Ellen Silverman
Over the years, I’ve furnished my living spaces with second-hand furniture, scavenged from flea markets, thrift stores, Ebay, and occasionally, found on the street. Early on, I didn’t really know what I was doing; I just bought stuff whose look I liked, that I could use, that seemed well-made. I’d clean the wood with Briwax
In the process of scouting second-hand furniture, “my eye” and understanding inadvertently read more…
We can imagine lots of ways to use this 16-drawer cabinet from Ikea, PS Sinka($249). It is made out almost entirely of solid birch (except for drawer bottoms and back), so doesn’t stand the chance of being chipped like a laminate. It could be easily taken off its base and hung on the wall, placed on floor on a lower plinth of stand, or stacked – imagine four, 2-by-2…
All those drawers are perfect for collections and projects…
Here’s what a stylist Lotta Agaton did with it… read more…
Kenyon Yeh
“The process is liberating and brings a limitless attitude of possibility creating unique furniture instead of doing such a thing that made by forces”
We know what he means. It IS a liberating idea.
And now that we’ve heard that Ikea is planning read more…
Norwegian Elle Interiør
A quick glance of these paired photos on Emma’s blog made us unconsciously splice the two ideas together: ‘salvaged wood bedside or sofa side table’, we thought…fine idea. There is so much great salvaged wood around these days, that can be easily cut and stacked askew to great effect…
Related posts: Blog Find: Daniel Hales ‘Serendipity Rising’
We find something incredibly compelling about Marjin Van der Poll‘s Do hit chair: hammering a chair out of a metal cube with all one’s strength, testing it out, and then pounding and hammering and testing over and over until it takes shape. The cube is smashed full force with a hammer, until it becomes… something else, a solution.
“Do hit… is an interpretation of a chair by Italian designer Enzo Mari, the ‘sof-sof chair’. Its complex looking frame to me seemed a result of good craftsmanship but as it turned out it was one of the first examples of spot welding in the furniture industry. This contradiction between craftsmanship and mass production became the concept for the chair. Do hit started as a small copper model which I beat into a tiny chair with the pointed part of a hobby hammer. The cube would be easy to produce industrially and would be moulded into a chair using a hammer. Repetition of the beating only strengthened the concept…
The Do hit can either be shaped by its owner or by me. I have shaped many Do hits and look for an expressive object with large folds which I then polish to make them stand out. Each Do hit therefore is different as I can only create the global shape of seat and backrest and have to react to the detailed form taken on by the metal as it is being shaped. This is a great challenge every time.”
Of course, we followed the trail back to Enzo’s Mari inspiring chair, designed in 1971 read more…
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This wondrous chair was posted on Atelier a while back, unattributed. (We searched its roots using TinEye, but didn’t come up with anything). This strangely elegant little sculpture of a chair made us imagine going to the lumber yard – even an art supply store would have this wood – and getting out a hammer and nails to follow the path of this design; it is so beautifully clear and forthright.
(If anyone knows who made this chair, please send us an email…)
Andrea Zittel
While we were writing about Andrea Zittel the other night, we stumbled on a post from her blog called “Still Working on the Kitchen Table“.
The photo shows one of her half-done billboard paintings on the kitchen table, in a living space that is clearly in action, work and living woven together. Even though Zittel could try discipline herself to work in her studio – a shipping container fifty feet from the house – she doesn’t. She works where it feels best, and things happens organically…
“When I was twenty and studying art in undergrad, I house sat for my parents one summer and built my entire senior show in their kitchen. I remember the feeling or horror one day when cutting out a shape with the jigsaw and accidentally making a slice into the tabletop that my mother had hand stained when I was an infant. Three decades later and I’m still making most of my work in the kitchen…”
We wonder how many BIG THINGS in the world were figured out at the kitchen table?
(In the background, you can also see the cardboard shelving we were so taken with…stuff beginning to be stored in it.)
Related post: Andrea Zittel: Investigative Living
Rum Magazine
Lately, we’ve been seeing planks and bits of salvaged wood being used in bold geometric patterns to enclose bathtubs, and kitchen islands, make headboards and floors… Pieced together like a puzzle, with a good eye, “rustic” changes curiously to modern. read more…
When we wrote about clipped-together cardboard box shelving a while back, we mentioned wanting to paint the cardboard boxes – coat them with something to change their look (we were thinking rubber paint) – knowing that the cardboard would swell slightly and become….something else: not smooth but sculptural, possibly even stronger once it had dried. After a few comments to the effect of: “bad idea…YOU CAN”T paint cardboard”, we put the idea aside. Then we saw Andrea Zittel’s wonderful cardboard construction, with its cryptic blurb:
“For the last year there has been a teetering pile of cardboard boxes precariously stacked against the dining room wall. Today the masterpiece was finished and installed…. Walla!”
Look at that!!! we thought as we sailed from one website to another discovering Andrea Zittel. FOR YEARS she has been following her imaginings and exploring ways to define and organize space, question assumptions about it, experiment with new ways and systems for living.
