A couple of years ago, we started a file called “bad ideas”. These are ideas featured in shelter/style magazines that look really good, but practically speaking, are really bad. They’d come back to haunt you in no time. Stacked magazines seem like a perfect, charming solution for a table leg, but have you ever TRIED to stack magazines more than a foot high, which, with their glossy paper, are nearly impossible to keep from sliding around, much less as a 2 1/2 foot support for a slab of glass? (Unless, maybe, you bore a hole through them and put a pipe through the center to secretly hold them together).
We’re got nothing against cool-for-the-sake-of-cool design. But we really mind design that masquerades as a practical idea and has a lot of back-end problems. read more…
Twenty years ago or so, I designed a kitchen for a space I thought I’d be in forever. I had cabinets made in a Shaker style that I hoped could walk the line between classic and modern for a long time, and bought myself a restaurant stove. Ten years later, life changed, and I had to leave that space. Having designed the cabinets and seen them installed, I knew that they were basically boxes bolted to the wall. So I took them with me, and reconfigured them on-the-cheap for the smaller space I was moving into. The cabinets that could not fit on the kitchen wall became freestanding furniture. read more…
OK Go is the band that made that hilarious treadmill video a few years ago. Their frontman Damian Kulash has issued tiny mission statements here and there: “We’re trying to be a DIY band in a post-major label world” …and the essential: “Our whole bag is having good ideas and making cool shit.”
Their new video is nothing but brilliant and silly ideas, one after another, so good, I wish I could watch it in slow motion (watching it without any sound is a whole other experience). It was designed and built by Syyn Labs who describe the amazing constraints they had to work under on their website. They call it “Rube Goldberg Machine”. It’s an homage to the work of Rube Goldberg, after whom an adjective was named; he was a cartoonist known for his wildly-elaborate inventions designed to accomplish some simple task, like this “Simplified Pencil Sharpener”: read more…
Pascal Anson sussed out kitchen cabinets and discovered that cabinet makers earn their serious money from the doors, which cost much more than the base cabinets. So he bought base cabinets from IKEA and then bought a mish-mash of doors that had been marked way down. Easy and cheap. There’s a caveat though:
“The rule with this kind of thing is…if you’re going to use a mix of doors, make sure it is a REAL mix and looks really really wrong, not just a little bit wrong.”
We love the idea of REALLY REALLY WRONG as design concept…when you push dissonance to cool…
We also love that Anson’s little video wakes your head up to the way kitchen cabinets work: read more…
Here’s another Pascal Anson innovation: disparate forks, knives and spoons, all painted the same way, are transformed into new collections of “silverware”. Such a simple design principle makes a cool unified set.
Here’s what Design Museum had to say about Pascal’s “Reunification Project”:
“One of the new generation of British product designers for whom narrative is an increasingly important element in their work, PASCAL ANSON (1973-) combines industrial production and improvisation to create products and furniture that tell a story while fulfilling their function.
Each object in Pascal Anson’s Reunification Project not only has a story to tell from its old life, but is starting to tell a new one. By unearthing orphaned objects – such as cutlery, tea cups and saucers, tables, chairs and tailored suits – that once belonged to a set but have since become separated from it, and by changing their appearance, Anson unifies them into new sets and imbues them with new purpose and meaning.”
Anson’s “silverware” got me trying to figure out ways to coat/paint metal – stainless steel, silver plate – so that the new surface will hold up to really being used… read more…
Ten years after it was built, my kitchen still looked great EXCEPT for the counter tops. The speckled black-white-and-gray granite that seemed so right at the time looked dated, and its pattern was too busy to use as a surface for the food photography we did in my space. My friend Holton, who is an amazing artist, designer, and gifted improvisor said “Why don’t you make a top to fit over the one you have?…Make a form out of plywood that will fit over the granite, and cover it with a soft-ish metal that can wrap around the form…”
I remembered the old burnished zinc bars and cafe tables I’d seen in France, and thought that zinc’s soft luster would be make a beautiful surface to photograph food on. So I looked up ZINC FABRICATORS in the Yellow Pages, and found a guy in Brooklyn who would make me what I wanted. All I had to do was send him a plan… read more…
Do you ever feel like you just can’t figure out what colors go with what? Being great at color is clearly a special gift, but we mortals can learn to find our way with a little help. Consciously looking at wonderful combinations of color is a way of training the eye: a practice. And an easy way to start practicing is to visit Studio Horn, color master Eve Ashcraft’s quirky personal blog about “Design, Art, Absurdity, Obscurity, Good Shopping, Farming, Wild Life, Urban Life, Domesticated Animals, Humans, Color, Architecture, Photography, Ideas and Happiness”.
