Nature and furniture with this wall shelf designed for Every Space Design by Jill Ayers. The shelf is made out of bamboo, with glass flower vases, rubber and steel. The tubes are designed to be easily removed, so you can water the plants/flowers as you need them or you can clean the glass vases a few times a month to keep them spotless.

Price is $600.00

Turn away the typical oil on canvas art work for something a bit more interesting. Adam Frank created this series of acid-etched, stainless steel, oil lamp shadow projectors, which he dubbed LUMEN.

Since this is powered by a liquid was fuel cell, you will need to replace it when the oil is gone. Thankfully, LUMEN comes with two liquid wax fuel cells in the box, for about 37 hours of beauty. You can buy replenishment on the designers' web site ($6.00 for a pack of two).

Each Lumen retails for $48.00.

Little Bird Vase designed by Joanna Mendicino is a lovable vase measuring four inches tall (or about the size of the IKEA .99 cent vases). The area for the flower is tiny, capable of holding only a few flower stems, but the Little Bird Vase was designed for simplicity in mind.

Each vase is hand made (with love I presume), so you'll get your own unique Little Bird.

I found these Chinese Garden Stools at Wisteria and thought they were interesting. To be quite frank, I didn't know what a Chinese Garden Stool was. I did a quick search and more of them turned out rather than an explanation in the search results. Still, this ceramic light green version at Wisteria seem to have a more modern take than the other Chinese garden stools I found online. I'm going to assume you can actually sit on these even though they look fragile, so feel free educate me otherwise.

Dimensions: 14 inches in diameter by 19 inches in height.
Price: $129.

When you need to be ridiculously precise with your measurements in your kitchen (never), you can look to this spoon scale for help. The Sunartis Spoon scale is accurate to the 1/10th of a gram, so you can really put the cook books to the test. The spoon features an LCD display that will work with both grams and ounces, so us Americans can know what the hell we are doing. The spoon is crafted out of black ABS plastic with a stainless steel handle.

At $50 USD (25 British pounds), this is the most expensive spoon you'll ever buy, just don't blame us for buyers remorse.

The Philips AJL308 7 inch Digital Photo Frame and Clock Radio came out of left field for us. It is the first digital photo frame that tries to also be an alarm clock. Can you imagine the challenge for the Philips engineers and design team: How do you create a user-friendly alarm clock, while also being a sexy photo frame.

For the most part the Philips AJL308 delivers on this challenge. It looks both like a photo frame and a high-end alarm clock. Part of the reason this device gets away with it is because it has a piano black face. This allows the buttons (also in piano black) to blend with the rest of the face. The button labels are in small white type so they are barely noticeable from far, but legible up close. Of course, if you are not a fan of black, this will automatically disqualify this frame from your list, and we wish Philips would offer a few other color choices like white or brush nickel.

The interface of the Philips AJL308 is slick and one of this device's highlights. Picture Mac OS X widgets and you'll have a good idea as to how this frame displays typical calendar and time information. What you find useless as a computer widget, on this device it makes perfect sense.

You also have the ability to customize the display by choosing from four different wallpapers: red, blue, green, and purple offering a nice variety to coordinate with your existing room decor. Additionally, you are able to chose which image is displayed as your default for the alarm clock display by clicking through your images in your USB/Media Card device. There are a few things we would like to see improved though. One of those things is the ability to set tell the device to randomly select a different picture each day for the alarm clock display. Two, it would be nice to open up the image browser to select the picture for the display.

One of our fears with the Philips AJL308 was that the display would be too bright during the night time in a bedroom setting. To combat that, the Philips AJL308 allows you to set auto dim settings. We set the machine to auto dim at 11:00pm and come back to life at 8:00am. It worked flawlessly. You also have the ability to dim the device at any time by pressing the dim button at the very top. Fears vanquished. On a side note, we cleverly came up with another use for this feature: If you have the AJL308 in your living room, you can set the auto dim to activate and save electricity while you are away at work.

The sleep feature is also very useful since it will play relaxing music for a pre-determined amount of time that you select. There are a total of four pre-set sleep tunes in the machine.

As a digital photo frame the Philips AJL308 is average. The resolution and picture display should be better for the price range. The lack of WiFi connection is also a disappointment for us. Imagine the ability to play slideshows from an RSS feed from your Flickr account. That kind of functionality would have made the Philips AJL308 the most versatile digital photo frame on the market.

Other features in the Philips AJL308 include: solid audio support (MP3, WMA, JPEG, DivX and MPEG4 file), FM radio (though we wonder why this device is not showing AM some love), two alarms, and SD/MMC media support.

Retailing for $139.99 the price is a bit steep, but the concept is refreshing. Although this device receives high marks from us, we recommend you wait for version 2.0 of this device. By then, we hope they Philips provides more color options for the display, improves the device's display capacities, and introduces more flexibility. However, for those not willing to wait, this photo frame is as feature rich as it currently gets and it performs surprisingly well.

