walls + windows
Tara Mann alerted us to Mashable’s slide show of unusual offices. We especially like this impromtu cardboard office designed by Paul Coudamy, who cleverly used corrugated cardboard as walls and shelves (more photos follow). Of course we instantly started hunting down that really thick cardboard that’s so perfect for making furniture like this chaise… read more…
11.03.10 |
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in cheap + great, cool spaces, copy this!, furniture, inside, materials, resources, resources blogs + sites, walls + windows, working |
Ever since we blogged a whiteboard-painted wall for tracking ideas and next steps, we’ve been coming across examples of graphed ideas. This is J.K. Rowlings plot spreadsheet for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It knocked us out for how utterly straightforward and unfussy it is; written in ball-point pen on lined notebook paper. And look what it became!
It reminded us how useful/essential it is to graph our ideas, and make visual representations of getting from one place to another – where we are to where we want to go – and the steps in-between, with room to shift it as things evolve and change.
The form is whatever works for you. We find that our paper maps get buried. With so many things going on, they really need to be on a wall for us to keep our goals in mind. We’re going to build that into our new office.
Design consultants IDEO famously use Post-It notes to track ideas in their brainstorming sessions. The notes can be moved around as the idea evolves. read more…
10.21.10 |
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in inside, paths + processes, tools, walls + windows, working |
Ditte Isager
We’re always amazed at the way we can start thinking about something and then, like magic, we find more examples, or pictures or casual mentions of the idea. It’s a kind of radar (or perhaps just a shift in our vision); we don’t know how it works or how to control it but it is always fun and illuminating. Today, no sooner had we thought “How beautiful a roughly painted concrete block and cement wall can be”… read more…
09.27.10 |
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Matthew Cavanaugh for The New York Times
We love maps of ideas and are inspired by this photo published in last weekends in Sunday New York Times Business Section. It got us thinking about how to create a good-looking erasable wall without having to use chalk. (Chalkboard paint is GREAT in many places, but we wondered about other options.) We thought of the “whiteboard“ often used to graph ideas in board rooms and wondered if there was a whiteboard paint that would make a similar surface on any wall. So we Googled “whiteboard paint” and hit the jackpot (we even found the Times guy’s pumpkin orange color). Checkout IdeaPaint for a one-coat, totally erasable paint that you can write with markers….You can use it on “anything you can paint”…
Related post: Where Good Ideas Come From
D-I-Y Words on Walls
09.21.10 |
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in copy this!, inside, materials, resources, walls + windows |
Jo Henderson (photo), Emma Thomas (stylist)
When I was a kid, the foyer of my family’s GreenwichVillage house was papered with blueprints of the building, the inspiration of our friend David Barrett, an interior designer, who always had amazing ideas. In those days, house plans were really blue, with white type and design, and came in big glossy folded sheets or rolls. They could be applied to the wall just like wallpaper.
This picture posted on Desire To Inspire reminded me how beautiful vintage blueprints can be used as wall coverings. When I poked around Ebay, I discovered that all sorts of vintage blueprints are available, including ones for railroad bridges and boats, even Yankee Stadium. Use the search term “blueprints” or “vintage blueprints.” read more…
09.16.10 |
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in inside, materials, resources, resources blogs + sites, walls + windows |
George Whiteside
We like the idea of this black-and-white photo collage, made sleek and moderne by placing the photos on a grid within a defined rectangle, and leaving a bit of space between each one. We’re thinking a restickable “Post It” glue stick
would do the trick, allowing you to shift and rearrange images at will without damaging walls. You can always “photoshop” color photos into black-and-white, size them as needed and print them out… lots of possibilities depending on the space…
via Desire to Inspire
09.10.10 |
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in copy this!, elements, how-to, inside, materials, resources, walls + windows |
Sally Schneider
Friends of ours recently finished the long renovation of their brownstone in Brooklyn; designed by artists, the house is full of interesting ideas. One of the most dramatic is the floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that collapse sideways to open to the lush garden in the back…on two floors no less. (Our photographs were taken while the punch-list was being done, a few days before our friends moved in; we thought it would be great to have before-and-after photos down the line of the empty-then-lived in house.)
When the doors are fully open, the house feels like a tree house: the outside is, startlingly, right there…expanding the concept of al fresco...
Then we started looking for ways to achieve this lovely effect with more modest means… read more…
09.07.10 |
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in cool spaces, elements, garden, hard, inside, kitchen, materials, outside, walls + windows |
Sally Schneider
We’ve spent the past ten days or so on the other side of the country, looking at everything but our laptops, and being nothing but lazy. Somehow doing NOTHING filled us up, gave us lots to think about and share…
Like this sign we saw (when Nina said LOOK UP!) in Balmy Alley in San Francisco, known for its wonderful murals, from one end to another…
(and which happens to be right around the corner from Humphry Slocum, our favorite ice cream place – more on that later)… read more…
08.24.10 |
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in art, community, outside, projects + play, reclaim, sightings, signs, walls + windows |
P.R. Hovland
Pamela Hovland‘s Comment in response to our recent wallpaper post is an amazing report from MOMA of a wallpaper installation that is so wonderfully described, hilarious and thoughtful, that we had to publish it here. And just as we were despairing of not being able to find any image like it on MOMA’s website, Pamela sent us one by email: blurry but completely expressive…
“I stopped by MoMA today, for a quick dose of inspiration. The Matisse show is on view so it is quite crowded — it takes all one’s attention just to negotiate the hallways. As a result, I don’t think many people stopped to look closely at a wallpaper “installation” between two galleries. The wallpaper is a temporary construction made simply by repeating a photograph numerous times in a grid. The image is a tightly cropped view of a man’s bare bottom (I’m trying to be polite) with his crack (I can’t think of another word here) in the center of the composition. It’s not a particularly photogenic specimen; upon closer analysis you see the dimples and blemishes of some anonymous middle aged guy’s rear end. In this presentation, however, the image takes on a kind of architectural quality – a kind of industrial building block, I guess. The imperfections are lost as the sum of the parts takes precedence.
Makes me want to create wallpaper at home out of some crazy image fragment I have lying around. Not a body part though… it’s been done!
Now that I think about it, this installation is a bit like your Lego post AND the wallpaper post — conflated!” read more…
08.05.10 |
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Ditte Isager
While surfing around this morning, we stumbled on an interior by photographer Ditte Isager and was struck by the wallpaper, loosely tacked rather than glued, for a whole other, delightfully un-done look. For us, it’s a swell alternative to the often-fussy permanence of wallpaper (and the difficulty of taking it off the wall when we change our minds). We went to Isager’s website to check out her work and found more lovely examples of paper wall coverings… read more…
08.03.10 |
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