Today, as part of–oh, I don’t know…let’s call it some sort of ad hoc Spring Training-and-refresher-course-in-conservation, I happened across this little tidbit on page 127 of the New York Times Bestseller, The Little Green Book:

Get ceiling fans and use them instead of air conditioning. It costs just a penny an hour to run a ceiling fan versus sixteen cents an hour for a room air conditioner and forty-three cents an hour for central air. More than 75 percent of U.S. households use air conditioning and in doing so waste $12 million per household in energy costs when ceiling fans would do.

If you’re like me, which I know you are, otherwise you’d be in your King George wingback nodding off to Ivanhoe instead of on the edge of your Aeron with the rest of us design geeks, the trouble is not going green. It’s finding a ceiling fan that doesn’t look absolutely hideous. 

As Fate would have it, my Spring Preview edition of the Chiasso catalog arrived like a white knight in the afternoon mail, and there, on page 49 (in clear; page 55 in wood) was the answer: Artemis!

Admire her ravishing beauty yourself. Gone are the gimmicky, homespun and ethnic features that threaten to turn every hallway and hideaway in your home into a theme park.

Near flush to the ceiling and quiet, you won’t feel like a whirlybird’s buzzing you at night, either. Even the remote (for the fan and sleek halogen light) is smart and civilized.

Best of all, when energy costs do creep upward, and they inevitably will, you’ll be as cool as ever.