The Times photo studio was abuzz (and aflame) earlier this week as we re-created an October 1951 Los Angeles Times Home Magazine cover, swapping out the furniture of the past  with California design of the present.

As readers may recall, inspired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's authentic restaging of that 1951 scene, earlier this month the Home crew took key elements -- indoor armchair, patio chair, planter, fire feature and so on -- and nominated contemporary California designers and manufacturers who embodied modern living. We added a category, pet beds, to acknowledge the larger role that pets play in our lives (and our pocketbooks). Then we asked you to vote.

Photos: California design readers poll, nominees and winners

More than 6,700 votes were cast, and the designs pictured in the photo at top represent your favorites, assembled and staged by writers David A. Keeps and Lisa Boone with an assist from Katy McNerney. Your choices -- a rechargeable LED outdoor lamp, a computer-cut room divider and more -- spoke volumes about what modern living means today.

In thinking about California design that truly embodies the idea of modern living, the Home crew kept returning to the new ModSeries shelving system created by Bernard Brucha, founder of Mash Studios in Venice.

Why? Take a look at this adorable ModSeries video and you'll discover what won us over: a modular system that has a clean, Scandinavian vibe coupled with practical versatility.

The components are shipped flat and assembled at home with one Allen wrench (included), but the construction is solid: The system is based on cubbies made of powder-coated steel uprights and shelves made of wood (shown in pine here but available in other finishes). Each cubby is 24 inches wide, 13.5 inches high and 15.5 inches deep, and it can be configured with doors (plain wood or upholstered), drawers or a drop-down desktop, right.

The units can be built as nightstands, dressers and low media consoles. Construct them as tall towers joined together and you've got a wall unit that appears to float on thin, metal plate legs.

For pricing and delivery time: Mash Studios, (310) 313-4700.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will open “California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way” on Saturday with a 60-year-old magazine cover brought to life. An October 1951 cover of the L.A. Times Home magazine has been re-created as part of the exhibit, complete with plastic Eames armchair, Van Keppel-Green cord patio furniture and other pieces of modern living. It's a scene that Times editors presented with the headline: “What Makes the California Look.”

Full article: LACMA re-creates 1951 Home cover

“People are still clamoring for accessible modernism, and these pieces fulfill that desire as well as speak to interest in the past and in how people lived when there was promise and hope, the dawning of a new age,” said Bobbye Tigerman, co-curator of the show. “It speaks to contemporary desires and hearkening back to old times.”

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"California Design 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way"

Time-lapse video: Eames House living room moved to museum

Eames House launches preservation project

-- David Hay

Photo: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Plant a pomegranate and the hole you dig drives straight through time -- Persephone deep, founding fathers deep. Pomegranates are in Greek and Persian mythology, the Bible, the Koran, on the seal of the British Royal College of Physicians. Scholarly gardening articles cite pomegranates as having figured in gardens in the Colonial Carolinas. Spanish settlers brought them to California. Search the botanical name Punica granatum in technical journals and you find the chemists at L’Oreal are onto them: Pomegranates are named in a new patent for shampoo. Health publications carry studies on the anti-oxidant properties. Martha Stewarts everywhere recommend dried pomegranates for Christmas wreaths.

But gardeners can turn up a lot of trivia without learning one key fact: how to tell when they are ripe. 

After cutting through a hard but reasonably ruddy pomegranate that has been slowly maturing all summer, I can impart this: A first step to knowing when a pomegranate is ripe is taking a beautiful, glossy fruit, cutting it open and discovering that the juice around its clustered seeds is plentiful enough to squirt and garnet enough to stain. Juice famed for its balance of tartness and sweetness, complexity and high sophistication was barely there in mine. What was there was sour.

D. Landreth Seed Co., a Pennsylvania operation that dates to 1784 and bills itself as the oldest seed company in America, faces an uncertain future as a Friday fundraising deadline approaches and the threat of closure looms. 

Owner Barbara Melera said D. Landreth Seed Co. is deeply in debt and has until Friday to pay back a $250,000 note to one investor that was due in 2009. As of Thursday morning, the company had raised about $120,000, largely through a frenetic Facebook campaign to sell $5 catalogs.

