Mocoloco.com's host erroneously believed that spam (probably spoofed) was coming from the Mocoloco.com domain, and took the site (and affiliated email accounts - they claim to have sent a warning a few minutes before taking the site down, but since they shut down the email accounts as well there was no way to see the warning). Of course we at MoCo Loco are not spammers - we don't even maintain a legitimate mailing list, let alone one used for bulk mailing. Hopefully Hostway will realize they have made a very grave error and will restore our site on Monday morning. We seem to be back, hopefully permanently, but we are unsure how long.

We continue to await news from hostway.com on how they have resolved this - but if you can't get through later, you know what happened.

Metro design and sell some of the smoothest, nicest-looking - and creative! - office furniture I've ever seen. This stuff takes "office" to a whole new, and much more appealing level. Celebrating their 100th year - the firm was founded in 1905 just across the bay in San Francisco - the Oakland firm has continually put as much attention into how their products fit into the human and physical environment as how well they'll sell. Every aspect of the design process is guided by careful and repeated study of people in action in their own workplaces, not performing for the ergonomicist (is that a word?) but rather doing what they need to do all day.

+ Metro: 7220 Edgewater Dr., Oakland, CA 94621
+ t 510.567.5200
+ f 510.562.2915

San Francisco taxi driver and furniture designer Michael Farruggia enjoys detail, both in the intricacies of the city's streetmap and in his own work. Trained at the California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland, Farruggia is also the creator of the Planet San Francisco wooden globe / street-map on display in the Ferry Building's Port Commission Hearing Room. His work, primarily in wood, includes bent ply and flat-pak techniqes as well as other creative uses of the material.

+ Michael Farruggia
+ tel 415.823.4593

Emeryville design studio Zuo Modern couple simple lines with bright colors, looking for the confluence of the "wow, this feels solid" axis with the "that looks so cool" factor. Amazingly, they are able to do this, and still incorporate the all-important "that is a great price" variable.

+ Zuo Modern: 5746 Hollis, Emeryville CA 94608
+ tel 510.655.3929

Stanley Saitowitz has become, in his tenure in the bay area, almost as integral a part of the modern Bay Area look as his forebears at EHDD and MLTW. Now teaching at UC Berkeley, Saitowitz is a critic of San Francisco's Victorian style, at least in how it limits the imagination of its residents and architects. "There's nothing at the public level that educates people about architectural options," he laments. "Because people are surrounded by old-fashioned Victorian architecture in this city, that's the boundary of what they know."

His projects include such boundary-pushing modernistic spaces as Russian Hill's Shaw House, the Portrero and Yerba Buena Lofts (pictured), Riverside's Photography Museum, Boston's New England Holocaust Memorial, the new San Francisco Embarcadero Promenade, UC Berkeley's Visual Arts Library and lots more.

+ Stanley Saitowitz Office: 1022 Natoma St, San Francisco CA 94103
+ tel 415.626.8977

A mix of eclectic offerings, from contemporary and mid-century modern furniture and bits and pieces of bent-ply to all sorts of weird ephemera - antique statuary, one-of-a-kind lamps and light fixtures, ancient chrome alarm clocks. Fans of typography will be happy with the selection of old metal letters - principally from retail and industrial signage - for sale.

+ Swallowtail: 2217 Polk St., San Francisco CA 94109
+ tel 415.567.1555

"At the Hotel des Arts, you are not limited to just observing art; you can live it!" - and, between the art gallery, the hotel's own painted "art rooms" - where pretty much every bit of available space has been done over in the style of any one of sixteen local artists - and the minimalist modern furnishings of the guest rooms that blend seamlessly into the background, you will be subsumed by art. Reservations at the des Arts' "painted rooms" can only be made by calling the hotel directly.

+ Hotel des Arts: 447 Bush St., San Francisco CA 94108
+ tel 415.956.3232