furniture
At
Design Milk, we came across these cool, full-of-possibilities “Chopped” tables by designer
Yuval Tal. They’re made of packs of wooden towels strapped together with a metal ring — no screws or glue needed. We were mulling where to get metal strapping and how to get it tight enough to hold the dowels securely in place, and we found the answer at
Uline, one of our favorite online resources for weirdly compelling and really useful industrial stuff. You can buy stainless steel strapping and seals that you tighten with and a tool called a tensioner. Uline offers have a great
instructional pdf that gave us the gist.
read more…
01.28.13 |
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in copy this!, d-i-y, furniture |
When we started on our obsessive tree riff, hauling home huge logs to make into “furniture“, Pamela Hovland mentioned that Robert Frost spoke standing at lectern made of a giant tree. We’ve GOT TO SEE THAT, we wrote, and Pamela kindly went to the library to scan the image.
And of course, that sent us looking for more examples of tree trunk lecterns and stands. To our surprise, we found this tree trunk bench by Droog. read more…
01.24.13 |
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in copy this!, d-i-y, furniture, inside, nature, outside, quotes |
photo via hno (henk nouwens) flickr
Holton Rower spotted this amazing image on henk nouwens flickr. It is titled ‘The Cantilevered Void House’ and accompanied by these words:
“Standing immobile throughout the day, these vivid objects, with their fantastic shadows on the wall behind them shifting and elongating hour by hour with the sun’s rotation, exuded a kind of darkness for all their color.” Cantilevered structures self-supported over the void. From: The Gormenghast Novels
.
Who knows what the story is, whether the house is real or fake? Is it a fantastical image from The Gormenghast Novels? Comments on the flickr page yielded no info but lead us to a tove of images at The Cantilever Project, which got us thinking about cantilevers: A projecting structure, such as a beam, that is supported at one end and carries a load at the other end or along its length.
We’re smitten with this simple cantilever plywood chair (tiny angle braces clearly showing…could we diy this?) read more…
01.22.13 |
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in buildings, dream houses, elements, furniture, outside, principles |
A rather ordinary chair with good simple lines becomes much more interesting with an assymetrical two-tone paint job. We love that color-blockish thing!
Here’s a chair transformed by two-toned upholstery: mattress ticking and velvet in tandem: read more…
01.08.13 |
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in copy this!, d-i-y, furniture, inside, reimagine |
We’ve long been fans of lighting designer David Weeks beautiful lighting, having been smitten initially with his sculptural Lunette clip-on shades. On December 14th and 15th, Weeks will hold his annual sample sale, where you can buy samples and prototypes of some of his wonderful designs at steep discounts. We won’t be going. We checked out the wattage of the bulbs Weeks’ lights take: max 60 watts for many, and a dim 40 watts for the lovely Shell Sconce, above, as well as the Cement Standing Lamp and potentially-indespensible Pearson clip light,both below.
We don’t understand this dim-bulbism because, read more…
12.04.12 |
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in furniture, inside, lighting |
ollson & jensen
One unexpected outcome of Hurricane Sandy for us was our new obsession with trees, after we saw some mighty ones toppled over and wondered how we could give them a second life. We hauled a bunch of huge heavy trunk parts home and have found ourselves wandering the park daily to check out the progress of the Parks Department in clearing them away, hoping to snag some slices of the massive 3-foot in diameter oak we wrote about. Most of it has been removed, save the huge trunk and roots. Today we counted the rings and figure the tree to have been around 150 years old.
A reader named Susie Flax summed up what it is that hooked us about the fallen trees in an email, along with a link to the very cool sliced tree trunk coffee table above, after our own hearts: read more…
11.26.12 |
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in copy this!, d-i-y, elements, furniture, inside, materials, nature, outside, repurpose, resources |
Bookend (2006), by Helmut Smits
We recently stumbled on Uncopy, a website that collates images of artworks under surprising categories and keywords. As always, we hunted for ideas we could use or that would shake up our everyday thinking. Our thinking was definitely shaken up by Bookend by Helmut Smits. Smits simply placed a book under one end of an classic Ikea Billy bookshelf to set it intentionally askew and make something very ordinary into something ELSE, in one fell swoop.
via Uncopy
Related posts: naked and defiled: book bricks as decorating element?
a perfect set of wheels for making furniture mobile + a great sapien bookcase hack
ikea hack: reverse-painted glass brick room divider
clipped-together shelving pt. 1: wood (help needed)
clipped-together shelving pt. 2: cardboard boxes
11.20.12 |
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in art, elements, furniture, inside, inspiration blogs + sites, reimagine, why not? |
photo: nana bech
When we wander around the city and see a discarded shipping pallet on the street, we mentally embrace its instant and deeply pleasurable design challenge: What could we make with this?