"Our accounts have been garnished because I haven't been able to pay back legitimate debt," Melera said. "If we don't figure out how to pay these notes back soon, we have no access to operating capital and we will have to close."

The desperation has been evident on Landreth's Facebook page, where the company announced that it was trying to sell 1 million catalogs to pay off the $250,000 note and other debt. Melera's plan was to take orders and then, based on customer interest, print an appropriate number of catalogs to minimize waste. She said 1 million catalogs would cost about $3.5 million to print and produce a profit of $1.5 million -- enough to cover what the company owes various parties.

The catalog is filled with hand-drawn illustrations (shown above), color photographs and articles from the 1800s. "It is filled with stuff that you will never see anyplace else," Melera said. "Articles written in the 1800s about creating a family kitchen garden or how to build a forcing frame because most Americans couldn't afford a greenhouse at that time."

When Melera took over Landreth in 2003, the former investment banker thought she could turn the company around in three to five years. She said it actually took seven years to make an annual profit.

One key factor Melera hadn't anticipated: the cost in modernizing the company's equipment.

"There were no computers, no website or copy machines," Melera said. "They printed labels by typing them individually on a Smith Corona typewriter. They did their accounting on index cards."

She has been optimistically waiting for some organization -- a foundation, perhaps -- to step forward and "buy 10,000 catalogs and distribute them to their friends and fans."

Meanwhile, the Facebook campaign and resulting messages spreading through social networks have played out as a separate drama, eliciting not only suggestions on how Landreth could raise money, but also attacks on the investor behind the $250,000 garnishment and even some criticism of Melera's management of the company and the fundraising campaign.

Attempts to reach the investor, Liz King, were unsuccessful, and her attorney did not return a call seeking comment.

Melera, an inveterate gardener, said she was drawn to the Pennsylvania company because of its historical significance. According to company history, it introduced the first zinnia seed for sale in the United States in 1798 as well as the first white potato (1811), first Bloomsdale spinach (1826) and first tomato seeds in America (1820).

The 2011 Solar Decathlon won't announce its overall winners until Saturday, but the University of Maryland entry pictured above placed first Wednesday in the architectural design category. On Tuesday, a team from Purdue and a combined team from Parsons the New School for Design in New York and Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey tied for first in the affordability category. Their energy-efficient home designs were estimated to cost less than $250,000 to build. 

Photos: Solar Decathlon 2011, the houses inside and out

The engineering judging will be announced Thursday. As 20 teams rack up points in the U.S. Department of Energy's biannual competition in Washington, D.C., Maryland has moved into the overall lead, followed by Ohio State, Purdue and Middlebury, pictured below.

Updated at 12:40 p.m.: In the Thursday judging of the engineering category, a New Zealand team from the Victoria University of Wellington placed first. The entry from the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and Caltech in Pasadena took second.

In the overall standings, Maryland remained in first, Ohio State in second, Purdue in third. The SCI-Arc and Caltech team surged into fourth. More judging to come; look for final results over the weekend.

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Photos: Caltech and SCI-Arc's CHIP house

Article: Caltech and SCI-Arc at Solar Decathlon

The bizarrely complicated world of recycling

 -- Craig Nakano

Photos: Stefano Paltera / U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon

Such is the life of a TV designer: When we initially interviewed and photographed former "Design on a Dime" star Kristan Cunningham and Scott Jarrell at the end of July, the couple -- fresh from a move from Venice -- had finished decorating a 1925 Los Feliz house and were expecting Cunningham's new show on Oprah Winfrey's OWN network to premiere in September.

Fast-forward two months: Surprise! Cunningham and Jarrell already have up and moved once again.

Cunningham confirmed this week that the couple just moved to a downtown Los Angeles live-work loft because of a snag in their lease. "We were very proud of the way our Los Feliz home turned out," she said. "But when our lease renewal was coming up, we started having discussions with our landlord about our need to have an option to film inside the house. She really didn't want that."

