Recently, the New York Time’s reported that legendary chef Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago will soon open a restaurant that “if all goes according to plan, could be the most difficult, ephemeral and stressful in culinary history.”
In his new restaurant, Next, the menu will change radically every three months; it will, in essence, become an entirely different restaurant, drawing from a different place and time: the classical French repertoire of Escoffier, Kyoto in springtime, Palermo in 1949. It might even be designed around a single day. (Next’s website is spectacular.)
Having been awarded three Michelin stars for Alinea, and survived tongue cancer (with the threat of losing his sense of taste), Achatz seems to be programming personal and professional challenges for himself. Achatz’s view is that success in such a potentially difficult endeavor depends less on cooking skills than on creating great systems (which he and his team will plot out weeks in advance on an spreadsheet). We were mulling this idea over as we looked at the slideshow of Achatz’s artwork-like dishes when we suddenly focused on the picture of him and his partner standing under bright yellow scaffolding during Next’s renovation.
Our mind began to fly with ideas for things we could construct with scaffolding and it’s endlessly configurable lacquered metal parts.
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…
After reading our post on painting fabric-covered furniture, Stacey Harwood sent us an email about her great “guest” chair. “I knew a white chair would not stay white for long in my NYC apartment so I bought some fabric markers and I invite our guests to sign it. I’m happy to say that it has been signed by some of our most celebrated poets: Mark Strand and John Ashbery are toward the top; Charles Simic is on the seat. You can also distinguish Jim Cummins, Susan Wheeler and Star Black (poet, collage artist, photographer). To the lower right is Gabriella Gershenson, a senior editor at Saveur. On the left is Deborah Landau and Richard Howard…”
Harwood’s husband, David Lehman is series editor of the annual The Best American Poetry books, which is how they come to have to many fine poets and writers as friends. Their blog is The Best American Poetry.
“It’s a wonderful record of the first two years in our apartment and truly a one-of-a-kind piece that gives us much pleasure.”
Harwood improvised a whole other order of guest book…
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….That long list of poets made us poke around the internet to read some poems. Here’s a beauty by Mark Strand: read more…
Browsing through our archive, we found this image we’d filed several years ago of a desk designed by Gerrit Rietveld, the Dutch minimalists architect and furniture designer, known for his iconic pieces made out of ordinary crates. We were surprised all over again by the range of Rietveld’s vision for furniture made of simple pine boards. Made the early part of the 20th century, they hold their uniquely modern feel due to their thoughtful lines and colors. The 1934 desk has become a sculpture (now worth thousands of dollars).
“. . .a piece of furniture of fine wood, made wholly according to traditional methods, is shipped in a crate to prevent damage and breakage. Someone receiving such a crate at home says, at most: well packed. But it has never been established that such a crate represents a freely rendered method of carpentry aimed straight at its goal. The plain materials of which it is composed make it stronger than its precious contents. . .Therefore, there must finally be someone who chooses the crate instead of the piece of furniture.”
The endlessly clever Wary Meyers, designer and author of Wary Meyers’ Tossed & Found: Unconventional Design from Cast-offs, sells cotton canvas pillow covers that he’s painted with acrylic paint, which is pliable. He mimics the look and feel of famous Abstract Expressionist works – like De Kooning, Pollock, Kline, Motherwell. The pillows are backed with velvet or corduroy, and filled with down and feathers. You can buy them here for $145 or…
Why not do-it-ourselves? We’ve been seeing painted upholstery all over the place (see below), and then remembered that we’d written a post about fabric paint some time ago. This takes the idea a step further, using acrylic paint, which comes in a glorious range of colors, including precious metals. Why not paint just about anything made of a textile: bedspreads, shower curtains, upholstered chairs…? Check out these gold-spliced chairs from Anthropologie’s exhibit of New Orleans artists…read more…
It is amazing what a little paint can do to transform a shipping pallet. It even makes the rough grain and embossed printing look good. Add some industrial wheels (which you can get in colors) and you’ve got a swell coffee table (with magazine storage built in)… read more…
We love this swell makeshift seat from Ikea’s Christmas blog (in Swedish): a stack of oversized books with a pillow on top. It’s comes close in simple brilliance to our favorite from last year: the chair bench, made from a few chairs and a long board… read more…
Last year, we were invited to the collective Thanksgiving dinner of several families. One person oversaw the wines, turkey and stuffing; others made desserts and side dishes. Another improvised the huge 16-foot-long table that would seat 18 hungry grown-ups and children. It was not until we were helping deconstruct the table at the end of the evening that we realized it was made of two 4-x-8-foot sheets of plywood placed end to end on our host’s dining table.
