(Video link here.) In 2010, Graham Hill, the founder of treehugger.com, bought 420 square foot apartment in a tenement building in New York City’s Soho and, over two years, turned it into a showcase for tiny living.
Hill wanted a tiny space hat would expand to fulfill his wish list which included dinner parties for 12, accommodations for 2 overnight guests, a home office and a home theater with digital projector. He crowdsourced the design as a competition and received 300 entries from all over the world. Two Romanian architecture students won with their design “One Size Fits All”.
Hill’s LifeEdited apartment can be expanded to include the functionality of 1,100 square feet: walls, drawers and beds move and unfold to create 6 rooms: living room, dining room, office, guest office, master bedroom and guest bedroom, kitchen and the bathroom (which morphs into a phone booth or meditation room).
The video shows the transformation and is packed with interesting ideas. read more…
Two images in a recent Remodelista post illustrate an essential principal that just might let you off-the-hook over the holidays: linen table cloths don’t need to be ironed to be beautiful, nor do they even have to be hemmed. We offer proof below, in the lovely tables set ‘au natural’.
But if prefer an ironed look but are short on time and energy (and don’t need more stress), here’s a way of making linen LOOK pressed without having to iron it; we heard about it from a reader named Joan who learned it from her sister-in-law: read more…
“Wake” by Michael McGillis is a 95-foot long pathway enclosed on both sides by brightly-painted cut logs; it’s on display at the Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota. Although the installation is apparently a commentary on humanity’s disruption of nature, for us (barbarians!) it’s an idea for embellishing the logs we hauled home after Hurricane Sandy, or still have our eye on out in the park…or a way to sparkle up part of a stash of fire wood. read more…
While we were poking around floral designer Emily Thompson’s website, we came across this swell little tabletop decoration: pillar candles arranged on the bed of a vintage toy pickup truck (all sorts available at Ebay.)
After we posted about making wreaths of “just about anything“, Maria Robledo sent us a picture of a wreath that pushes that idea in the most wonderful and surprising way: a real bird’s nest nestled into winter branches whose leaves have dropped. It was a gift from inspired floral designer Emily Thompson, who even left bits of New York City debris that were part of the find.
Maria photographed on story on Thompson’s “wild” wreath-making for Martha Stewart Living Magazine. Wrote Maria: ”Emily’s wreaths are always naturally-shaped. Doesn’t use the pre-wreath gadgets.” We found a slide-show here.
We love that Thompson often uses found and foraged materials. Any of the materials she winds into wreaths could simply be arranged on the holiday table, instead of flowers… read more…
We’re not sure what Cara de Silva was doing reading Garden and Gun, but we love the story she spotted on wreaths made in the South. There’s a beauty made with tobacco leaves and a few sprigs of red berries, and another made from cotton plants: materials sourced from fields. It reminded us that a holiday wreath can be made from just about anything. Grapevine, which can be bought already wound into a wreath is lovely as is, and makes a fine round base into which to arrange all sorts of materials, from pine and holly to paper origami (It was the base of the cotton sprig wreath): read more…
This surprising kitchen is the brainchild of Austrian conceptual artist Thomas Feuerstein. It is an artwork, but like many artworks we come across, it contains wonderful ideas to be had and used, like scrabble tiles on the walls.
Just for the hell of it, we started hunting down scrabble tiles. We didn’t find any ceramic ones, but found vinyl ones in Sweden at Bokstavskakel…We thinking they’d make a fine floor.
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…
We found Emily Johnson through an architect a friend was working with. Emily’s drawings and plans were stunning. And although her focus was public spaces, the high level of her problem-solving abilities and imagination were apparent at the first meeting. We discussed our ideas with her. She suggested clever solutions to some of our design quandaries as well as people she knew that might help, from licensed architects to sign-off on final plans, to concrete floor finishers. She GOT what we were thinking.
Here’s what impressed us about Emily (and what to look for when interviewing any architectural plan-maker): read more…
We have a strange aversion to wall-to-wall carpeting, finding it monotonous, one dimensional and claustral. But when we saw this clever carpeting made of stripey colors, we though, yeah we might could live with that.
Then we saw these stipes made out of floor tiles and realized the striped thing could be done with lots of materials, transforming them from something ordinary to something ELSE. read more…
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…
Recently, Lynne Rosetto Kasper of public radio’s The Splendid Table asked Sally to come up with some ideas for decorating the holiday table. (On December 21st, you can listen to a packed 6 or so minutes of ideas). Sally went right to her local farmer’s market to “forage” for visually beautiful, of-the-season items she could put right on the table, to create an instant still-lifes in lieu of, or in combination with, flowers. For Thanksgiving, she found fragrant quinces (above), apples and tiny seckel pears. The secret of their charm: Sally carefully picks through the crates to find fruits with their leaves still attached which evoke farms and orchards… (After the meal, they can be roasted or braised.)
And playing on an idea we posted some time ago of flower-and-vegetable arrangements, Sally plunked single radishes with their leaves in glass beakers and vases, for a suprising vegetal bouquet: read more…
arranged on the bed of a vintage toy pickup truck (all sorts available at Ebay.)
and 
