Welcome to Window Shopping, a weekly exercise in lusting over home products we want in our homes right the hell now. This week: a sophisticated, yet funny stand for your glasses, the AC of tomorrow and more.
Windmill
Little thought goes into purchasing an air conditioner. If it cools the room, and doesn't run the electrical bill through the roof, then it's a solid pick. But if you haven't noticed, air conditioners are kind of ugly — they're clunky little boxes, and for some reason they all come in white, which eventually turns brown and dingy yellow. Windmill is a new window AC unit that looks far nicer than any unit on the market right now. And it has the features to boot: a dual air filter, quiet cooling, minimalist LED display and superior air flow (cool air blows up and out for efficient room cooling). Additionally, like any good modern home appliance, the 8,500 BTU unit connects to an app for remote control. This thing triggers my trypophobia, but I still dig it.
Craighill Eyewear Stand
I have three pairs of sunglasses and one pair of eyeglasses. At any point of the day, not including my sleeping hours, one of those pairs will be on my face. The other three will be strewn across my dresser. Craighill's new eyewear stand, a dainty cast brass pedestal, offers a worthy settling place for each pair of spectacles. The stands are $48, but my frames give me the gift of sight, so the least I can do for them is to give them a respectable place to sit. Also, when placed on the stand, the eyeglass-stand combo looks a bit like Groucho Marx — a funny little Easter egg from this sophisticated little stand.
OffLimits Cereal
The cereal aisle is in a sad state of affairs. You buy colorful, delicious sugar or grainy, brown cereal that does its best to let you know just how little you'll enjoy eating it. OffLimits, a new cereal brand started by breakfast savant Emily Elyse Miller, who literally wrote the book on the meal, would like to fill the gap in the middle. The two launch cereals – coffee & cacao and vanilla & pandan – are also cartoon characters (Dash and Zombie respectively). The coffee-flavored cereal – the pieces are in the shape of Reese's Puffs – has coffee in it and will serve as a replacement (or supplement, at the very least) to a morning cup. Its counterpart, lower in sugar and packed with adaptogens, is designed for the opposite use case. Both are available now.
Chef's Press
Your old grill press is not worthy. Especially not in comparison to the Chef's Press, invented by San Francisco-based chef Bruce Hill, who has over 30 years of restaurant experience. The Chef's Presses are thin 11-gauge stainless steel weights available in an eight-ounce ($13) and 13-ounce ($18) option. The slotted design allows for steam to escape, and it makes it easy to stack and combine multiple weights so you exert the right amount of pressure on your food. Give a panini-style sear to your grilled cheese, weigh down your meats to marinate and fully submerge your plastic bags for sous vide. Even Kenji Lopez-Alt gave Chef's Press a seal of approval.
The Landing
Very few people are out furniture shopping right now, and direct-to-consumer brands are making it even easier to get high-quality, affordable furniture delivered directly to you. The Landing is a new online platform that sources a bunch of DTC furniture brands (such as Burrow, Article, Inside Weather) and lets users arrange and furnish a virtual room. Share your designs with a collaborator, and they can put their touch on your arrangement. The Landing is free to use, pieces are for sale from the website and it's a great way to kill time designing a make-believe room.
Junzi Pantry Essentials
Junzi Kitchen is a chain of fast-casual Chinese restaurant with locations in Connecticut and New York. The restaurant specializes in rice bowls, noodle dishes and chun bings, or Chinese wraps. The restaurant is now launching Junzi Pantry Essentials, a box of pantry staples (I'm amped about the Junzi chili oil) to recreate iconic Chinese-style dishes Like Omsom's ramen-style flavor packets for recreating Vietnamese lemongrass barbeque, Thai larb and Filipino sisig, Junzi's sauces, teas, seasonings and snacks are like eating out without the whole "eating out."
