But we never showed what actually happens over the course of a week as the tightly-closed bulbs open and bloom. So we photographed the hyacinths that we’d plunked into a Smarta bowl from Ikea about 5 days ago. All we had to do was water them lightly every few days. Over days we watched the plants transform in front of our very eyes. We realized that we had actually created a tiny tabletop garden, whose subtle changes we could enjoy daily.
We are completely smitten with the pink-washed walls in this photo from the Milan Furniture Fair. It looks like plywood to us (or we imagine it as that) color-washed with an incredible shade of pink…(though it may also be a surface unevenly painted in close shades of flat pink paint)
It made us start thinking about the possibilities for not simply painting plywood uniformly opaque, but washing it with rich ever-so-slightly-diluted paints in unexpected colors so that the grain shines through and the surface is made interesting by imperfection.
At The Chive, we came across a list of 16 simple solutions to some everyday dilemmas: a virtual, visual Hints from Heloise. We’ve found some incredibly useful, like using bread bag tags as cord labels (of course, with our obsessive minds, we’d go looking for stylish tag in a color we like: white! – and might trim it to a cooler shape).
David Saltman reports that he’s been using the strategy for getting an elevator to go directly to the floor you want, useful for emergencies (Note: We recommend reading Mary Reynolds thoughtful comment below.) read more…
When Design Within Reach launched the Sapien bookcase, it seemed like a brilliant idea: a bookshelf that allows books to be stacked vertically over five feet high, to form a neat stack from which you could easily remove any book. CB2 promptly knocked off the rectangular-pillar-with-removable-shelves-design. We bought one, then rued the day. The problem is, once the bookshelf is loaded with books, it becomes too heavy to move, a major flaw for something that is really about living fluidly, the opposite of built-in shelving.
So we devised the perfect hack: a ready-made set of wheels (originally made to hold metal file boxes) that fit the Sapien base perfectly. read more…
We knew that changing the shape of a sofa’s or bed’s legs can be a simple way of jazzing up lines and look AND that there are lot of options around for unfinished wooden legs of all shapes and sizes. And we’ve written before about mask-painting one or all the legs of a table or chair. But we hadn’t thought of putting the two ideas together until we saw a how-to on the French blog Morning by Foley.
By by masking off parts of the an unfinished wooden leg with tape, you can create all sorts of designs – subtle and not-so – that lend a pleasing detail to a bed or sofa; read more…
Lately, we’ve come across some extraordinary uses for OSB – oriented strand board (also known as waferboard) – a cheap, strong, durable building material made from pressed tree chippings and resin. It’s generally been viewed as garbage, something to use for structure and hide, until open-minded designers started to explore its potential and beauty.
Architect Carl Turner’s use of it to clad the interiors of two barns borders on obsession; it is everywhere as itself: as walls, beds, sofas, benches, even an interior pod that houses a bathroom and utility room. read more…
Today Remodelista featured Garde, a new shop in Los Angeles that sells “stylishly understated” housewares. We are smitten with the poplar-top table’s Garde’s owner Scotti Sitz designed to display her wares, and which are available by custom order.
The bases appear to be an ingenious use of simple copper plumbing pipe. We’ve thought of all the times we’ve found ourselves in the plumbing department of our local hardware store, mulling the possibilities for copper pipe, t-joints and other fittings. Copper, left uncoated, is beautiful shiny or dull.
We recently came across a photo essay of a home decorated with vintage fruit boxes. We’re talking some kind of obsession here. They’re all through the house as furniture and storage solutions, like the bed and shelves above, and this kitchen island on wheels… read more…
We are smitten with this room divider featured a while back on IkeaHackers: it is a rather visionary transformation of a simple material by Marloes van Heteren of SOLUZ and Remco Wilcke of CUBE Architecten. Clear glass Ikea rectangular vases, in two sizes, were painted white inside, to make reverse-painted glass, a compelling material we posted some time ago. They are used as “bricks”, staggered with light shining through, and cemented with strong transparent glue.
The effect is of a curiously light wall that can be made in a variety of shapes to define a space, read more…
Today, not for the first time, we mistook an artwork for a household object – a mirror actually. We saw this work by Winston Roeth at YouHaveBeenHereSometime right after seeing some images of mirrors and our brain said: “Wow, what a great deeply-orange painted mirror! Why don’t we make one of those?!!” Then we scrolled down and read the copy. We looked back and realized there was no shiny mirror surface after all, but pure geometry on canvas.
Beautiful. So we read about Roeth and looked at some pictures.
We still loved the idea for a deeply orange-framed mirror, inspired by Roeth (whose work we can’f afford) and went hunting around for how to make, or get, one. read more…
Practically, pegboard is masonite (tempered hardboard) with holes punched in it to hold metal tool holders. Visually, pegboard is polka dot masonite that can be painted any color. It is cheap, strong and light (a 4′ x 8′ sheet costs around $20). At Coffee Supreme, they use pegboard in all sorts of ways: as a surface, above or as a simple, polka dot wall…
Our friend Maria Robledo has an ever-improvisational way with “flower” arranging. Here, she cut sprigs of a fragrant vine from her garden and arranged them running down the center of her dinner table, placing the cut ends in shallow ceramic bowls of water to keep them fresh. Perfect. Come to think of it, jar lids, especially the glass lids from French canning jars would work as well….
(Video link here.) Cara de Silva sent us this video with a short note: ”…there is something quite caring (and “scientific) about her approach.”
Indeed Korean Artist Jihyun Ryou cares so deeply about our relationship to food that she has researched traditional methods of food storage used before refrigeration was available, looking for ways that might be more sustainable AND forge a closer relationship to the foods we eat. Then she designed elegant, minimalist solutions -tools that are also lovely artworks – based on this traditional oral knowledge.
I believe that once people are given a tool that triggers their minds and requires a mental effort to use it, new traditions and new rituals can be introduced into our culture.”
Ryou views fruits and vegetables as being alive, and teaches ways to nourish and interact with their aliveness. We especially like “The Breathing of Eggs”, a poetic explanation of the logic of storing eggs outside the fridge and how to tell if they are fresh. read more…
available at the supermarket; 