Ashcraft, who has consulted about color for Martha Stewart, Architectural Digest and Benjamin Moore Paints, to name a few, has a regular post theme called “Today’s Color Palette“. read more…
Every great invention, from the Murphy bed to the bicycle, started as an improvisation: an elegant solution to something someone needed or just plain wanted. But an improvisation never stops there. The improvised invention gets improvised upon, and that improvisation gets improvised upon, and so on, and so on. Viewing the everyday objects around us as improvisations makes for endless inspiration.
Take the safety pin, the ultimate emergency tool that holds up hems without thread and makes possible all manner of instant repairs. read more…
When Margot Wellington designed the kitchen of her house in East Hampton in 1984, she defied the usual notions of kitchen design. Instead, she set out to incorporate the elements she found essential from many years of serious cooking and entertaining. One of her most remarkable innovations was the design of an eleven-foot-long stainless steel counter with a large shallow sink built seamlessly into the center of it. The sink itself becomes a work surface, allowing her to use the whole eleven-foot span to do many jobs at once, from prepping vegetables on the left to preparing a turkey for roasting on the right. She designed the sink herself and then found someone to make it for her.
Here she describes the logic behind her design, and how she made her idea a reality:
It’s weird how easily taboos can sneak into our thinking: subtle, almost unconscious “don’t do that”s or “that’s not normal” or “not done”, that keep the status quo. They can apply the all sorts of mundane parts of our lives, and especially our living spaces. The standard height of kitchen wall cabinets is 18 inches above the counter which makes the work surface feel oppressive…why not make them higher? Why not make counters deeper than the standard 24 inches so there’s plenty of room to work, even if the carpenter or contractor says “You CAN’T”.
Ask “Why?” and you often get the answer “Because that’s how it’s ALWAYS done”. “But,” you ask, “if it’s the same amount of work to put an outlet in the middle of the wall (where it’s glaring and ugly) as it is to put it close to the counter where it blends in…why not do it the way that looks best, or is best for the way I live my life?” It can take persistence to identify an everyday taboo, and then to break it.
But taboos also apply to how we live, and what we think we can and cannot do. read more…
A big part of improvising is imagining possibilities, or “listening” to the possibilities inherent in a situation or a thing. That can mean any thing, even something as ordinary as a hook, though its always easier if it has a simple, rather classic design that can work in a variety of situations. The trick is to ignore what the item was originally designed for. This handmade brass boat hook from the great, bordering-on-fetish website Hook Lady is a fine example. It is at once handsome, understated, and elemental, both modern and rustic. It would work equally well as a bathroom towel hook, a closet hook, key hook, fireplace tool hook…as coat hooks (a row of them on a wall by the door), or, as a “pot rack” (many hooks composed in stacked rows or as a cluster on an entire wall of a kitchen)… read more…
Designer Abby Clawson, creator of interesting Hi & Low blog, devised a series of playful, big-relief-from-the-usual- fax cover sheets. She made them in response to an exhibit called “FAX” that she saw at the Drawing Center in New York City; artists, designers, thinkers, film makers were asked to conceive of the fax machine as a drawing tool (unfortunately it doesn’t appear to be viewable online). It looks like they could be done by with pretty ordinary tools: read more…
The N.Y.Times recently ran a story about a couple who bought a house in Upstate New York for $95,000 and fixed it up, beautifully, for $10,000, using pure elbow grease and a eye for scavenged and second-hand stuff.
The best nugget of info, to me, was about how to score serious finds on Craigslist: “Using Craigslist successfully means scrolling through the listings every day, not once a month,”read more…
ColorCapture Ben, a new iPhone and iPod Touch application, allows users to zoom into a particular color in a picture on their device, tap the “match” key, and see a display of paints closest to the color, along with a range of lighter and darker shades. (The app, created by Benjamin Moore, will reference its 3,300+ paint colors.) You can save the color “chips” on your phone for future reference.
Its an incredibly useful app, if you bear in mind that the color match is of a photo, which are often different than real-life colors.
ColorCapture Ben will be Available in June 1, free of charge at the Apple App Store.
If you don’t have an iPhone and/or are really serious about paint colors, Benjamin Moore has a more accurate standalone alternative, Pocket Palette Device, that will do the same thing, with more serious calibrations (for about $300).
For years, I made short-shrift of concrete block, associating it with the clunky cinderblock-and-pine shelves beloved by frugal college students, or bleak, prison-like garages and homemade tool sheds. I’d pass cheap, strong concrete blocks at construction sites and lumber yards, and wonder what I could do with them. Although I’m crazy about concrete, I seemed to have no imagination for concrete block.
Lately, new visions of concrete block have come my way, and opened my eyes to possibilities. read more…
