(Video link here.) When this very resourceful couple found that they didn’t have the money to build even the traditional brick envelope of their 20′x40′ lot in Brooklyn, they used 5 shipping containers and went from there. It’s a totally inspiring and charming story of perserverence and outside-the-box (!!!!!) thinking, as well as a swell house tour for us space voyeurs.
In the new Spring Design Issue of New York Magazine, artist Maira Kalman talks to longtime neighbor and friend Isaac Mizrahi about how Tel Aviv has influenced her New York apartment. The two images of Kalman’s apartment shows a warm, personal, comfortable, loose space, very different from the stark interiors of so many other designer’s homes. Kalman calls her apartment a “cabinet of curiosities” and indeed it appears to be. The suit hanging in the picture below was worn by Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini.
For the renovation of my 1,000-square-foot ‘Laboratory’ in New York City, my mission was to open up the space to the spectacular park view AND fluidly accomodate an open kitchen, workspace, dining area, and living area. To do this, I removed a small bedroom to dramatically expand the main room and built an office area along one 15′ wall in the big space. The pressing question then became: how to “disappear” or close-off the office so I could “leave” my work? (This is the great dilemma of people who work at home; I learned the hard way that sleeping where you work is NOT a good idea.)
I discussed the problem with Scott McFarlane, an interior designer I consulted with early on in the project. A curtain won’t do”, said Scott. “It’s not substantial enough. You need to close your work off with a WALL, that will really make you feel it’s gone.” He thought for a moment. “I remember seeing a mechanism that was basically flat panels that roll on a track to become a flush wall that would conceal the office. When you rolled them back to reveal the office again, they would “nest” in a specially built nook.”
When we saw this image featured under Bedrooms on a design blog, we instantly thought: what a great solution for jazzing up a place, like the drab walls of a rental studio a friend is struggling to make into a home, however temporary. We started looking into services that make wall murals, imagining cool images from ourarchive wrought BIG.
First we came across Murals Your Way, a service will make any high-resolution image you have into a 6-x-4-foot mural on canvas, fabric-backed vinyl or a repositionable material. If you planned it right, you could forge a really huge mural by seaming together smaller panels. Murals Your Way’s faq gives a sense of what’s possible, and there are A LOT of possibilities.
Then when we were hunting around for the photo credit for the bedroom image, above, we discovered that the mural came from Pixers, a company that sells bespoke wall murals read more…
Two images spotted on Japanese Trash recently opened our eyes to the possibility of using geometic cuts of plywood veneers as a wall covering. Ah, no, on closer inspection, the fireplace surround above appears to be stone…but it COULD be done with plywood…
Why not?
To get a sense of range of possibilities, we recommend read more…
Recently Dwell featured a slideshow of Brooklyn architect Tim Seggerman’s design to renovate a dismal brownstone studio with a sleeping loft. He was inspired by legendary furniture designer George Nakashima to “create an enveloping cabin of blond woods”. He managed to make a tiny 240 square foot space seem expansive by using the blond wood panels to disguise clever storage and cubbies. read more…
Scraggly, unkempt electrical cords can be the bane a well-designed interior. At L’Ouvrier Restaurant in Toronto, black electrical cords are wound and tacked onto walls in spirally designs, turning a normally ugly element into something visually pleasing, without trying to hide it. read more…
French by Design recently featured Veerle Wenes‘ unique home in Belgium that serves as both residence and gallery. We recommend taking the full tour for the wealth of design ideas the images hold. Take this foyer, for example, with unique, diy-able peg hooks that run horizontally and vertically, not to mention the swell two-legged plywood desk affixed to the wall, the rough brick-and-concrete floor, and sheetrock walls brought right down to the floor and unfinished by the usual molding.
We also like the the sheetrock ledge in the bedroom that that acts both as a headboard and as a display for beautiful and/or usefulobjects, set against a slate-colored wall. read more…
(Video link here.) About 6 months ago, we got an email from Merete Mueller, a friend of a friend who was just finishing up a film about the Tiny House Movement.
The film, “TINY: A Story About Living Small” follows Christopher Smith and my attempt to build a tiny house from scratch with no building experience in the mountains of Colorado. It also explores the lives of other Americans who have downsized their lives into houses smaller than the average parking space.
We’re interested in innovative design and environmental sustainability, but most of all, we’re interested in “Home”—how we find it and how we know when we’re there, the small, strong details that make us feel comfortable and at-ease in a place.