THE GOOD
- Loaded with options
- Greatly designed and engineered
- Awesome user interface
- Great concept

THE BAD
- Display is average at best

WHERE TO BUY
Amazon

MANUFACTURER
Philips USA

Designed by Tomas Erel, Wallover, is a wall light fixture that can also act as a console capable of carrying a load of up to 44lbs. When you place and object on the lamp, the light engulfs it with dramatic shadows. You can build your custom Wallover by choosing the color and by choosing the lamp style. Colors include: white or black gloss, mirror polished stainles steel or brushed stainless steel. Light types include: large (S012) or small (S011 pictured here).

Ready for the price? 4.300 Euros.

The unique art style of the k studio pillows is what pulled us in. Small clean lines with art resembling characters from Tim Burton movies with a mix of European summer cartoons. Pillows are available in organic cotton, hemp, recycled wool, as well as recycled polyester and of course offered in many different color combinations.

Prices for pillows start at $134 for the smallest size (14") and go up from there, so expect to pay a premium for these guys.

The Emerson iTone iC200 SmartSet Alarm clock radio claims to be a good bang for your buck. Service Villa research labs put it to the test to see if the claims are true.

When we plugged in the Emerson iTone iC200 SmartSet Alarm clock unit, the smart set feature did exactly what it was supposed to do: It automatically incremented the time and accurately displayed the present time, month, day, and year. We were very impressed by not having to set the time of the alarm clock at all. After that, we went through all the menus and felt they were relatively easy to navigate even without reading through the instruction manual. The remote control, although lacking some features, did the basics and did them well.

Testing of the radio didn't go so well. The Emereson iTone iC200 SmartSet had no reception and we were unable to listen to either AM or FM stations in the heart of Miami, Florida. We thought at one point that there must be an antenna we forgot to plug in or something, but after reading the manual it states that the antenna is built into the power cord. After noting this we began moving the power cord and the radio and still nothing. We took the unit out of our labs with a long extension cord and still nothing. We felt this was one of the most important features of the alarm clock because odds are you won't wake up to any alarm if you can't hear it. To give Emerson the benefit of the doubt, we went to a local store where they sell the unit and tried a different one. It seemed to have the same problem.

Disappointed, we decided to try the iPod dock that is built into the unit. To our surprise, it worked remarkably well. We were able to set alarms using the iPod and the sound was relatively good compared to other systems of the same price range. Alarms could be set to ring Monday - Friday, all seven days of the week , or just weekends, which was an excellent feature and worked well with the iPod.

Another thing that we didn't like with the Emerson SmartSet Alarm clock was that we could not set the time ahead by a couple of minutes like many people like to do to trick themselves into getting up earlier. It felt odd we couldn't actually set the time we wanted.

All in all, if the radio would actually work, it would be a great buy, but since it doesn't, we thought the Emerson iTone iC200 SmartSet Alarm clock was a bust. Instead of purchasing this unit, we recommend the iHome iH9 for its better sound quality and functionality, all for just a couple dollars more.

THE GOOD
- Automatic time set
- Good sound quality when connected to the iPod
- Good iPod connectivity

THE BAD
- Atrocious AM/FM Reception rendered it useless
- Can't manually set the time ahead

WHERE TO BUY
Amazon

If you are looking for a small and affordable ball head for your DSLR stop right there - you just found it! The 488 from Manfrotto - Bogen is a remarkable piece of equipment for the price. Our photographer here at the Villa clued us in on this product when he purchased one for our studio.

This ball head, although small, is remarkably strong - it can hold up to 17.6 Lbs, which comfortably hold our studio's Nikon D300 or equivalent camera. The height of the head is 4.25 inches and it has a 3/8" female thread to connect to your tripod. The best part of this head is that it has a tilt of -90 degrees +90 degrees and a pan of 360 degrees, which has its own independent lock from the actual ball that holds your camera. This is great for producing panoramic shots. We liked the 488 over the 486 for its extra weight support and independent lock lever for the pan. If the pan is not important to you, then the 486 is an even cheaper alternative, but we figured for an extra 30 dollars the feature is worth it.

We didn't find any faults with the head, except that it could be a bit too heavy, but then again, that's what gives it its strength.

To sum it all up the Manfrotto - Bogen 488 RC2 is an easy to use affordable ball head that attaches firmly to any camera, features good stability, and a large range of motion.

THE GOOD
- Provides great stability
- Solid construction
- Great pan controls


THE BAD
- Somewhat heavy

WHERE TO BUY
We found the best prices at:
Amazon.com at $107.00 with free supersaver shipping.
Adorama, one of our favorite shops, has it for $110.00 + shipping.
B&H Photo has it for $109.95 plus shipping.