Lately, we’ve seen them cleverly used as day beds, with minimal work on the pallet itself, unless you feel like finishing or painting them. Stack ‘em and top with a foam slip-covered cushion. read more…
11.12.12 |
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in cheap + great, copy this!, d-i-y, diy, furniture, how-to, materials, reclaim, repurpose, resources |
Recently on Unconsumption, we spotted these cool little cardboard benches made by A4A Design in Milan. The post mentioned that A4A has been a pioneer in designing cardboard furniture; that sent us looking for more, which we found at Inhabitat — a whole slideshow of them.
Anaylizing A4A’s designs, we realized that much of their furniture is made of stacked and glued sheets of honeycomb cardboard, a super-strong, lightweight and easily cuttable material. Since we know that the great Uline sells big sheets of honeycomb cardboard in thickness of 1/2″, 1″ and 2″ we thought: why couldn’t we make our own cardboard furniture? read more…
11.08.12 |
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in copy this!, d-i-y, diy, furniture, how-to, inside, materials, resources |
photo: sally schneider
Not long after I dragged the tree sculpture home, I went back into the park to see what was happening with the huge, ancient 3-foot-in-diameter oak that Hurricane Sandy brought down. The parks people had been cutting it up — terrible to see. They just sawed it apart into chunks to chip; think of the beautiful wide boards or public seating it could have made…
I had no idea what I’d do with a big rough-hewn oak log, but figured it would be worth grabbing one before they disappeared, while the Parks Department workers were gone and the police weren’t patrolling. I found one a foot wide to haul home that was so heavy, I couldn’t get it on the 12″ round 3-wheeled dolly
I had brought (having loaned my trusty folding hand truck
to a neighbor). As I was struggling, a West African man came up to help. He lifted the log onto the dolly, then said thoughtfully, “You need something to pull it with”. I rummaged through my knapsack and found a bungee cord. Sela figured out a way to attach it. He told me that over time the tree would dry out and become less heavy; then he went on his way.
read more…
11.05.12 |
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in d-i-y, diy, elements, furniture, inside, materials, nature, outside, reclaim, resources, strategies, wheels |
Ever since we saw Brazilian sculptor Hugo Franca‘s wondrous furniture hewn from fallen trees, we view the occasional fallen tree the many trees blown down by Hurricane Sandy in our nearby park as POSSIBILITY. Franca has turned the big trunks into places for people to lounge, read, hangout, play in Sao Paulo. We want to “beam” ourselves there to take one of his workshops. read more…
10.31.12 |
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in cheap + great, d-i-y, furniture, materials, reimagine, repurpose |
photo: sally schneider
While walking in the woods upstate last week, we came across this ad hoc bench positioned across from a massive, ancient tree. The bench had been forged out of the forest’s own materials, without nails. We love the asymmetry of the stump pillar on one side, and the pile of flat rocks on the other, supporting a thick slab of sawn wood, bark intact. The bench was completely stable and comfortable, and the wood slab ample enough to lie down on, to look UP into the mighty tree. read more…
10.25.12 |
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in copy this!, d-i-y, diy, furniture, materials, nature, outside, resources |
photo: courtesy of tillett and rauscher inc
We were instantly smitten with this kitchen, for its spareness and simplicity (on the upper East side of Manhattan no less), but especially for the marble slab table with a rough, unfinished edge. Such a simple detail to leave undone, yet the effect is bold and surprising. It could be done with any stone surface.
It is the vision of D.D. and Leslie Tillett, influential post-war textile designers whose townhouse on the Upper East side of Manhattan served both as family space and workspace for the textile design and printing. They are the subject of a retrospective that has just opened at the Museum of the City of New York. “D.D. liked surfaces to have broken edges. She had a ‘Wabi-sabi’ aesthetic,” says her son Seth in a recent New York Magazine interview.
We’re going to run over and see it as the house appears to be full of adventurous design ideas. In addition to rough-edged table tops… read more…
10.24.12 |
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in cool spaces, copy this!, floors, furniture, hard, inside, materials, paths + processes, people, textiles, why not? |
photo: jill krementz
Although our borrowed cabin in the country was not quite as spare as Charlotte’s Web
author E.B. White’s enviable makeshift work space (in his boat shed overlooking Allen Cove in 1976, pre internet), we are refreshed by going minimal for a week, in nature and quiet.
We were so intrigued by White’s utterly simple, focused space, that we browsed some of his essays
. We were amused and heartened to read of White’s eloquent stuggle with “stuff” in “Goodbye to Forty-eighth Street:
For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. I am impressed by the reluctance of one’s worldly goods to go out again into the world. During September I kept hoping that some morning, as if by magic, all books, pictures, records, chairs, beds, curtains, lamps, china, glass utensils, keepsakes would drain away from around my feet, like the outgoing tide, leaving me standing silent on a bare beach. But this did not happen… read more…
10.23.12 |
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in furniture, inside, paths + processes, people, quotes, solutions, working |