Through homes stripped down to their essentials, the film raises questions about sustainability, good design, and the changing American Dream, and what we REALLY need to live well and happily. It’s also the story of Merete and Christopher embarking on a project without knowing what they were doing; they could LEARN what they didn’t know. And did. (TINY just premiered at South by SouthWest, an independent film festival. Way to go!!!!)
We already love the film for this wise nugget:
For some people bigger isn’t necessarily better.The world gets a lot bigger when you begin to have more cash and time. read more…
Architects SMLXL Studio seems to have a real THING for shipping pallets, which they’ve used all through a tiny two story apartment in Prague. In many cases, it seems they took they pallets apart and reconfigured their components: thick blocks and slats to custom make furniture the exact size they wanted. Pallet has clearly become aesthetic… read more…
Over our many years of traveling to West Virginia, we’ve admired a number of eccentric, cozy dwellings, including a school bus with a giant stone hearth built onto it, nestled by a river. But this shack we spotted at Cabin Porn incites serious envy.
A couple named Lilah and Nick built the Sunset House using lumber from a barn on their property which was cut and milled from the land by the previous owner many years ago. All the windows are reclaimed from junkyards over their history of thrifting together. read more…
After I had figured out the essential plan of the multi-functional space that was to become my home and ‘the improvised life’s Laboratory, I started bringing friends by to get their opinions and input. I also hired an interior designer to consult for a short time, to consider my ideas, challenge them, add to them, as well as help source the many items I would need, from sinks and plumbing fixtures to door knobs. Hiring a consultant for a fixed amount of time is a good strategy if you you’re don’t have the resources to hire a someone to see the project though, or don’t need start-to-finish service.
I met Scott McFarlane through friends and liked ideas he’d come up with for their recent renovation, as well as his attention to detail. Although I have a strong design sense, it was clear that there was A LOT of things I could use advice on. I hired Scott to consult on critical elements of my plan so architect Emily Johnson could draw up plans that contractors would understand. Scott and I spent many hours in the empty apartment busting holes in walls, tacking up images I’d clipped from design blogs, measuring, brain-storming.
Scott came up with A LOT of clever solutions to some extreme design problems (all pictures below are from the in-process days of the reno). For starters, read more…
When we were renovating the bathroom of our new place, we chose a wall-hung sink in order to make the small 7′x5′ room look bigger (vanities take up a lot of space and close things in – see below). We were very careful to give the plumbing sleek lines to keep the spare look, at a good deal of thought and effort and $$ (nice looking p-traps cost more than garden variety ones…starting at about $50 bucks and going up well over $100 for fancy, moderne ones). It isn’t easy to make plumbing look pleasing…UNLESS you take off in a totally different direction…
…and PUSH the visual impact of the the plumbing, as in this photo from a Swedish family home. They used bold loops of PVC, copper, and stainless pipe along with a outsized brass faucet.
Although we LOVE the spare, relatively low-budget and now-spacious bathroom we created (details to come in future posts)… read more…
In an effort to bring more nature into this urban home, Polish architecture firm mode:lina conspired with the own to make a chandelier out a tree branch. “It can not be just any branch!” said the owner, “I will bring one from the place where I used to spend my childhood holidays.”
We’re adding it to our file of tree branch inspirations, started when we started hauling home downed limbs after Hurricane Sandy.
The chandelier seems to be little more than the carefully-chosen branch looped with outdoor string lights and hardwired into the ceiling. It’s one of the best chandelier’s we’ve seen in some time… read more…
(Video link here.) In 2010, Graham Hill, the founder of treehugger.com, bought 420 square foot apartment in a tenement building in New York City’s Soho and, over two years, turned it into a showcase for tiny living.
Hill wanted a tiny space hat would expand to fulfill his wish list which included dinner parties for 12, accommodations for 2 overnight guests, a home office and a home theater with digital projector. He crowdsourced the design as a competition and received 300 entries from all over the world. Two Romanian architecture students won with their design “One Size Fits All”.
Hill’s LifeEdited apartment can be expanded to include the functionality of 1,100 square feet: walls, drawers and beds move and unfold to create 6 rooms: living room, dining room, office, guest office, master bedroom and guest bedroom, kitchen and the bathroom (which morphs into a phone booth or meditation room).
The video shows the transformation and is packed with interesting ideas. read more…
