Lately, we’ve stumbled on some cool ways to bring color to shelves. We saw BM’s Junior line of furniture and thought: why don’t we just paint the backs of our shelves in color blocks to wake them up a bit? And then we saw the reverse in action: just the edges painted a color… read more…
andrea branzi @ carpenters workshop gallery, paris
Recently, we’ve seen bundles of birch logs being sold at delis around New York City: cheap enough for an evening’s cozy fire. Since we don’t have a fireplace, we’ve admired them as a lovely, elemental raw material – right on our doorstep – and mulled what we could do with them; we’ve been meaning to buy a pack just to have and see where they took us.
This morning we came across this shelving unit designed by architect Andrea Branzi - a simple birch log inserted into a simple black bookshelf, that makes for a charming and surprising visual.
So now we ARE going to go out and buy some logs before they’re gone with winter. read more…
photo: mirja/koulun lattia narisee
There’s a lot we love about this whimsically d-i-y decorated storage cabinet:
The torquoise and yellow legs… read more…
We really like this novel way to store magazines by strapping stacks of them with belts; it turns them into an objet, a surprising something that is more stylish than a stack of magazines, yet serves a function. Cool-looking belts can be had cheap at second-hand and thrift stores. We wondered if the stack could go stool height without slipping around, for impromtu seating or surface. We found this iteration of the idea… read more…
BoingBoing recently posted a compelling video (below or link here) of a toupeed fellow named Augustus Gladstone giving a tour of the room he lives in in an abandoned hotel, in some unnamed city. Gladstone’s apartment is an eccentric, strangely homey place decorated with what appears to be mostly found stuff and collections of bric-a-brac. There’s some question as to the authenticity of the video but no matter. It’s really interesting either way.
What caught our eye (in addition to two old TV’s placed one on top of the other) was an ingenious shelving unit using stacks of books as bricks to hold boards. It’s clever, and in another setting, could be pretty chic. Just for the hell of it, we typed “books as bricks” into google images and found some beautiful iterations of the idea, like read more…
Sally Schneider
For years, we’ve been amazed at the clever and imaginative solutions our friend Holton Rower has come up for his various spaces – both at home and work. Take the chic leather cabinet pulls we’ve been seeing around at high-end housewares stores, for $20 + a piece. Holton starting making leather pulls twenty years ago to use in an apartment and has been making them himself ever since. They are nothing more than a rectangle of leather folded in half and held fast with a roofing nail – a common nail that has a particularly large flat head and a fat shank that holds fast to wood. Holton is an artist who knows about all sorts of materials and how things work, knowledge to which he applies his acute visual sense (check out the 1.6 million hit YouTube video of one of his paintings). He likes the dot within a rectangle that the pulls make – evocative of Bauhaus. read more…
We were interested to see Ikea’s blog Livet Hemma‘s recent take on an idea we posted months ago: clipping boxes together with big binder clips to make somewhat freeform and sculptural shelving. We looked at their iteration of the idea, wondering if they’d seen our post, or if they’d just thought it up themselves. We were reminded of the startling way that an idea can shoot up like spring crocuses in many places at once, as though it were in the air. And that part of the nature of creating things is culling ideas that already exist and tailoring them to suit your own vision. To quote film maker Jim Jarmusch: “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonated with inspiration or fuels your imagination…” (Check out the full quote in the previous post.) The Ikea shelves are a great example.
What ideas would we steal from Ikea’s version of clipped-together shelves (that they may have stolen from us)? What would we change? read more…
Ambatalia
For some time now, we’ve struggled with the plastic bag problem. Not shopping bags – we’ve got that figured – we just carry a cute fold-up bag in our everyday bag. We’re talking plastic food bags. What is a really feasible bag for collecting messy things like bunches of grapes, piles of cherries or loose mesclun from the market? It needs to not take much room so we can take a bunch with us on our daily forays out, AND be washable.
