Homeandgarden: For builders, it's the big top

For builders, it's the big top

The Home Builders' trade show is a three-ring circus of promotion, with a midway of displays and samples and sideshows of "concept'' appliances and inventions.

By JUDY STARK

ATLANTA -- The guy, dressed up like a giant bumblebee, was handing out Bit-O-Honey candies on the trade show floor at the National Association of Home Builders convention recently.

"I hope they pay you enormous amounts of money to do this," I told him, accepting a piece of candy.

He looked embarrassed, standing there with bobbing antennas clipped to his head. "Actually, I'm doing this for my wife," he said. "She works for the company."

We concluded that he was making major deposits in the favor bank that he'd be able to draw on for the rest of his life. The missus will never be able to tell him he can't go out with the boys or complain when he wants to play golf on Saturday.

I no longer remember the name of the company that Mr. Bumblebee represented, and I do not recall which company paid women to dress up in poodle skirts, saddle shoes and towering fake beehive hairdos and dance around a '50s diner where they gave away free pie and promoted some product or other, and I feel nothing but sympathy for a woman in coveralls who sang a version of Hit Me with Your Best Shot all weekend, promoting an insulating house wrap. Good voice, too.

That is the sort of wackiness you get at this, the major trade show for the home building industry. In 500,000 square feet of space, 1,000 vendors were pushing their products: software systems to organize the business side of the business, voice-activated light switches, shades and blinds, truss systems, power tools, structured wiring, architecturally correct double-hung windows, appliances, concrete, paint, tile. For a builder, it's a toy store, Christmas morning and winning the lottery all rolled into one.

At the appliance booths, celebrity chefs were cooking, and helpers were handing out freshly baked tiny quiches and chocolate chip cookies.

At the Kohler plumbing booth, drummers and dancers performed ethnic dances in front of a cascading waterfall. At another booth Norm Abram of This Old House was signing autographs.

On the last morning, when it was 36 degrees and raining outside, the gas fireplace booths were the most popular on the floor as some of the chilly 70,000 conventiongoers huddled up to the hearths to get warm.

At the Recyclit booth, the guys were trying to sell me on their idea of through-the-wall trash tubes. You open a chute in the wall, toss in your recyclables or garbage, and they exit into your recycling bins outside. The Australian-born inventor of this system said, in shrimp-on-the-barbie accent, that the idea "just came to me" while he was recovering from a back injury.

Now you too can have the same system that he says Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise have -- or should we say, had, since that marriage is over -- in their home in Australia. Recyclers to the stars! Just imagine!

For a far more down-home approach, Louisiana-Pacific introduced its Norman Rockwell siding collection. The most middle-American of materials, vinyl siding, now comes in colors such as barn red and forest green, which the manufacturer says will stand up to harsh weather conditions without fading. They're a noticeable change from a color palette that traditionally has focused on variations on white, gray and beige, and, of course, they're advertised with Rockwell drawings.

My favorite booths on the show floor are the ones where manufacturers show off their "concept" appliances. These are the creations of the folks in research and development, one-of-a-kind inventions that may never go into production, things they've done just because they can and because they're cool. Sometimes the manufacturers want to put them out there and gauge reaction to determine whether it's worth their while to keep working on something. Sometimes they put them out there just to show off.

At the Whirlpool booth, the staff was offering sneak peeks of its Personal Valet. Picture a freestanding closet, maybe 6 feet high, 1 foot deep, 3 feet wide. You hang your clothes inside, where they are sprayed with a mist of a solution called Presiva, then the closet heats up. In 30 minutes your clothes are refreshed and wrinkle-free.

The system doesn't clean dirt out of your clothes, so it's not a complete substitute for the dry cleaner, but, if all your duds need is fluffing and refreshing and deodorizing, this could be the appliance for you.

"It even works on beads and sequins!" one of the booth staffers told me. There's no price and no timetable for this item and no promise that it will ever move beyond this gleam-in-the-eye state.

The Maytag booth had the concept appliance I want. You've seen ads for those Web-connected picture frames: You can e-mail your mother the latest digital photo of the grandkids, and it pops up in the digital frame on her coffee table.

Imagine such a frame, maybe 12 by 18 inches, on the front of your refrigerator. You can scan in images you like, snapshots or family photos or recipes or the kids' artwork, whatever you want. When the images are displayed (they can morph in and out), the body of the refrigerator constantly changes color and pattern to provide an appropriate background.

In today's kitchens, open to the rest of the house, where a big white refrigerator looks sterile and appliancelike, this turns it into a piece of art. No price, no timetable.

I also liked Maytag's washer with a radio and TV built into the back panel. While you're removing spots or folding towels you can watch TV on a screen about 6 inches on the diagonal.

Design experts say the laundry room is the must-have room in the house, and consumers want it to be an attractive place, given that they spend so much time there. Well, this washer's one way to brighten it up -- it even makes underwater "glubbing" noises at you.

Come on, guys, put this into production now!