Always on the lookout for more ideas for impermanent pop-up rooms within rooms, we were taken by a work by Zimoun, a sound artist/sculptor who builds different kinds of white noise into structures.We love his room of interlocking slabs of notched cardboard, made like a house of cards, and imagined building a smaller version that could be stored when no longer needed, stacked and tied in a bundle, in the closet. read more…
Kava Gorna for The New York Times
The best thing we found in the recent New York Times’ Design and Living Magazine was Bud Wise, a story and slideshow about making arrangements out of ordinary deli/supermarket flowers. Having found ourselves many times looking blankly at the mishmash of seemingly uninspired offerings at the corner store for a bit of REAL to perk up our table, and spirits, we found the advice given by Sarah Ryhanen and Nicolette Camille each of whom run floral design studios (Saipua and Nicolette Camille Floral Designs, respectively) in Brooklyn. They also operate the Little Flower School, through which they give classes in various locations. They give some really good advice about choosing and handling flowers, what amounts to a set of four loose principles you can apply to fit your own sensibility and budget; it’s worth reading the reasoning and info they give for each one. read more…
Charlie Allenson
Our friend Charlie Allenson had a big birthday a few days ago, and we had big plans to give him a shout out that day and find ourselves, THE DAY AFTER, having been swept away by..everything. Damn. Charlie’s at the jazz festival in New Orleans so we thought we’d publish some of the very cool photos he sent us when he was in Vietnam recently. They are right up our alley of totally, seriously, charmingly improvised LIFE that seems to happen everywhere there, like the floating villages of Ha Long Bay. This house, above, appears to be floating on oil drums and styrefoam block. There is no supermarket; a market boat makes regultrips to each floating house.
Charlie leads workshops in adaptive thinking, so he’s got an eye for just that. We especially like read more…
Sally Schneider
For years, we’ve been amazed at the clever and imaginative solutions our friend Holton Rower has come up for his various spaces – both at home and work. Take the chic leather cabinet pulls we’ve been seeing around at high-end housewares stores, for $20 + a piece. Holton starting making leather pulls twenty years ago to use in an apartment and has been making them himself ever since. They are nothing more than a rectangle of leather folded in half and held fast with a roofing nail – a common nail that has a particularly large flat head and a fat shank that holds fast to wood. Holton is an artist who knows about all sorts of materials and how things work, knowledge to which he applies his acute visual sense (check out the 1.6 million hit YouTube video of one of his paintings). He likes the dot within a rectangle that the pulls make – evocative of Bauhaus. read more…
We were interested to see Ikea’s blog Livet Hemma‘s recent take on an idea we posted months ago: clipping boxes together with big binder clips to make somewhat freeform and sculptural shelving. We looked at their iteration of the idea, wondering if they’d seen our post, or if they’d just thought it up themselves. We were reminded of the startling way that an idea can shoot up like spring crocuses in many places at once, as though it were in the air. And that part of the nature of creating things is culling ideas that already exist and tailoring them to suit your own vision. To quote film maker Jim Jarmusch: “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonated with inspiration or fuels your imagination…” (Check out the full quote in the previous post.) The Ikea shelves are a great example.
What ideas would we steal from Ikea’s version of clipped-together shelves (that they may have stolen from us)? What would we change? read more…
We recently saw a business card after our own hearts. Dave Hakkins made a stamp the same size as a normal business card so that he could stamp it on ANYTHING. He cuts out card size rectangles of paper, cloth, cereal boxes and then just stamps them: each one is a surprise. By this method, he’s managed to address what he likes and doesn’t about the classic business card:
“The good thing about business cards is that you have something touchable, what’s bad is that it always costs material and you will probably never hand out all the 500 pieces.” read more…
On the lookout for flower pots with sleek modern lines, we love this one made from a hacked Ikea lamp. Says creative hackeress Heloisa Fiasco of Raleigh, NC:
“I bought this ceiling lamp at the AS IS section of Ikea. When I saw it I thought it would be the perfect modern flower pot that is so hard to find for an affordable price.
It already has an opening in the bottom where the wire would normally go. Instead the water can make an exit through there now.”
via Ikea Hackers
We’ve always loved the white painted floors that are especially prominent on Scandinavian design blogs and magazines, like these from the home of Danish stylist Sidsel Zachariassen. We wondered what the secret is to making them both pristine and durable. We found the answer in a Dwell slideshow about the smart, frugal renovation of a small two-bedroom apartment by two very clever Finnish designers who weren’t afraid to d-i-themselves.
“It took Susanna several layers of sanding—and then finally tossing her water-based paint and selecting the proper oil-based formula—to get the floor as white as she’d envisioned. But she couldn’t be happier with the result. ‘The apartment looks bigger when there are white surfaces for the light to bounce on,’ she says.”
