Three Good Things on the Market

1. It's not often you buy a floor, but the best engineered floor on the market, in my opinion, is made by Listone Giordano, out of Perugia, Italy. Engineered floors are essentially high-end plywood, which makes them very stable and thus a great choice over radiant heat and/or concrete (as well as bathrooms and kitchens). The top layer is the wood you see, and since it goes down to the tongue just like any solid tongue-and-groove flooring, it will stand many sandings. Fact is, however, that such sandings will be few and far between: the factory-applied finishes offered with these floors are longer-lasting than those done in the field. Listone Giordano, for example, uses an 8-coat UV-cured finish that comes with a 25-year wear-through warrantee.

One rap against prefinished flooring is the annoying "microbevel," or eased edge, that sits between the planks. Micro or not, they make the floor look, well, manufactured. Listone Giordano does away with that by cutting the plank edges square after the finish is applied; installed, the square edges butt up against each other dead smooth, like a traditional sanded-in-place floor. The wood species and the finishes, including a very sexy one of natural oil, are gorgeous.

I recently visited the Boston-area showroom (there are about a dozen around the country) and was impressed by the floors and the know-how of the Moss brothers, who run the place. Tucked away in a mini mall in Danvers (not a bad destination, actually, for those on the house furnishings hunt, as InnuWindow, California Closets, Heartwood Kitchens, Eastern Butcher Block, and Circle Furniture also have stores there), the showroom features floors you don't usually see. Planks 5 1/2" wide, tropical woods like afzelia, morado, and sirari, straight-grained French maple, reclaimed heart-pine. The stuff ain't cheap, nor should it be-prices range from about $6/square foot for single-length French white oak to $18 for some of the wider and more exotic products. No wonder a couple of our beloved Red Sox have these floors in their homes. www.europeanwoodfloors.com

2. One of the best field trips we ever took on This Old House was to the Bradbury & Bradbury wallpaper factory out in Benicia, California. Sensuous, silk-screened, and handmade on 90-foot tables, Bradbury papers are considered the gold standard for period appropriate walls, from Arts and Crafts to their new "Mod Generation" line from the 1960s (take a detour on the website to check these latter babies out).

The latest thing to come out of the studio is fabric, in three William Morris-inspired motifs of sunflowers, willow fronds, and acanthus leaves. Having never done much on the fabric front, I don't know how often one might change drapes, pillows and table runners, but these may spur you to do so sooner rather than later.

3. You'll recall the hoopla around compact fluorescent lights-major savings, if everyone used them greenhouse gases would drop significantly, etc. Then we found out that the light quality wasn't so great and there was this nasty problem about throwing them away, what with the mercury they contain. The light quality and dimmability have greatly improved, but the mercury remains.

Now comes what a Department of Energy official predicts will save Americans $280 billion in energy costs over the next 20 years and will, by the end of that period, account for 70% of the lighting market. Enter LEDs, light-emitting diodes. They use 85% less electricity and last 30 times as long as incandescent bulbs...but they cost about 5 times more. That's to be expected for something at the beginning of its manufacturing history, but with prices falling about 25% every year, lumen output (brightness) per watt rising, and increasing product quality and diversity, it's pretty clear LEDs will be in your home soon.

To learn more, I went Wolfers Lighting in Allston, Massachusetts, to see their new "Green Zone," which shows various lighting sources, their relative merits, and gives tips about energy savings. Lighting designer Susan Arnold admits she's still learning the LED ropes. "Keeping heat away from the diode is key to longevity," she says, "so all the products have large heat sinks, usually metal fins, incorporated into them." That makes them bulky; though some can be screwed into standard sockets like a regular lamp, many are full-on lighting systems with an AC/DC power converter and heat sink separated from the light source. But since they won't be burning out for at least 8 to 10 years, replacing them won't a big part of living with them.

My experience with LEDs is that while some are simply not ready for prime time-weak light for a silly price-others are legit. The color is good and the lumens are there. Give the market another year or so, and I'll bet compact fluorescents will no longer be the future.

In the meantime, here's something I learned at the Green Zone and am imposing on my family: dimming a light, any light, by 25% saves 20% on the electric bill and quadruples the lamp's life. Which, by translating into money saved, brings this newsletter to its full-circle close. Almost.