rooms
Benjamin Benschneider/Pacific Northwest Magazine
A few months ago we clipped this picture of Steve Sauer sitting in the 182 square foot Seattle apartment he had renovated, creating three levels, and nooks for different uses, including two beds, a full kitchen with a dishwasher, bathroom with a shower, a soaking tub set into the floor, closet space, a dining table and storage for two bikes. An airplane interiors engineer at Boeing, Sauer cleverly designed his space to accommodate his lifestyle EXACTLY, without a drop of wasted space, which he felt would be the problem with anything larger. Even more interesting than Sauer’s design, is the thinking behind it:
“I wanted to compress my home to squirt me back out to the community. That was one of the philosophical reasons. I want to be able to shop daily, not store a lot and eat really well.” said Seattle’s Steve Sauer.
It one of the most interesting reasons for living in a tiny space that we’d heard: to choose and create a space that would force you to live a certain way. read more…
06.15.11 |
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in cool spaces, inside, paths + processes, people, reimagine, rooms, why not? |
Always on the lookout for more ideas for impermanent pop-up rooms within rooms, we were taken by a work by Zimoun, a sound artist/sculptor who builds different kinds of white noise into structures.We love his room of interlocking slabs of notched cardboard, made like a house of cards, and imagined building a smaller version that could be stored when no longer needed, stacked and tied in a bundle, in the closet. read more…
05.16.11 |
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in cheap + great, cool spaces, floors, inside, rooms, why not? |
Trevor Tondro for The New York Times
Living in New York City, we are obsessed with space: how much can we pack into not enough of it and still have it look clean and spare? Having 900 square feet, we imagine living in 450, to challenge our ingenuity. So we were smitten with last week’s New York Times article with slideshow that featured a 200!!! square foot apartment that is both clever and charming. It is the home of Malena Georgieva, a young interior design-smitten emigre from Bulgaria, done on a budget of $1,500.
First great idea: just about all the seats in the apartment swivel, to face either the “dining area” or “living room”. read more…
02.17.11 |
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in cheap + great, cool spaces, elements, inside, paths + processes, people, reimagine, rooms, solutions |
Ellen Silverman
Knowing that Lydia Wills was about to move to a bigger apartment, we enlisted Ellen Silverman to photograph her 600-square-foot studio near Gramercy Park. We’ve known Lydia for years and have watched her apartment evolve into a home with lots of good ideas, far too many to cover in one post. So we thought we’d do the broad strokes now and then focus on specifics during the next few weeks. The real story of Lydia’s apartment is that it slowly evolved, as Lydia did, growing out of one thing and into another, as she discovered furniture, fabrics and lighting that resonated with her life.
Lydia has been sewing since she was young and loves natural textiles, which she used to define the space (often incorporating unusual and vintage fabrics). Over years, she discovered and fell in love with the work of Scandinavian and European Modernist designers. She bought some enduring, beautifully designed pieces of furniture and lighting (mostly on Ebay, for a fraction of their cost), like the leather chair by Yngve Ekstrom, the fantastic table by Bengt Gullberg and the chandelier by Eric Hoglund.
Since there is nothing more gratifying than seeing before-and-after photos, we’ll start with a picture of what this apartment looked like BEFORE, when someone else had it: read more…
06.23.10 |
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in before + after, cool spaces, elements, furniture, inside, kitchen, paths + processes, reimagine, rooms |
Periodically we like to feature the messy workspaces of artists as a reminder that being creative often means making a mess…We see it as an antidote to the shelter-magazine vision of a nice neat life that has infiltrated our heads over the years.
To take the idea a step further, we thought it would be fun to run a picture of Sally’s hacked kitchen as it was photographed for just one such magazine (note the artfully arranged array of photogenic foods) alongside an i-Phone photo Sally took one day when all-hell-was-breaking-lose in that same kitchen… and she couldn’t keep up with all the things she had to do, not to mention close the cabinet door, or break up an Amazon box to take to the recycling bin or even pick up a paper off the floor.
A lot of that stuff on the counter are objects waiting to be photographed and half-done projects for ‘the improvised life’, amidst bills and lists and…
The truth of that kitchen is that it waxes and wanes… gets messy then neat…out-of-control then serene and collected, and back again. Real life and making and doing is a wild business: work….in….progress….
Related post: On Things “Not Looking Good While You’re Working on Them”
What Unkempt or Messy or Shabby Can Mean
Kitchen Cabinets as Furniture
M.F.K. Fisher’s “Mystic Materialism of a Hungry Woman”
Fling and Be Flung
06.02.10 |
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in before + after, inside, kitchen, living, paths + processes, projects + play, rooms, strategies |
Ellen Silverman
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…
03.11.10 |
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in eating, inside, materials, reimagine, rooms |
I stumbled on an archived post on Automatism of some pictures of jewelry designer Ted Muehling‘s New York City apartment. Blogger Lori had reprinted an article on Muehling’s apartment that she’d saved for years, from Maison Francaise in the late 1990′s. The place looks as appealing today as it did then (THAT’S style). In response, a woman named Joanna wrote “SO beautiful. i’m downloading these for the inspiration journal… xo”.
The Inspiration Journal. It reminded me of folders I’ve often kept of clippings from magazines: of spaces I liked, or ideas I wanted to pursue. Seeing pictures can help you bring to life your own ideas, as you take the gist, or a kernel, or a detail and run with it. Nowadays, it can be done digitally of course, and kept on a computer or printed out. An Inspiration Journal is a much better way of framing things than a “bookmark”. read more…
10.05.09 |
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in cool spaces, elements, inside, inspiration, media, people, rooms, solutions |
Adam Kuban of Serious Eats’ Slice Blog has a compelling series about people who have built their own pizza ovens. His interview with Mark Wilkie, who created this beauty is in the backyard of his Brooklyn rental, comes complete with photos and drawings of the process. Wilkie found lots of practical resources at Forno Bravo, a California based pizza oven maker that offers free plans for building “Pompeii” brick pizza oven as well as forums where d-i-y oven builders can exchange info.
It seems the Forno Bravo can fashion all or part of an oven if you’re into designing your own. Their “Photos” section has inspiring photos of wood-fired ovens from all over the world, read more…
09.08.09 |
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in eating, food, how-to, living, outside, resources blogs + sites, rooms |
In the wonderful daddy blog Stork Bites Man, Andy (who also writes Reference Library) wrote a brief post about making this blue tape painting in the hallway outside his daughter Elsa’s room. The two had been working on it for a few months,”a few minutes at a time. She requests a ‘little one, great big one, skinny one, or triangle one’ and I cut each shape to order.”
It’s a perfect, simple, visually charming project to do with a kid (or another adult), and is another example of the brilliant versatility of blue painter’s tape
(it’s masking tape so it comes off with no marks, if you could ever imagine taking such a painting down).
Here are more things to do with painter’s tape.
And don’t forget how great it is for making signs on walls.
05.23.09 |
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in family + friends, kids, materials, playing, projects + play, rooms, walls + windows |
