photo: mikołaj molenda, jacek majewski
We are completely smitten with this jazzy floor at Relaks Cafe and Bike Repair Shop in Warsaw, Poland. Conceived of by Super super and Moko Architects as a low-budget flooring solution, it’s a modernist mosaic made out of scraps and offcuts of plywood, chipboard, mdf, maybe some cork and non slip rubber tiles… read more…
photo © melissa catanese,
We stumbled on some compelling photo placemats done as a public art project for Atlanta Celebrates Photography: photos printed onto large size paper, perfect IF you have a big color printer. The standard size of a placemat is 12″ x 18″, bigger we can print, although we suppose, we could have them done at Kinko’s.
The photo placemats got us mulling what we have around besides our roll of kraft paper for making some impromptu placemats. Our 11″ x 14″ pad of Strathmore Drawing Paper 
photo: christopher hirscheimer
Our friends Christopher Hirscheimer and Melissa Hamilton, creators of the wonderful Canal House cookbook series, have a friend in the appliance business who keeps offering to get them a big new stove for their kitchen studio. NO, they keep saying, We love our little side-by-side stoves!
Every great dish Melissa and Christopher come up with is cooked on their two vin-ordinaire gas stoves, which makes for eight burners and two ovens. And those very same plain little stoves appear in photographs of their unselfconsciously stylish, comfortable kitchen.
Which begs the question: What kind of stove will really help you to cook happily and easily? The answer, we’ve found, is read more…
PegandAwl/Etsy
Spotted at the PegandAwl Etsy shop (above) and Martha Stewart Living (below) simultaneously: bath tub trays/desks made out of a wood (reclaimed or new) board. Beautiful (and a relief from those wire grid tray) but we worry about the board sliding off the edge of the tub. MSL advises screwing on wood struts below. We’ve got another approach…
Place a heavy rock (which we keep around for multiple uses) on one edge so the weight keeps it in place; then you can even cantilever a longish board read more…
When we first saw the Sapien vertical book shelf, we were smitten. What a great idea: an impermanent shelf that stacks books vertically, making use of odd spaces. We bought one, well, er, a less expensive knockoff
We still didn’t love that way it looked: a busy tower of book titles, distracting to our minimalist slightly ADD eye. Then we saw THIS solution to that problem: read more…
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…
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…
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
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Who knows what the story is, whether the house is real or fake? Is it a fantastical image from The Gormenghast Novels
We’re smitten with this simple cantilever plywood chair (tiny angle braces clearly showing…could we diy this?) read more…
The other day, we spotted natural fiber rugs on the floor of a Swedish farmhouse — they look like coir or jute — that seem to have been stenciled with a pattern. Brilliant, why didn’t we think of that?!!! The technique would allow you add simple geometric designs to inexpensive and durable rugs. It might even be a way to give new life to stained or worned sisals (sisals ain’t cheap and show wear like crazy).
The other day, I accidentally knocked a treasured cup off a table and watched, in the slow motion of a car accident, as it crashed onto the stone floor. It was gone in a moment, an object whose beauty I’d enjoyed daily since my friend Suzanne Shaker had given it to me over a decade ago: Ted Muehling’s nymphenburg porcelain ‘convex’ cup, a wonder.
As it flew through the air, I found myself thinking “It’s only an object…Nothing terrible has happened…no lives lost, no illness. An object only.” In the face of all the losses we’ve read about recently, that we’ve all seen in our own and other’s lives, it paled.I thought of the guy who remarked so matter-of-factly in the face of the huge beautiful trees blown over in the hurricane: “It’s Nature.”
I’m contemplating glueing the cup together, not to make perfect mends, read more…
photo by anna kern
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…
fridge + duct tape + tablet-or-phone….
A strangely swell idea, low on style (though it sure beats those ugly water dispensers.)
It reminded us of the great video Jesse Rosten made showing how-to secure an ipad to just about anything using velcro, possibly a slightly more elegant and practical solution to the one above.
We could see devising a hybrid using Tom Sachs’ plywood clad fridge idea, or the spray-painted fridge in this Marseille Penthouse, playing loops of suprising visuals…
(Video link here.) The other day I was in the park across the way doing my ad-hoc workout while listening to the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s My Heart, My Life
Skipping, h-m-m-m…haven’t done that since I was a kid. Maybe skipping is a good exercise for me, since it seems to be much lower impact than running.
Of course, a few days later, I came across this video of a guy who is just crazy about skipping read more…
