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…
(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…
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…
I’ve been circling the story of the transformation of ‘the improvised life’s new Laboratory from vin ordinaire apartment to its new incarnation of fluid, morphable, multi-use space for living and improvising (a glimpse above), wondering how to tell it. Having shown the early sketches and plans, it seems like the best bet would be to show BEFORE photos of the place as it was when I first found it, along with notations of the immediate challenges I saw, so you can get your bearings. I’ll get into the wild specifics of planning and renovation in the months to come.
The harsh reality of white-painted floors like the ones in our ‘laboratory’ is that they are prone to scratching and losing their pristine look FAST. Since our plywood floors were painted a beautiful oyster shell white (THAT story to come in a later post), it has been our personal challenge to GET OVER the fact that they will get nicked, scratched, stained and who knows what else…
The solution: to view them as a canvas to paint as we wish, when we wish, WHAT we wish. We’ve started a mental file of possibilities. The zig-zag pattern on this rug would translate easily to being painted on the floor read more…
Having no hidden rooms in our apartments, we have written a number of posts mulling ways to make an “instant”, impermanent guest room in our space. They are usually along the lines of something a kid would make, since secretly, we love the feeling of forts, teepees, treehouses. We are always on the lookout for materials with which we might quickly rig such a private space in our big open room, to enclose a guest bed, be a meditation room, a hideout.
So we were smitten when we read about Fort Magic, a kit full of PVC pipes and connecters and clips with which you can make Tinkertoy-like structures to attach sheets or fabrics. Designed for kids but it see,s perfectly suits our adult fantasies. read more…
Sleep doctors say that it’s important to wind down before going to sleep: no TV or computer that activates the brain, no magazines full of dire ‘reality’. Read fiction to get your mind in a quieter zone…
My solution is, often, to look at picture books of interiors, houses, furniture design: an adult version of a bedtime story. I’ve gathered a pile of favorites over the years that, like a kid, I never seem to tire of. They relax my mind, and seem to activate some dreamy center.
One of my favorites is Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder by Pedro Guerrero. read more…
The other day BoingBoing posted a ‘photo gallery’ from the newly-released Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter by Lloyd Kahn, a book of the possibilities for small space living of all kinds, from Colin Doane’s sauna, above, in Queen Charlotte Islands with green whale jawbones lashed to the front rafters to this spectacular little cabin in Montana’s mountains… read more…
We are smitten with this room divider featured a while back on IkeaHackers: it is a rather visionary transformation of a simple material by Marloes van Heteren of SOLUZ and Remco Wilcke of CUBE Architecten. Clear glass Ikea rectangular vases, in two sizes, were painted white inside, to make reverse-painted glass, a compelling material we posted some time ago. They are used as “bricks”, staggered with light shining through, and cemented with strong transparent glue.
The effect is of a curiously light wall that can be made in a variety of shapes to define a space, read more…
After photographer Beatrice da Costa sent us her virtual flowers in an email, we went poking around her website. There we found a trove of images of interiors, each, though uncaptioned and mysterious, holding some cool and inspiring idea, like the extraordinary choice of wall colors, above.
We are smitten with this corrugated tin ceiling… read more…
We recently stumbled on a cool post at French by Design illustrating ways to define space by painting walls in unexpected ways. We especially like the illusion of sunlight make be using tones of grays and whites, and the blue paint defining the start of a new space: read more…
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…
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…
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…
, a kit full of PVC pipes and connecters and clips with which you can make Tinkertoy-like structures to attach sheets or fabrics. Designed for kids but it see,s perfectly suits our adult fantasies. 
by Lloyd Kahn, a book of the possibilities for small space living of all kinds, from Colin Doane’s sauna, above, in Queen Charlotte Islands with green whale jawbones lashed to the front rafters to this spectacular little cabin in Montana’s mountains… 
