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…
Since we first set out on our mission to find good looking clips to make shelving out of boxes, we came across Indie Furniture‘s site. (That’s what happens when you hold an idea in your mind: answers and iterations start to appear). The folks at Indie devised a clamp/joint that can fit different sizes of wood, with instructions for using them. They are so passionate about creating a do-it-yourself shelving system that would allow people to configure their own unique shelving, that they even published a manifesto: read more…
Our recent call for accessible clip/clamp ideas for securing stacked boxes (wood, cardboard, plastic) to make d-i-y clipped-together shelving got a big response, all offering the same solution: large binder clips. These cheap, ubiquitous clips seem to be the go-to solution for many niggling problems. Wine writer Anthony Giglio wrote:
“I have improvised with these binder clips for years. Currently they clamp open a window that won’t stay up, and clamp those brackets flaps on the window air conditioner in place. For those shelves you would but the extra large, clamp them on and them squeeze/remove the wing handles for aesthetics. Voilà!”
“I agree that the binder clip is a magical tool. The metal wire looking handles not only fold forward as Joan mentioned but can actually be taken off once you position them in the desired place by squeezing the handles and taking them off their hinges. I think this would create a better look from the side at the vertical connections of these shelves.”
Two inches seem to be about the right size; their one-inch opening would sandwich two half-inch (or thinner) boards. Now we’re hunting for two-inch binder clips in white or colors, rather than the usual black clip. read more…
Pamela Hovland, who is our BEST scout, found this cardboard box shelving system on Etsy. It’s a variation of the clipped-together shelving idea we wrote about earlier. It is to our mind a brilliant use of an ordinary cardboard box (which we’re thinking, could even be painted with rubber paint…) It seems to be the same deal as the other clipped-together systems we’ve found: to get the clips, you’ve got to buy the box. So we’re continuing our call for HELP finding something that will do as a clips to make sturdy shelves out of boxes. read more…
We are always amazed by how we’ll have an idea and start thinking about it, trying to figure it out, and then start to stumble on echoes and iterations of it. We’ve been thinking about modular shelving that looks good and sleek and is sturdy but do-able, not too expensive…Why not stack boxes in various ways, we wondered, why not CLIP them together? In the course of a week, we came across some interesting versions of the idea, from chic http://muuto.com/##mce_temp_url#‘s architect-designed – and expensive – shelving to shelving units made with clipped-together crates, and even cardboard boxes (see pt 2). What figure we can find the box pretty easy to find or make; what we want is the clip so we do this our own way, on-the-cheap.
The problem with this great idea is that we haven’t been able to find affordable clips – or any that would work on 1/2 or 3/4-inch thick boards (two put together). So we’re calling on you to help us find them, by expertly or uniquely googling, or keeping eyes peeled in hardware stores or websites that might sell clips for a totally other use that would work here. We’re asking for HELP…
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…
When my trusty lemon squeezer broke, I toyed with the idea of buying a new one, but found that design collaborative Platform 21′s Repair Manifesto (blogged last summer) had lodged itself in my consciousness. “REPAIRING IS A CREATIVE CHALLENGE“…and “TO REPAIR IS TO DISCOVER” subtly resonated. There’s a way to fix this, I thought, as I wandered around my apartment looking for a sturdy piece of metal to hinge the two enameled sides together; it would have to withstand the pressure of squeezing a lemon, and not react to acidic lemon juice.
The process was a simple one, really, once I finally focused on it (the broken squeezer sat on the counter for a couple of weeks while I mulled): I’d ask myself “What if I tried THIS? and then I tried the idea out, fiddled, failed a few times: a heavy-duty paper clip couldn’t take the pressure…I had no nut to secure a screw, which I suspected would rust anyway…Wire was reactive and would keep the hinge from moving properly. I found the solution in my office. read more…
Years ago, New York photographer Maria Robledo designed this simple, functional and really cool-looking storage for her studio. A few hours before she moved to a new space, I ran over to photograph them for ‘the improvised life’ because they are so smart and great, even though she’d emptied them out. They once held an impressive amount of office and photographic supplies, and linens and props for shoots.
Maria’s wall of cabinets is an unfussy, easy-to-duplicate approach that would translate well to all sorts of spaces. read more…
If you pile a bunch of washed and stemmed greens like chard or spinach or kale in a shallow skillet with a few tablespoons of water, cover them and set over high heat, they’ll steam just fine without a proper steamer; most of the water evaporates by the time they’ve become tender, so they’ll be no loss in vitamins. Then, you can add some olive oil or butter to the bottom of the pan to saute the greens.
The problem is that the bulky greens defy the lid, lifting it up, making it impossible to have the seal necessary for steaming. I recommend keeping a rock handy for weighting down the lid. read more…
Pamela Hovland alerted me to these cool jars that have chalkboard labels so you can just scribble the contents (or the date) with chalk. You can by them at Rockett St. George for 12.50 euros and have them shipped from the U.K. OR you can rig your own. Paint labels directly on jars using chalkboard paint by hand or with chalkboard spray paint (follow the directions and caveats here). Or make or buy press-on labels like these from an industrious Etsy seller who cuts them out of chalkboard vinyl (fine for jars with a flat surface).
The wonderfully-shaped Weck canning jars would be great with painted labels (though press-on labels would probably work on their gentle slope.
Years ago, when I was putting together my very make-shift kitchen, I searched and searched for a pot rack that was the opposite of the ones that seemed to be everywhere – clunky or “country”-ish, overly ornate or verging on Medieval. Nothing I found accommodated my personal pot rack idiosyncrasies that includes not liking pots hanging over head, or making my small space looking cluttered.
So I turned to towel bars. It was a small shift in thinking to envision these sleek steel bars hung with hooks and copper, rather than terry cloth. Why not use a towel bar as a pot rack? (Or simply change its name?) read more…
Over the course of thirty years, Andy Warhol filled over 600 cardboard boxes with objects from his daily life, from photographs and newspaper clippings to artworks and telephone messages. He used a marker to write the date or contents on the outside, then sent the boxes to storage rooms.
The array of boxes, which are all the same size, are themselves quite beautiful. Actually, it is because they are all the same size that they are beautiful and not as daunting as different size boxes, which look messy and haphazard. Warhol figured out the perfect simple, cheap, unfussy, visually-pleasing method for collecting just about anything: uniform containers in multiples. read more…
Although I have a big built-in bookcase, there always seems to be books floating around my apartment; either there’s no room (because books – like food -are the purchases I make weekly), or they are books I am currently using. They need a place and a way to be that isn’t a mess, but is accessible and nice looking. My solution is to stack them on “stands” that I’ve found on the street, and that are to me, pleasingly elemental, like the three above. read more…
A picture of some gorgeous ceramic paper plates by designer Virginia Sim sent me to her website, an odd mix of her advertising and art works, and practical inventions. My favorite, filed under “Passionately Curious” is her system for catalogueing her shoes by pasting a polaroid image of the shoe right on the box. You don’t need a polaroid camera to do this; take pictures with a digital camera or your cellphone, email it to yourself, print the email out and cut out the image. Then paste it on your shoe box. Or any box where you can’t see in: Fill the box with stuff and snap a photo of what’s inside, to paste on the outside. An image is worth a thousand words.
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, but found that design collaborative 
(follow the directions and caveats 
(fine for jars with a flat surface).
