Of the many imaginary inventions in my head, a pop-up guest room has had many iterations. Living in a moderate-sized New York City apartment with only one bedroom, I’d love a separate, somewhat private space to offer guests who come to sleep in my big open livingroom/kitchen/workspace. My latest inspiration comes Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research center in Treviso, Ialy.’Next Cabane’ was a design exploration spurred by a foldable wooden structure found in a dark corner of an antique market in the south of Scotland. Fabrica’s designers viewed envisioned it as movable rooms that can be carried from place to place.
‘small, temporary spaces where we can set our boundaries, seek shelter or simply live a different life rediscovering the quality and simplicity of things. personal, intimate havens in harmony with their surroundings; they reflect on subjects like work, pop-up culture, loneliness, games. alternative settings were one can live in a better way with more awareness, where design is at the service of research into materials, forms and structures.’
All it would take to make the frame is a some drilled slats of hardwood, jointed with hex bolts and wing nuts* nut whose “wings” provide a grip for the thumb and finger. You tighten the wing nut to secure the form; untighten it to fold it up for storage. read more…
Being smitten with rusty steel, we love this solution to a rather homely exposed brick fireplace: cover it in sheets of intentionally-rusted corten steel (also known as weathering steel) and paint the flue blue.
Recently Dwell featured a slideshow of Brooklyn architect Tim Seggerman’s design to renovate a dismal brownstone studio with a sleeping loft. He was inspired by legendary furniture designer George Nakashima to “create an enveloping cabin of blond woods”. He managed to make a tiny 240 square foot space seem expansive by using the blond wood panels to disguise clever storage and cubbies. read more…
Take away the visual clutter (pots, cutting boards, dishtowels) and you can see a wonderfully distressed wall with very cool faucets made from black and copper piping, materials available at many hardware and plumbing supply stores.
It’s a variation on the theme of sculptural diy faucets which we love: endless possibilities for configuring the bendable pipe and valves… read more…
Since hauling several huge hunks of fallen trees home after Hurricane Sandy, we’ve been attuned to interesting ways of transforming them. We especially love Italian designer Marco Stefanelli‘s idea of illuminating the splits and cracks in the wood with LEDs (he embeds them in resin), and the thinking behind creating his wonderful luminous stools and tables:
I wanted to take inspiration from the research of natural objects that, in some ways, have reached their final step in the life cycle. They are for example sawmill’s outlets, pieces of urban architecture, logs carried by the river, firewood…
I have tried to give these pieces a second chance, tempting to make the light come out from the material and to amplify the sensorial experience. read more…
We are knocked out by the insanely beautiful, moderne chair designs made out of construction paper by 3rd & 4th graders at Turtle Lake Elementary School in Minnesota. They are highly architectural, thoughtfully made and colored, with a sophisticated minimalist aesthetic. We see them as fine inspiration for chairs and chaises made of plywood or heat-bendable plastic (and remind us that making prototypes can be a form of thinking-out-loud.) We’d be thrilled to have anyone of them in our home. The first and last are the bomb.
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…
A rather ordinary chair with good simple lines becomes much more interesting with an assymetrical two-tone paint job. We love that color-blockish thing!
Here’s a chair transformed by two-toned upholstery: mattress ticking and velvet in tandem: read more…
(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…
We recently stumbled on Uncopy, a website that collates images of artworks under surprising categories and keywords. As always, we hunted for ideas we could use or that would shake up our everyday thinking. Our thinking was definitely shaken up by Bookend by Helmut Smits. Smits simply placed a book under one end of an classic Ikea Billy bookshelf to set it intentionally askew and make something very ordinary into something ELSE, in one fell swoop.
Ever since we saw Brazilian sculptor Hugo Franca‘s wondrous furniture hewn from fallen trees, we view the occasional fallen tree the many trees blown down by Hurricane Sandy in our nearby park as POSSIBILITY. Franca has turned the big trunks into places for people to lounge, read, hangout, play in Sao Paulo. We want to “beam” ourselves there to take one of his workshops. read more…
We love checking in to Cabin Porn a site which provides “inspiration for your quiet place somewhere”, which right now, is in our heads.
Recently, we became smitten with this hut overlooking Lake Bonney in the southeast of South Australia. All we know is that “it was built over 5 years with salvaged materials”; no other details were given. So we looked close at what those salvaged materials might be: we saw corrugated aluminum, windows, concrete blocks, reclaimed timber, a door, some sort of thin modern glass, driftwood…
When we first saw this stack of books-stripped-bare of their covers to reveal neutral color and graphic texture, we thought: what a cool material for doing all sorts of things. Stack em to make stools, displays and ad hoc tables, or supports for low shelves. Books as bricks. Then we wondered: Could we really justify dismantling books in such a way?
Well yeah, maybe. There are all sorts of books that we’d feel justified in taking the covers off: falling apart ones, water-damaged ones, cheap ones, and especially fat catalogues. We tried it with the huge Outwater Hardware catalogue and found it made a lovely “brick” (we might glue a neutral top page on to the printed one). read more…
In this Sunday’s NY Times T magazine, we were happy to see the cover story on John Derian’s East Village apartment photographed by our old friend Bill Abranowicz (whose beauty of a book on Greece we featured some time ago.)It starts with a photo of the naked, as-is space, rife with possibilities. We realized we were relieved we were to see an undone, unslick, unmodern, messy space, tired as we are of clinically modern interiors-porn that are everywhere. Derian had the courage and vision to leave the essentials be.
We loved imagining how we would handle the space were it ours, and then looking at the photos of what Derian did (swell befores-and-afters here), and seeing how our sensibilities differed or grooved with his (we’d nix the dark armoire between the windows blocking all that light and sense of space…but yeah, what about storage?) read more…