We love the idea of furoshiki – the Japanese tradition of transforming a big square into all sorts of carrying bags and packages and are inspired by Ambatalia’s transformations of a big square dishcloth. (We found a trove of simple techniques for knotting and folding cloths online). Still we can’t quite imagine ourselves making bags in the heat of produce shopping. read more…
Although we’ve always thought of ourselves as rather minimalist, we’ve been realizing that we have attachments to things that we don’t really want or need anymore, and have a hard time letting them go. What we are really attached to are the memories and associations the object spurs, afraid we’d lose the memory if we could never see the object again. As a solution, we started photographing things we wanted to let go of to create a digital archive of “Memory Stuff”. It freed us up to give stuff away.
Now we have a photo to remind us the tiny blue-gray pebbles we collected as we sat for hours on a beach near San Francisco talking to a friend many years ago…We don’t need to write anything down, because the memories are within us, called up instantly.
We discovered a variation of this strategy in a recent SwissMiss post called Eulogy of Stuff; it quoted a Comment left on an Apartment Therapy thread by a reader named slocumnavigator: read more…
Ian McDonald
We stumbled on this wonderful hanging shelf on You Have Been Here Sometime, but when we went back to look it was gone! It’s from an exhibition by Ian McDonald called Wearing.
In our minds it’s art = a shelf = art = a shelf = wonderful to look at = practical = odd =art = a shelf….
The gist is really a wood slab and rod bored with holes through which to run rope or wire, elaborated on with a big metal ring, a hanging counterweight and the rod that sticks up for no apparent reason (which we love). It made us want to hunt down odd bits and start rigging them…
Using sliding panels and walls and consummately clever thinking, architect Gary Chang revamped his tiny 344-square-foot Hong Kong apartment to be able to change it into 24 different designs. It totally challenges preconceived notions of what a space can be, which is Chang’s mission. We are especially inspired by his use of sliding walls, which offers fantastic potential in small urban spaces, allowing them to become mutable and expansive. And we wish there were a place to buy the sleek murphy bed-cum-sofa he designed.
We love this quote from Design Milk’s great interview: “Psychologically, one should ‘maintain’ an open mind on how to use the space and avoid, as much as possible, the pre-conceptions on what a ‘home’ should function and look like.”
You’ll find pictures and floor plans at Architonic. View more of Chang’s interiors here. Video link here.
via Emma's Design Blog
Every morning we scroll through A LOT of blogs looking for delicious/interesting/useful ideas and improvisations. Lately, we spotted some Ikea pieces buried in features about stylish interiors. Our view of Ikea is that when it’s great, it’s really great, like the Alto-esque stacking stools they used to sell for $12 and the geometric rug, above, that we blogged a while back. And then there is Ikea that becomes great when used cleverly…
Take this very basic Ikea PS metal cabinet for $99, for example… read more…
Anthony Giglio
Our friend Anthony Giglio sent us this email:
…being a vertically-challenged Italian-American with extra-tall kitchen cabinets, I keep a step-stool at the ready for a quick boost. This week while trying to pack lunch boxes for Sofia and Marco I couldn’t find my white, plastic step-up, and calls out to the family yielded not a single response. Then I found Marco organizing beads. Reaching into a huge jar filled with thousands of colored beads he was sorting them by color into separate compartments, by way of dropping each one into a grid on the underside of my inverted step stool. I had no idea these “compartments” were even there! How did he find them? Brilliant discovery and improv. But now I need a new stool! read more…
Sally Schneider
After we wrote about making bookshelves out of black pipe, we stumbled on these images of black pipe closet fitting. We’d taken them a couple of months ago at our friends’ newly renovated, about-to-be-moved-into, Brooklyn brownstone; there are no clothes hanging yet so you can really see the detail. We’re thinking that the resources in the bookcase post – where to buy, and the basic how-to’s – are about all you need to do this-cool-closet-treatment yourself.
The black hangers turn the whole thing stylish and artful. read more…
