We view this beauty of a floor as a kind of coloring book for adults: paint a color within the lines of each floor board and look what you get, the ultimate d-i-y, pattern already built-in.
(Practicality: be sure to lightly sand and prime the floor before painting…)
The harsh reality of white-painted floors like the ones in our ‘laboratory’ is that they are prone to scratching and losing their pristine look FAST. Since our plywood floors were painted a beautiful oyster shell white (THAT story to come in a later post), it has been our personal challenge to GET OVER the fact that they will get nicked, scratched, stained and who knows what else…
The solution: to view them as a canvas to paint as we wish, when we wish, WHAT we wish. We’ve started a mental file of possibilities. The zig-zag pattern on this rug would translate easily to being painted on the floor read more…
(Video link here.) Artist Tom Sachs, who we’ve posted about a number of times, recently made a video about plywood. He LOVES IT, uses a lot of it in his work, and has learned a great deal about handling it, which he summed up in this charming, illuminating video. It is totally after-are-own-hearts: in our the ongoing renovation of our Laboratory, we’ve made – and are making – all sorts of things from plywood…like the floors read more…
The focus this picture from Remodelista is DIY: High-Style, Low-Cost Party Decor, but our eye went right to the checkerboard “painted” floor…NOT with the usual opaque paint, but with a wash of diluted black and white paint. It stains the wood so its character still shines through: a wonderful solution to jazzing up and inexpensive pine floor.
We’re always on the lookout for interesting painted floor ideas and love this modernist pattern painted onto the naked wood. This ‘freeform’ design would have to be done with care, with a series of stencils, we imagine, shapes carefully cut out of big sheets of thin but firm plastic.
We started to imagine other “moderne” designs that would be great on a floor and thought of the great Alvin Lustig, who designed book jackets, textiles, magazines and interiors in the 40′s and 50′s. The graphic elements from these book jackets these be swell: read more…
We written before about “rugs” painted right on a wood floor. When we saw the actual rug in this picture, we thought: how great would THAT be painted on the floor. So now we’re looking at geometricly patterned rugs, as possible templates for our painted floors.
Soon after, we stumbled on a picture in Reference Library of Yoshifumi Nakamura’s Seven Chairs, from the Exhibition of Chairs for Children at Chihiro Art Museum. Look at that geometrically pieced rug! Another beautiful design inspiration for painting floors. read more…
We recently stumbled on a cool post at French by Design illustrating ways to define space by painting walls in unexpected ways. We especially like the illusion of sunlight make be using tones of grays and whites, and the blue paint defining the start of a new space: read more…
(Video link here.) We love this installation at one of Issy Miyake’s stores: computer-controlled electric fans sending little gusts and sculpting an ethereal fabric. We wish we could translate the idea to home but think it’s beyond our reach. BUT we could take the idea of the etched-looking floor that we saw early on in the video, read more…
We never cease to be amazed at the uses people have come up for shipping pallets. Their boxy form naturally allows for building block type constructions of all kinds. DE-constructed, they afford an unpredictable variety of rustic, often beat-up woods, in roughly 2 or 3-foot lengths. The chicest application we’ve seen lately are these floors made by Arctic Plank.
Arctic Plank “upcycles” the salvaged wood boards, though doesn’t say exactly what that process entails. It looks to us like they sand, stain and finish the boards to create a unique patina. To deal with the short lengths of wood, they smartly cut the planks to make in zigzag, herringbone or parquet patterns. These look much more finished than aligning boards vertically, which makes for a rag-tag look that has a completely different kind of charm. Arctic Plank‘s floors got us thinking about just what the possibilities for shipping pallet floors might be… read more…
We stumbled on this crazy-great painted floor artist Matthieu Lavanchy on the very out-there/interesting 2thewalls by New York designer Keehnan Konyha (Slide show of his apartment here; we couldn’t find any actual info about him.) + (Warning, 2thewalls has been likened to “falling down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland”. It’s easy to get lost looking at all the wild stuff.)
We spotted this charmingly painted wall of a Berber house in Ouno’s great post about the beautiful “broken” geometry of Berber rugs from the Beni Ourain region. We were intitially inspired by the idea of chalking or painting an image/pattern like this on the side of ANY building – a sort of mental d-i-y fantasy – when we got blown away by this bit of text about the rugs, which applies to so much else.
“this semi-controlled disorder is said to function as a talisman against evil and as a promoter of fertility. But it also seems to emanate from the nomadic culture’s more general tolerance of uncertainty, nothingness and change.”
The rug themselves offering curiously modernist designs to apply elsewhere, perhaps for painting fabrics, walls or floors. read more…
To our minds, paint is about the easiest way to give something a new look without spending a lot of money. We have a special fondness for painted floors, since floors are a pain-in-the-neck and expensive to replace. We stumbled on this inspiring idea while leafing through Artists’ Handmade Houses: the sublime yellow floors Constantino Nivola painted in his Long Island home.
Nivola was given the yellow tractor paint he used to coat the kitchen floor by the Mobil Oil Company, for whom he did a commission. When the sun hits this remarkable surface, the room is bathed in a honey glow. —Michael Gotkin
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…
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…
Spotted in Annaleenas HEM: taping down an electric cord with a charming warning…the opposite of the usual mass of gaffer’s tape. We’re thinking this would encourage people to step OVER the cord rather than stepping on it as gaffer’s tape does. We’re wondering how long it would stay in good shape.
It also makes us think about taping down electrical cord with a multitude of colored tapes in stripes or other designs that are not about hiding what’s going on, but making it a design element. Artist Jim Jambie‘s wonderful floors come to mind… read more…
: the sublime yellow floors 
