A perfect impromtu side table, made from worn stacked boxes, each worn in a unique way as to contribute to a striped, graphical design. This is the kind of thing that salvage places are perfect for…
via Japanese Trash
Related posts: d-i-y vintage-box furniture (and obsession)
dreaming of a rietveld crate desk
cardboard, crates + chairs as building materials
led-illuminated shipping pallet bed
alt bookcases: stacks on stands
photo: boots beulah
Some time ago, when we posted about uses we had improvised for binder clips, we got a rash of reader responses telling their improvisations with the ubiquitous tool that just keeps on providing solutions to life’s little problems. Check out Treehugger‘s recent 16 Clever Uses for Binder Clips (we love ‘em in Steel). Here are our favorites: read more…
We’ve been amassing quite a collection of pictures of stacked boxes and crates being used as shelving. And lately, they’ve included crates and boxes that are painted on the inside, outsides left their natural shelves. This simple embellishment presents the colors as a sort of surprise, that lends a lot of charm to the plain box look…
We recommend checking out Japanese Trash’s recent Industrial Chic loft tour. Though short but sweet, it’s full of good ideas using very simple elements. We especially love the 3 hanging globes above, which float upward, rather than loom as much lighting does these days. And the angled duct work over the window that we initially thought were mirrors. The reflections add and element of surprise.
via Japanese Trash
Related posts: hubert le gall house tour: dig the fireplace!
house tour: laura handler’s montana log cabin
weekend voyeur: beatrice da costa’s idea-ific interiors
finnish country house tour: bovik farm
lydia wills’ apartment: before + after + in between
(Video link here.) Tracy Metro is a designer and the host of I Live with My Mom on SpacesTV, where she makes over bedrooms of twenty- somethings who are still living at home with Mom. “I rid them of their soccer trophies, Legos and stuffed animals in favor of an adult launching pad for life.”
She’s applied her own small-space thinking to The Retro Metro, a houseboat she and her husband bought a few years ago. When we saw the before-and-after photos, we had to know the story. So we interviewed Tracy and spliced-in pictures and plans to show you just how big a project it was. read more…
photo: magnus mårding
These recent pictures spotted on Desire to Inspire affirmed the enduring chic of noguchi-esque paper shades, a subject we’ve posted about before since so many true mid-century modern houses relied on them. The formula is simple: read more…
photo: richard powers
About a year ago, our friend Ellen Silverman came back from France with a beautiful linen flat sheet that she’d seen displayed in a Paris shop. The salesperson encouraged her to buy a king size sheet and use it as a coverlet that would drape on the floor and become it’s own “dust-ruffle”, hiding whatever lay hidden under the bed. It looked so pretty, and seemed like such a practical idea, that we hatched a plot to photograph it; both being so crazy-busy we still haven’t gotten around to it.
So I was pleased to stumble on a similar image buried in a recent Remodelista house tour. This huge flat-sheet coverlet is made of gauze but linen is lovely, washable, comes in a variety of colors, and doesn’t need to be ironed. Wrinkled is fine, as are ripped edges. We’re wondering what would happen if read more…
photo: mikko ryhänen
We love the glossy white wall tiles used as white board at Bar & Co. a bistro-style bar in Helsinki, a great idea for a kitchen wall. We’re suddenly viewing our oversized rectangular bathroom tiles in a new way: message boards (with the possibility for leaving little wash-off-able notes in a normally scriptless room). read more…
We love copper pipe and have blogged a fab diy table made of it as well as sculptural faucets. But this picture of this Amsterdam coffee shop took our copper imaginings to new heights: copper pipe light fixtures, copper pipe faucets, and copper pipe hooks, all in one space!! read more…
Chilewich is a brand of chic, minimalist woven polypropalene floor mat that is a staple in design magazines. You’d think the material from which they’re made – woven polypropyline – would be available in off-brands, but we haven’t found any in our searches. (We did, however, find a number of seller’s on Ebay who sell seconds or discontinued styles; Chilewich mats aren’t cheap.) We’ve been thinking of possibly using a Chilewich floor mat for the kitchen whose painted plywood floors take a lot of wear and tear. So we ordered some samples from Chilewich’s site.
From having cooked seriously and sometimes wildly-with-a-number-of-cooks-at-once, we know about all the bits of food that can end up ground into the kitchen floor, from scraps of fat from trimmed meat to fruit peels. We worried that all this stuff would mash into the weave and make for more work than we want. So we decided to do a test to see if the Chilewich would really clean easily despite our abuse. read more…
photo: dezeen
After our friend Lisa Morphew took a shovel and demolished the wall separating our living room and bedroom of our soon-to-be-renovated space, we sent a photo of the newly-opened room to our friend Tom Fallon, an interior designer whose given us lots of great ideas over the years. He emailed back: It’s great. Why not keep it the way it is?
Well, we thought, the idea IS great, but practically speaking, we just wouldn’t be able to do all the things we needed to do in that space. We ended up demolishing the entire wall to open up the room, and finishing the walls in the usual manner i.e. sheetrocking and painting (all except one, that moves, but that’s another story).
Recently, we saw a wonderful iteration of Tom’s idea from designer Faye Toogood who cut a wall between rooms read more…
In the process of planning our Laboratory’s renovation, we called on a number of friends for advice: designers, artists, and people who just had plain good sense of one kind or another. When I told artist friend Lisa Morphew of the prices some of the contractors we’d spoken to were quoting us she said: “Honey, what you want to do isn’t rocket science. It shouldn’t cost so much.” Lisa, who had worked construction and transformed a wreck of a house in North Carolina into a wondrous space, proceeded to give us a lesson in how our place was made.
Pointing to the sheetrock wall that bisected the living rooms and second bedroom which we were dying to take down, she said “I could take that down with a shovel if you have one. I’ll show you how easy it is, and you’ll understand how it’s made”. A shovel?!! We didn’t have a shovel on hand so we went around to the hardware store and bought one then and there. We weren’t going to miss the chance to see that wall come down.
Lisa, and a friend, proceeded to demolish the wall in less than half an hour. read more…
(Video link here.) This video about the private little games people (especially kids) play in their heads reminded me of one I’ve been playing for years.
One of the big surprises in our renovation of ‘the improvised life’s laboratory was the floor. When we took up the funky carpeting, we didn’t find the concrete we expected but a soft gypsum compound that couldn’t be hardened. We had no budget for a floor so we started to look around at possibilities. We entertained the idea of linoleum, which we love, but found even it was too pricey and labor intensive (it needs sealing periodically). Still, we found ourselves fantasizing about an orange linoleum floor. We weren’t quite able to imagine it.
