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…
Spotted in a the cube room, a concept room created by designer Fabian Gatermann for a design hostel in Cologne, Germany: a fab shipping pallet bed painted like one of Piet Mondrian‘s famous “Compositions” from 20′s and 30′s.
On close inspection, it appears that the bed was made to LOOK like it was made of pallets; it seems a bit too perfectly made, its wood a bit too smooth to be from real pallets.
Nevertheless, pallets provide great inspiration, and clever use of paint can take pallet furniture to a new level… 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…
gorden ammermann
While we were away, we got a very succinct, very cool email from reader Gorden Ammermann, with photos of the wonderful shipping pallet bed he made:
hi,
maybe i´ve something for your site. be free to post it: my new diy-pallet-bed
greetz
gorden
We not only love the white painted bed, but the deliciously rumpled linens in a very simple room as well. You can get the gist of Ammermann’s creation from the other two photos he sent: read more…
youaretheriver.com
On the lookout for an inexpensive bed frame, this shipping pallet bed caught our eye. It’s got a low profile rustic-modern look, though we’re not crazy about the overhang on the sides (easy to bang your shin on). It made us start analyzing and mulling what makes a really great shipping pallet bed.
At Straphacker, we stumbled on a great roundup of shipping pallet beds that confirmed some of our ideas. read more…
myeongbeom kim
myeongbeom kim
Conceptual Artist Myeongbeom Kim makes eerily beautiful and evocative work that fuses manmade things with big doses of nature. We can totally see ourselves lying down on this bed, and feeling like we are in a mossy woods…
…we can imagine how we’d feel riding an elevator like this one: read more…
We not crazy for headboards but find ourselves really liking the idea of a virtual headboard – painted right on the wall – that we recently stumbled on. When you want to change the style, just repaint… read more…
Our dreams have become so frequent lately, we’ve been trying to figure out ways to “catch” and remember them. We keep a little notebook and pen on the night table, trying to train ourselves to write down the details, or even just the essential bits, before waking makes them fade. It’s a kind of discipline, a half-awake awareness that we are cultivating, to remember to jot down the gist to see what the message might be. (Sally once woke from a dream KNOWING that she should cook professionally, although the thought had never crossed her mind before; so that’s what she did).
We find that the notebook is gradually filling; we hope save it in our archive, as we do our I Ching throws (more on that in another post) and diary entrees, to look back on ‘the inside’ of what was going on at the time.
Lately, we’ve been seeing some interesting versions of Dream Books. Our favorite, by Maria Fischer, captures the language of dreams, and the threads of ideas and connections that our dream language makes. It made us wonder why we think that writing is the only way to capture our dreams; why not draw them? Or plot them graphically somehow, as we’ve tried doing with our day… read more…
We can’t remember when we started mentally re-designing things in our heads; it’s been part of our thought process for years, made even more acute by ‘the improvised life’. We look at a design and mentally “try it on”, in an instant envisioning what it would be like to use actually use it, make it, change it. HACK IT.
When we saw Remodelista’s recent post about Commune designer Chau Truong’s cool bed base made from concrete blocks, we actually climbed into that bed – in our heads. We discovered that it has the major design flaw we wrote about a few weeks ago: bigger-than-the-mattress-platforms make it practically impossible to get in and out of bed without scraping your shin. And one made of concrete blocks would be especially painful. Yikes!
So we started our mental redesign: read more…
MALIIN STOOR
We love this bed made of shipping pallets that the endlessly clever Swedish designer Maliin Stoor built for her daughters: a chain of LEDs illuminates it from underneath. Here are details, translated from Swedish (we hope accurately enough):
“Lights under the bed…Inspired by a hotel I recently stayed in…I bought a light chain and put it under the bed. (When we cast the concrete slab we made sure to fix a number of electrical plugs in the floors, even one under the bed. I felt smart!) The girls think it’s really nice and hoped that the loop shone all night, but the loop is set on a timer and is on from five o’clock to half-eleven; it works for us …” read more…
David Dubois (photo: Olivier Amsellem)
We LOVE this simple bed on a base of this rough-cut timbers, one longer than the other to extend beyond the bed to make a built-in side table. This bedroom is part of an exhibition at The Villa Noailles, an arts center located in the hills above Hyères, in the Var, in southeastern France. The villa is an early modernist house, built by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens for art patrons in 1925. (It has quite a history.)
Four designers were invited to design a guest room in a wing of the building, conceiving the basic furniture of a room: a bed, a table-office, bedding, a lamp and a vase.
In this bathroom, the walls were covered with artful photomurals, that expand the space (imagining it with plain walls shows the scope of the transformation, do-able in any untiled bathroom.) read more…
Todd Selby//The Selby
A picture of a chair made out of orange-and-white-striped wooden safety barriers that we saw on The Selby led us to discovering Tom Sachs. He’s an artist who makes elaborate recreations of modern icons: masterpieces of engineering and design of one kind or another, from Knoll office furniture to Prada to NASA (like this hilarious video). The all-seams-showing recreations are made out of ordinary stuff like phone books and Foamcoare welded together with duct tape or a glue gun. As it is clear from The Selby’s pictures of Sach’s living/studio space, the work of this imaginative inventor/artist holds ideas for our own more modest creations…
Although we don’t know what it says, we’re crazy about Sach’s bedspread, and the idea of writing on our own…
….not to mention the wonderful chair… read more…
I continue to mull ways to merge office and bedroom without sleeping in the midst of the fray of papers and projects…and stumbled on an interesting variant of the idea posted earlier, of creating a little shed in the office/bedroom that would be a sleeping cocoon, protected from officey stuff and the idea of never-finished work. This version of a “room (cocoon) bed” from Hotel Aire de Bardenas in Spain has a wonderful view (a nature preserve). Not so in my city digs.
To create a view, I’m fooling around with the idea of making a “room (cocoon) bed” whose fabric walls are printed with a trompe l’oeil photo mural, read more…
www.dberke.com
For years, my office was a corner of my 20-x-17-foot bedroom. I managed to write a 700 page book there, and numerous articles, as well as pay bills. The problem was that I really never left my work; it was always in view, always calling me to do more. For an urban freelance person, having a separate office, as I’ve had for a few years, is a real luxury, and one that, given the scary economy, I’ve been wondering if I could give up if I had to. IS there a way to have an office AND a bedroom, in one large room? read more…
Living Etc. via Style Files
I love the idea of this patchwork headboard from Lockwood Design. There are endless possibilities for combining cool fabrics and textures and it’s definitely a do-able project. I can imagine using all sorts of vintage fabrics, which can be found at flea markets and on Ebay. Or buying 1/2 yard of several fabrics from a great fabric store.
It’s basically an elaboration of a basic upholstered headboard like this one made from a tablecloth. (Tablecloths are often made of wonderful hard-to-find fabric. So why not use them like fabric?) Charming tea towels and linen place mats would make great patchwork panels.
via Designer's Library
There’s lots of info on the internet about how to make an upholstered headboard; I recommend reading a few to figure out your strategy. Here’s a start:
How to Make an Upholstered Headboard (sew a panel of patchwork pieces to use as their single sheet of fabric)
How to Make an Upholstered Headboard Using Pillow Shams (essentially a patchwork headboard that you could do with other fabrics).