Plywood is a fine, inexpensive material for making tabletops in a variety of shapes, from rectangles, to squares to rounds. Since the table will be covered with a cloth, it doesn’t really matter what the plywood looks like – whether veneered or not. Thickness should depend on the supports underneath; it shouldn’t bow. (If you are a person who likes to have plywood on-hand for projects, then it makes sense to buy what you will re-use).
Last year’s table-maker happened to have a huge Frette linen tablecloth (from a past life) just large enough to cover. At party last summer, he cut open a new duvet cover to make a huge tablecloth that went to the floor. We’re fine with “piecing” tablecloths – that is, overlapping whatever we have one hand to make a patchwork. But many fabrics will do, from sheets to bolts of linen and cotton on line, to muslin doubled up.
And of course, plates, silverware, napkins and glasses will invariably be cobbled together from different sets to make the right number, with great charm and warmth.
Years ago a friend devised an interesting table top to use for big dinner parties. She had two half-circles cut from two 4′x 8′ sheets of plywood. Then she hinged them together at the straight sides with a piano hinge. It opened up like a book to become an round 8-foot-diameter table top which she placed, hinge-side-down, on her smaller round table (the base). She covered the rig with a pale yellow linen cloth and set it with her best china and silver. Her guests never knew what lay beneath the beautiful setting. To store the top, she folded it in half and slid it under the sofa where it stayed, out of sight, until the next party.
Our rough map of how to make it is below. You can make any size top you wish using this method. We recommend the biggest size that you can a) balance safely on whatever base(s) you have, and b) are able to store easily (figure the length, width and height when folded). Or use the essential idea to make a hinged rectangle that would fold to hide under a bed or behind a door, similar to the one we wrote about a few weeks ago. Folding sawhorses make a good base (we keep a pair in the closet). Check out our d-i-y on making a huge rectangular table out of plywood.
We think the gradated paint on the vertical back posts of these wooden chairs gives them great character and charm. You could order them done from Colonel, OR buy some nice-looking chairs at an unfinished furniture store and d-i-y, using a slightly darker shade of paint from one post to the next.
Tara Mann alerted us to Mashable’s slide show of unusual offices. We especially like this impromtu cardboard office designed by Paul Coudamy, who cleverly used corrugated cardboard as walls and shelves (more photos follow). Of course we instantly started hunting down that really thick cardboard that’s so perfect for making furniture like this chaise… read more…
Our new favorite fantasy material is Concrete Cloth: a flexible cement impregnated fabric that hardens when hydrated to from a thin durable water and fire proof concrete layer. This video and a pdf about it gave us lots of ideas. You can drape it over forms to mold it into shapes, like these sculptural chairs and sofas read more…
We were looking at this photo of a work table of artist Dieter Roth on display Hauser & Wirth gallery, admiring its design, and its sculptural base…and started to wonder if those V-shaped supports were not simply upside-down wooden sawhorses affixed to a slab of plywood. read more…
We spotted this great table at MC&Co, a Brooklyn-based company that makes furniture and household accessories (including copies of a Donal Judd daybed and a Rietveld outdoor chair)…It’s a hinged rectangular laminate top set on ash saw horses. To expand the table, you lift the top, open it like a book and set it back down on its base.
It’s a great idea to copy…cut two equal rectangles of veneered or Baltic birch plywood, attach them with hinges and set it on some cool-looking sawhorses (check out our round-up). Gear the size to suit your space and needs…(and the width of your sawhorses)…
Aaron Trindar of Film:Motion:Music made this wonderful video about desks of creative people and how they think about them, and what sort of desk makes them work best? Some, like Designer Massimo Vignelli‘s remain an austere clean slate, others like Einstein’s, a wild jumble of papers and notes. This video made us reflect on our own occasionally harsh judgements about our desks, as we bought into the popular notion that the chaos of papers revealed the chaos of our own thinking – NOT! – rather than a very personal unique, often quirky creative process. This illuminating and somehow comforting video will make you view your workspace in a new way.
It also reminded us of a photo we once saw of the desk of Alexander Calder, one of the Twentieth century’s most influential sculptors and inventor of the mobile. read more…
on Amazon…
, sells cotton canvas pillow covers that he’s painted with acrylic paint, which is pliable. He mimics the look and feel of famous Abstract Expressionist works – like De Kooning, Pollock, Kline, Motherwell. The pillows are backed with velvet or corduroy, and filled with down and feathers. You can 
(which you can get in colors) and you’ve got a swell coffee table (with magazine storage built in)… 
