, it reads "Piccadilly Bazaar".

Unlike the crowded busy square in London it is named after, the little space the board refers to has only 20-odd idle shops. A few tailors, some curio and antique sellers, and textile retailers lie in perpetual wait for customers in a musty cast-iron building roofed with clay tiles and ageing timber beams.

Piccadilly was once a popular shopping venue for Penang folk before the Japanese invasion in the 1940s. Today, it is a pale shadow of its former commercial glory.

In fact, there was a time in George Town when anyone looking for some good bargains and colourful shopping experience would invariably think of Chowrasta. Located in the heart of the city, the century-old collection of small bazaars and shops has today also lost much of its draw.

The fading appeal of Chowrasta and its neighbourhood is in no small part due to the proliferation of shopping malls and hypermarkets.

Unlike its heyday, Chowrasta and other traditional markets suffer from dwindling interest from local communities. Just ask the traders in Chowrasta's "Jual Murah" enclave.

Despite their colourful assortment of wares - sarong, batek fabrics, songkok, lush Persian-style rugs, scarves and so on – demand has declined tremendously, with shoppers now preferring hypermarkets and shopping centres.

The plight of Chowrasta is reflective of the state of similar markets, especially in this new era of consumerism where large retail corporations siphon the masses with their bulk discounts, entertainment and other services.

One may say the traditional marketplaces face a big challenge in adapting to the times, or in somehow bringing back the charm and appeal that attracted people in the olden days.

Roughly translated from Hindi and Urdu, Chowrasta means "four cross-roads". Indeed, the famous shopping venue is at a crossroads after more than a century in existence.

For it was announced earlier this week that the Penang Island Municipal Council is to undertake a RM12 million refurbishing exercise to rejuvenate Chowrasta by the end of the year. The upgrading, to incorporate eco-friendly features while preserving the heritage identity of the site, is the first since the market's last facelift in 1961.

Records show that the original wet market was built sometime in the 1870s. A front portion was added in 1920 and the whole building was torn down and rebuilt as seen today in 1961.

Traditionally, the century-old marketplace has had a distinctly singular character, very different from its namesake in India, the touristy Chowrasta square of Darjeeling.

Swarming the wet markets, the thrift bazaars, the antique shops and the roadside hawkers, people haggle over a motley of things mundane and eccentric – preserved nutmeg, Shakespeare books, straw hats, fresh green broccolis, imitation designer sunglasses, antique watches, T-shirts, caps and undergarments.

There is even a corner where an old sewing machine from the 1940s still spins and whirrs away in the hands of a tailor stitching traditional dresses, scarves and headgear in good old-fashioned Malay style.

During the years when Penang was a duty-free port before the late sixties, the cheap Jual Murah items attracted Malay customers from as far away as South Thailand and Kedah, as well as workers and migrants from Sumatra who lived in George Town.

Many British people also came here to celebrate. A huge rusted signboard of the Broadway Café still looms high near the entrance of the Jual Murah. A Chinese herbal shop now occupies the first floor area where the westerners had famous bar fights.

City halls are getting fancier

The Vista Civic Center, completed in 2010 for more than $50 million, is adorned with cream and beige travertine marble tiles. On the inside, deep-cherry walls complement the bronze city seal embedded in the floor.

The building cost $530 a square foot, in today’s dollars.

That makes it the second most expensive in the county out of 18 built since 1958, according to a review by The Watchdog. The survey shows a jagged upward trend over time for more architecturally and visually ornate — and more expensive — city halls.

Vista’s Civic Center was approved during headier times, and its financing structure is now projected to come up short.

Voters approved the project in 2006 as part of Proposition L, a $100 million building campaign. The half-percent sales tax, which expires in 2037, was supposed to cover the cost of the money borrowed for the building.

Because of flagging sales-tax revenue, the city now estimates that by 2016 it will have to start taking money from its general fund — which pays for basic city services – to meet bond obligations.

Vista has already had to make cuts from its operating budget in the form of layoffs, reduced park hours and recreation programs and reduced City Hall hours. The city even considered switching off streetlights to save money.

In the past decade, city halls have opened in Coronado, Poway, Chula Vista and Vista, all costing more than $400 a square foot.

Vista’s cost of $530 a square foot also happens to be the same rate that San Diego is proposing with its dormant proposal for a new city hall.

Over the years, officials have expanded civic centers to include more than just government buildings. Vista’s includes a two-story community center and a walking park. Three-fourths of Coronado’s 2004 project was a community center that included two swimming pools, a gym, a community playhouse, a rock-climbing wall and fitness rooms.

Additionally, officials said, increased regulations such as earthquake codes — which weren’t as stringent in older buildings — have driven up costs.

In some cases, like Oceanside and Escondido, the centers were catalysts of development in flagging downtown districts. Escondido’s City Hall was part of a civic-center project that the community felt was vital to keep downtown from becoming a ghost town after the North County Fair opened in the city’s southern edge.

Oceanside officials point out that the civic center’s completion in 1990 started a surge in development in downtown that includes an adjacent movie theater, 250 homes and condominium units, restaurants and a time-share resort.

“Downtown has been transformed since the completion of the civic center,” economic development analyst Maryanne Bruce said.

Two of the cities that have had the lowest cost per square foot for opening a new city hall were Carlsbad and Santee. Both purchased existing buildings and came in at less than $200 per square foot.

Carlsbad spent $10 million to first lease, and then buy an office building on Faraday Avenue that houses the majority of its city functions. Santee spent $3 million to purchase a commercial center on Magnolia Avenue.

One government expert said that it is important for cities to have space to centralize their services and it can be visually pleasing. Those needs, however, should be balanced with the cost to taxpayers, said Glen Sparrow, a retired professor at San Diego State University’s School of Public Affairs.

With redevelopment’s end taking away an effective tool for officials to finance civic expansion and the economy still stagnant, Sparrow said he doesn’t think many more large scale civic centers will be on the horizon.

“At this time voters really have a lot of pressure on their elected officials,” Sparrow said. “There is not going to be building anything sensational anymore, especially with redevelopment on its way out.”