Patient sanding between coats + the right paint are the keys. Add this information to this great how-to from Real Simple, read more…
via Chez Pim on Flickr
We love this alt-flower arrangement spotted in Remodelista’s post about Sitka & Spruce, a restaurant in Seattle: herbs – here, thyme and rosemary – in a little vase. (A pretty glass would do.) This would be especially great in high summer when herbs are abundant, fragrant and often in flower. We found this nice looking set of three bud vases
Related posts: little makeshift vases
Sally Schneider
Wine writer Anthony Giglio, who entertains a lot and gives some of the BEST dinner parties we’ve ever been to, alerted us to Broke and Chic Projects “The Top Ten Rules for Throwing a Thrifty & Super Fabulously Chic Dinner Party Every Time You Entertain“.
In his email, Anthony wrote: ”Number 5 being the quote that caught me. It’s not as polished or “literate” or “writerly” as it could be, but the meat is there.”
5) DIY is Just Another Word for Couture. What people with unlimited budget for entertaining have that you don’t have is the ability to buy other people’s labor. That’s all. If you are willing to put the labor in, to do it yourself, you will have the most delicious food, fabulous drinks, and nifty dinner party ever. To buy a luscious cake for 12 people will cost you somewhere near $100 to make it less than $10. It’s that simple. By starting in advance and lavishing love and attention on what you are making (like a couturier) you will have perfection.
DIY is Just Another Word for Couture = right-on perfect!
Thanks Anthony!
Related posts: d-i-y expandable table pt.2 (rectangle) for holiday and other celebrations
anthony giglio’s secret weapon: a china marker for home entertaining
www.sha.org/bottle/wine
In a recent post at Radmegan: In Words and Pictures, crafty blogger Megan described improvising watering globes out of glass Coke bottles. Watering globes, commercially sold as Aqua Globes
We wondered: why use an ugly bottle with a label when there are so many beautiful glass bottles to be had? Why not figure out some pleasing-to-look at solutions? Our favorites for many years (and many purposes) are wine bottles with the labels soaked off, which allows you see their form: sensual, sculpture, subtly-colored. (We especially like the elongated bottles used for Albariño – a perfect summer wine from Spain. ) read more…
via Emma's Design Blog
Every morning we scroll through A LOT of blogs looking for delicious/interesting/useful ideas and improvisations. Lately, we spotted some Ikea pieces buried in features about stylish interiors. Our view of Ikea is that when it’s great, it’s really great, like the Alto-esque stacking stools they used to sell for $12 and the geometric rug, above, that we blogged a while back. And then there is Ikea that becomes great when used cleverly…
Take this very basic Ikea PS metal cabinet for $99, for example… read more…
Yoshie Nishikawa
The Interventionist’s Toolkit, Mimi Zeiger’s long and illuminating essay in Design Observer, tracks the effect the recession has had on inspiring frugal, improvisational strategies for urban spaces around the world. When there’s no money for traditional architecture projects,” Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism” take root. We’ve excerpted the sections of Zeiger’s piece that are chock full of examples, with links to explore.
“These days vacant lots offer sites for urban farming, mini-golf, and dumpster pools. Trash recycles into a speculative housing prototype (see the Tiny Pallet House). Whether it’s The Living’s Amphibious Architecture or Mark Shepard’s Serendipitor, the built environment speaks through mobile devices. Retail spaces hit by the recession are fodder for reinvention, as the art organization No Longer Empty transforms unleased storefronts into temporary galleries. Even the street itself is reclaimed. REBAR’s annual initiative, Park(ing) Day, urges global participants to use a pranksters wit to turn parking spaces into pocket parks, one quarter at a time. (If you don’t feel like reading much, just click on the links, or scroll down for our favorites…) read more…
Trevor Tondro for The New York Times
Living in New York City, we are obsessed with space: how much can we pack into not enough of it and still have it look clean and spare? Having 900 square feet, we imagine living in 450, to challenge our ingenuity. So we were smitten with last week’s New York Times article with slideshow that featured a 200!!! square foot apartment that is both clever and charming. It is the home of Malena Georgieva, a young interior design-smitten emigre from Bulgaria, done on a budget of $1,500.
First great idea: just about all the seats in the apartment swivel, to face either the “dining area” or “living room”. read more…
Ethan Greenbaum
Artist Ethan Greenbaum‘s work gave us lots of idea for home works made of concrete block. He has figured out ways to make them seem both light and somehow charming, by using plasticine and colored acrylics instead of cement as grout. Plasticine is a kind of clay that won’t harden so maybe it actually IS a good idea for certain homemade pieces where you don’t want the commitment of concrete, or it’s permanence. We love the idea of painting the cement grouting with Greenbaum’s whimsical colors, to transform a dreary block wall.
We also love Greenbaum’s plasticine-covered block structures; although the always-soft plasticine might not be feasible in the long run, it makes us wonder what would be: what could we coat concrete blocks with to give them a surprising and less heavy look, while preserving blocks’ elemental form ? And his idea of combining blocks of different sizes is a revelation, making us see ever more possibilities for “random” assemblages of concrete blocks as table bases, bed platforms, odd storage units… read more…