Zittel’s not-quite-finished website is all about her work as a – WHAT? -, an installation artist-designer-sculptor-lifestyle thinker and investigator… She is the driving force behind A-Z West,”an institute of investigative living” read more…
Ellen Silverman
One of the details we loved about Lydia Wills’ apartment, featured yesterday, are the folding stools hanging on the wall in the foyer. They look great, take up no space and are perfect for a million uses, as extra chairs for a dinner party, side tables, a place to sit and take off your boots…On their own, they are lovely little sculptures. They were designed by Roger Tallon in the late ’70′s. Lydia described how she stumbled on the stools and what she discovered about Tallon:
“Roger Tallon started out as a product/industrial designer (watches, electronics, typewriters), but his big thing is that he was a TRAIN designer, very well known for the Mexican underground, a trans euro train, and his biggest deal, the TGV Atlantique (!). I found this stool because he also made a little chair that was designed in a similar way that was an even more beautiful sculpture when folded, but it was too expensive on Ebay, so I just entered his name and then these stools came up one day. Since he did trains, no wonder he came up with these little useful folding chairs.”
Here are images of Tallon’s work (including trains, watches and a spectacular staircase)…We came across the little folding chair that led to Lydia’s stools: read more…
Ellen Silverman
Knowing that Lydia Wills was about to move to a bigger apartment, we enlisted Ellen Silverman to photograph her 600-square-foot studio near Gramercy Park. We’ve known Lydia for years and have watched her apartment evolve into a home with lots of good ideas, far too many to cover in one post. So we thought we’d do the broad strokes now and then focus on specifics during the next few weeks. The real story of Lydia’s apartment is that it slowly evolved, as Lydia did, growing out of one thing and into another, as she discovered furniture, fabrics and lighting that resonated with her life.
Lydia has been sewing since she was young and loves natural textiles, which she used to define the space (often incorporating unusual and vintage fabrics). Over years, she discovered and fell in love with the work of Scandinavian and European Modernist designers. She bought some enduring, beautifully designed pieces of furniture and lighting (mostly on Ebay, for a fraction of their cost), like the leather chair by Yngve Ekstrom, the fantastic table by Bengt Gullberg and the chandelier by Eric Hoglund.
Since there is nothing more gratifying than seeing before-and-after photos, we’ll start with a picture of what this apartment looked like BEFORE, when someone else had it: read more…
What is it that we love about this? This wrap job is a whole OTHER thing than a mover would do. The use of twine and rope, akimbo, along with the fine lines of the unseen table (which could be made out of anything), turned it into a sculpture. We’re filing that in our heads for future “transformations” we might try on a piece of furniture we’re tired of, or that need something.
When we were looking around for affordable knobs for a kitchen cabinet we wanted to use as furniture, we spent quite a bit of time hunting for ones that were the moderne shape we liked, only to discover that the finish was awful: too-shiny, too-brassy, too…cheap looking. Since the knobs we found had great lines and were inexpensive, we decided to try hacking them: we sanded them with fine sand paper to take most of the brassy coating off, and bring them down to the base metal (or was it the other way around?). We liked the roughed-up look even better than what we had in our heads.
We LOVE hacking things, customizing them, “overcoming their limits”, as Scott Burnham writes in his the very interesting pamphlet on hacking, “creating new options on one’s own terms”.
Constance Old recently sent us a compelling email: “After our comments exchange on your post about “American Pickers” I had a feeling I might see this table again that location agent Andrea Raisfeld plucked from my car and reworked.”
And sure enough, the little table appeared completely transformed on Andrea and her husband Bill Abranowicz‘s blog A + B See:
“Andrea is a proud dumpster diver. Much of the furnishings in our homes were procured from places other than a store. While we buy plenty, we love the thrill of the find at a tag sale, side of the road pick-up, or thrift store. It’s part of our reduce, re-use, recycle philosophy.
On a recent scout to one of her client’s homes, the homeowner, artist Constance Olds, pointed to a car filled with all kinds of stuff destined for the thrift store. Andrea peered into the back seat, and spotted a small wooden table. Constance originally purchased it at a thrift store to use as her daughter’s drawing table, and had always intended to repaint it herself, but years later still hadn’t gotten around to it, and now the daughter was adult sized. Within hours of getting it home, we had it painted.
I love my dumpster diving momma!”
Now that is Creative Re-Use! Here’s how they did it: read more…
Sometimes there’s no way around keeping a piece of furniture in your place that you’re not crazy about; you either need it (like a file cabinet or storage chest) or you can’t get rid of it just yet (you’re keeping it for the next place). Here’s an example of using a great fabric to hide a piece of furniture, from the fabulous house designed by the great Mexican architect Luis Barrigan that we blogged last week. Laying fabric upon wonderful fabric on the table and folding the corners in neatly makes it look interesting and intentional, rather than like a disguise (though we don’t imagine Barrigan is disguising anything in that house.)
We think, the example from Lonny Magazine, below, works pretty well, though it transmits subtle inklings of “disguise”. We think it would have been much more complete with another piece of fabric, or a runner (even placed front to back) draped over it, a la Barrigan.