So now, the loft downtown.

Despite the hassle of moving furniture, art and collections once again, the serial decorators see the potential of another blank slate. "It's 3,200-square-feet of raw, unadulterated space," Cunningham said.

The OWN show, meanwhile, remains a work in progress too, with no premiere date announced yet.

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Photos: The house that isn't Kristan Cunningham's anymore

Photos: The other house that isn't Kristan Cunningham's anymore

Eames House living room installed at LACMA

-- Debra Prinzing

Rejuvenation, the lighting and hardware specialist based in Portland, Ore., has opened the company's third showroom in a restored 1931 Art Deco building across from H.D. Buttercup in L.A.

One pleasant surprise: The spacious and inviting store has much more than lighting, including a mix of new and vintage furniture and accessories including doormats, barware, pillows, Bauer pottery, candles and coffee-table books. The salvaged finds such as the funky neon sign and rope coffee table that I saw during my visit add a sense of fun.

Because the store is divided into different categories -- Midcentury Modern, Classical Revival, Arts and Crafts and more -- shopping for period pieces is a breeze. Prices range from $8 for a juice glass to $12,000 for the vintage table shown below. Store manager Doug Grooms said most lighting falls in the $100 to $6,000 range.

One area of the new store lets you see the effects of different lightbulbs. You'll also see installations of doorknobs,  light switches, hinges and hooks. (The selection includes period switches for, say, a Craftsman home.) My favorite vignette: intricately detailed vintage lights rewired for sale at the back of the store. 

A grand opening party is planned for 6 p.m. Oct. 13. Proceeds from a silent auction during the event will benefit People Assisting the Homeless in Los Angeles. Reservations are requested.

Rejuvenation is at 8780 Venice Blvd., a location that many people think of as Culver City but that's actually Los Angeles. (310) 400-1872.

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Sneak peek: New from West Elm

New designs in room dividers and screens

"Nano House: Innovations for Small Dwellings"

-- Lisa Boone

Photo credits: Lisa Boone

Shredded paper can be recycled in Los Angeles' blue bins, but it needs to be enclosed in a plastic bag or some other container to prevent the small paper pieces from flying out as the bin is emptied into the collection truck.

Because policies and recommendations can vary from city to city, each week we ask a sampling of officials from various municipalities to weigh in. Can you recycle shredded paper in ...

Burbank: Yes, if placed in a paper bag. The city prefers that shredded paper be dropped at its Recycle Center in the white paper bin.
Glendale: Yes, if placed in a clear plastic bag, paper bag or cardboard box.
Long Beach: Yes.
Los Angeles: Yes, if placed in a bag or other container.
Manhattan Beach: Yes, if placed in a bag.
Riverside: Yes.
Santa Monica: Yes.
Torrance: Yes, if placed in a sealed bag.
Unincorporated L.A. County: Yes.
Ventura: Yes.

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Can I Recycle, the series: PlantBottles, milk cartons, plastic utensils and more ...

-- Susan Carpenter

Photo credit: Los Angeles Times

Community Garden Dispatch No. 49: Oxnard Senior Vegetable Garden

“We all chipped in and planted this plot for the old-timer,” John Pardee says. “We let him come in and harvest. He’s about the oldest one here.”

At the Oxnard Senior Vegetable Garden, that’s saying a lot. Ora Cole, the garden president, is 82. Foster, her husband, is 74. (That's the couple, above.) To be eligible for one of the 17 plots, a gardener has to be older than 55.

The garden is next to a fire station on Pleasant Valley Road in Oxnard, its home since moving in 2003. It had been behind another fire station on Hill Street for 30 years, closer to the Wilson Senior Center, the garden’s primary sponsor. A local Eagle Scout found the new site, and he and the gardeners cleared the weed-choked lot and built a small meeting hall. They lowered the dirt by about a foot and used a Rototiller to break up the hardpan.

A lawn is out front and a low chain-link fence is thick with climbing beans, an English variety that a friend of Foster Cole’s sent. The beans do well, but the cool weather this close to the ocean results in mold for some plants.