Public radio’s Studio 360 recently passed out fill-in-the-blank cards to their audience that said: “In my next life, I will be_____________.” Check out the slideshow of some of the responses they got.
It makes us wonder: When could our ‘next life’ start? Was George Elliot right when she said, It’s never too late to be what you might have been. read more…
Benjamin Benschneider/Pacific Northwest Magazine
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…
Dominic Wilcox
We are completely smitten with Variations on Normal, Dominic Wilcox’s blog about his inventions and simple,”out there” solutions to everyday needs and wants. Wilcox is a self-described “artist, designer, inventor and ‘thinkeruper’ who works within the territory of the ‘everyday’.” That’s our favorite territory.
Each of Wilcox’s concepts and inventions is annotated. To make his room more welcoming, he carpeted it with Welcome mats. “You can even wipe your feet wherever you want. Oh and there is a patch of floor where the door mat should be.”
“ …to avoid the squeezing at wrong end arguments” he invented Two WayToothpaste, with a cap on each end.
Wilcox has gained some notoriety of late for his phallic and practical Finger-nose stylus for touchscreen technology… read more…
We always thought Kramer had a great idea there….But we’d make it with a really BIG book, like Little Nemo in Slumberland: Many More Splendid Sundays, Volume 2
Sally Schneider
Our friend Maria Robledo LOVES her garden and makes the most astonishing, impromptu arrangements from her cuttings. We were charmed and delighted by the arrangement we found on her dining table recently: no vase, no water, just a spray and a cluster of flowers placed directly on the tabletop. The flowers stayed fine throughout several hours of dinner, and Maria gave them to us to take home. We put them in water and they are just fine, two days later. The gist: 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…
We fell HARD for artist Max Lamb‘s work after we sat on a Lamb stool owned by our friend A.S.C. (Sandy) Rower, President of the Calder Foundation (more on that big adventure soon). The stool was beautiful and comfortable and made by an ancient process of sand casting: Lamb goes to the beach and makes a mould in the wet sand, then pours molten pewter (heated on a camping stove) into it, waits for it to set, then digs out the strangely elegant stool with its roughly granulated legs.
Lamb embarked on his ad hoc method of sand-casting after he was unable to afford to have a professional foundry do the casting process for him. He remembered building sand castles as a kid, and knew he could figure out sand casting himself. He publishes videos of his work process, because he wants other people to know how he does it. Watch the sand-casting video here (making the mould runs until about 2:40 when Lamb pours the liquid metal; he digs out the work at 3:37).
Then Sandy showed us a picture of some incredible library shelves he’d commissioned Lamb to make for him (below). They were based on another classic Lamb technique: carving polystyrene (think packing materials and take-out coffee cups) into a usable form (like the chair, above), then spraying it with a polyurethane rubber finish. We love it because, as Lamb says: ”A variety of simple tools and a reasonable amount of energy is all that is required…” He makes us believe WE could do something like that, read more…
For some time now, we’ve been mulling the idea of pop-up, temporary “rooms” that we could put in place easily in a smallish apartment. The idea started with wanting to provide out-of-town friends camping in our living room with privacy, and evolved when we were trying to figure out a way to separate our sleeping area off from our office, which shares one big room. Lately, as we’ve thought about the things we could do with one huge loft-like room, we thought it would be great to be able to devise a separate office, without building anything in.
Although this could be done with imaginative use of room screens, we imagine an impermanent structure that would define a space: a moveable, temporary room within an apartment…We found quite a range of possibilities from the seriously-designed and expensive MultiScreen Shangrila, above, with screens that move up and down to Display Hut’s 8′x8′ Canopy Tent. read more…
Marjon Hoogervorst aka Vorstin
We have a thing for faucets made of artfully bent pipe. We love this bare-bones beauty we spotted on Bloesem.
Photo: Marjon Hoogervorst aka Vorstin
Related post: sculptural faucets of pipe (and shovel)…
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We stumbled on this image of the great architect Le Corbusier painting a fresco in the nude. in Le Corbusier: A Life. He was staying at legendary architect Eileen Gray‘s Villa E-1027 in St. Tropez, in 1927. You can almost feel the Mediterranean breezes.
To us, it is a reminder of “flow”, of following ideas spontaneously and just doing them, in whatever state you are in, in the moment, and enjoying its pleasures…
….jump out of bed and start working, dressed in a tee shirt or…nothing if the situation allows…
via Under the Sun
Recently, the New York Time’s reported that legendary chef Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago will soon open a restaurant that “if all goes according to plan, could be the most difficult, ephemeral and stressful in culinary history.”
In his new restaurant, Next, the menu will change radically every three months; it will, in essence, become an entirely different restaurant, drawing from a different place and time: the classical French repertoire of Escoffier, Kyoto in springtime, Palermo in 1949. It might even be designed around a single day. (Next’s website is spectacular.)
Having been awarded three Michelin stars for Alinea, and survived tongue cancer (with the threat of losing his sense of taste), Achatz seems to be programming personal and professional challenges for himself. Achatz’s view is that success in such a potentially difficult endeavor depends less on cooking skills than on creating great systems (which he and his team will plot out weeks in advance on an spreadsheet). We were mulling this idea over as we looked at the slideshow of Achatz’s artwork-like dishes when we suddenly focused on the picture of him and his partner standing under bright yellow scaffolding during Next’s renovation.
Our mind began to fly with ideas for things we could construct with scaffolding and it’s endlessly configurable lacquered metal parts.
From Eloise by Kay Thompson (Drawing: Hilary Knight)
The other night a friend who was recuperating from an injury asked us to tell him a story as he fell asleep. A story, we wondered, h-mm-mm. Why not read a kid’s book for this exhausted, wounded grown-up. Looking through our library, an ancient copy of Kay Thompson’s Eloise 
Robert Blinn of Core 77 posted an extensive and very interesting review of Living with Complexity
In Norman’s view, Gore’s desk is the cluttered extension of an organized mind. Indeed, Norman interviewed many seemingly organized owners of messy workspaces and heard them repeatedly request, “Please don’t clean my desk.” The apparent disorder of the office was being carefully tracked in their minds. Norman explains that all of our desire for “simplicity” is a false hope because life is complex. Complexity, however, does not need to be confusing.
We find complexity amazingly interesting AND confusing; since starting ‘the improvised life’, we’ve have had to totally GET with our messy workspace, and it’s vast piles of ideas that we’ve found and can’t keep up with filing. We’re kind of obsessed with “messy” spaces of creative people, who clearly have their own unique mental filing systems. We find that so many people think they are somehow flawed for having an in-flux workspace, we love to post examples to antidote the notion. Here’s another favorite. read more…
We are constantly amazed at the useful and stylish stuff that is available on Amazon – WAY beyond books, music and electronics. There are obvious design treasures like the fine bone china pitcher by Jasper Conran (a perfect wedding gift) or a cowhide rug
…like oddly-shaped glass laboratory vessels that we uses as flower vases; these Pyrex long-neck flasks
We made this sign almost a year ago to accompany our post about making time to pursue what’s REALLY important to you; we can’t remember why we didn’t publish it. When we stumbled on it after all this time, it shook our head up a bit and put a few things in perspective, which we figure is always a good thing.
Related post: the power of time off
