Recently, Design Sponge featured the three-level Copenhagen apartment of Camilla Ebdrup, half of the Danish duo behind LuckyBoySunday, and her husband, photographer Andreas Stenmann. Their style is a mix of modern and vintage, with many items foraged from the nearby canals, where interesting items are washed in from the sea. We especially loved the wooden ladder that they use as a pot rack.
The ladder idea came up when there was no more room in the cupboards for the pots and pans, and it looks great.
Indeed! We hunted around for “wooden ladders with round rungs” and found a huge selection on Ebay under wooden ladders: read more…
‘the improvised life’s former assistant Sarah M alerted us to this easy-to-make gift for the holidays: color block wooden spoons, along with a link to A Cozy Kitchen showing how-to. It could not be easier: buy some wooden spoons (they’re cheap), use painter’s tape to mask-off a striped design, then paint the spaces left and allow to dry. Then tie ‘em together with a ribbon. read more…
This surprising kitchen is the brainchild of Austrian conceptual artist Thomas Feuerstein. It is an artwork, but like many artworks we come across, it contains wonderful ideas to be had and used, like scrabble tiles on the walls.
Just for the hell of it, we started hunting down scrabble tiles. We didn’t find any ceramic ones, but found vinyl ones in Sweden at Bokstavskakel…We thinking they’d make a fine floor.
We’ve long been fans of Canal House Cooking, the groundbreaking cookbook series created and published by Christopher Hirscheimer and Melissa Hamilton. We are totally smitten with their latest effort: Canal House Cooks Every Day, a bright red, 385-page tome documenting a year of cooking from Canal House, based on their popular daily lunch blog. The book offers many levels of pleasure: great REAL do-able recipes by two women who cook for themselves daily, evocative photographs and illustrations AND a no-nonsense, simplepleasure-centric philosophy of cooking. Perfect. Check out a preview here.
We’ll be giving away a copy to the lucky winner of a random drawing (see details below). read more…
The wind has picked up in the huge trees in the park across the way. TV news is reporting mandatory evacuations around the city, as the confluence of full moon, the jet stream and hurricane Sandy’s massive size threatens major flooding and power outages. The sky is straight our of a Ghostbuster’s movie; we’re waiting for the storm to hit.
We spent the morning walking around Harlem gathering supplies, as others did…prescriptions, cash, batteries. We stopped to listen to the joyous gospel that spilled from the windows of a church. As we wandered, we planned our supplies and strategy should the power go out. We’re definitely not into Powerbars; but into REAL as long as we can maintain it.
Chilewich is a brand of chic, minimalist woven polypropalene floor mat that is a staple in design magazines. You’d think the material from which they’re made – woven polypropyline – would be available in off-brands, but we haven’t found any in our searches. (We did, however, find a number of seller’s on Ebay who sell seconds or discontinued styles; Chilewich mats aren’t cheap.) We’ve been thinking of possibly using a Chilewich floor mat for the kitchen whose painted plywood floors take a lot of wear and tear. So we ordered some samples from Chilewich’s site.
From having cooked seriously and sometimes wildly-with-a-number-of-cooks-at-once, we know about all the bits of food that can end up ground into the kitchen floor, from scraps of fat from trimmed meat to fruit peels. We worried that all this stuff would mash into the weave and make for more work than we want. So we decided to do a test to see if the Chilewich would really clean easily despite our abuse. read more…
Recently, quite out-of-the-blue, we contrived a surprisingly chic garbage can. In the course of moving apartments, we had found 6-gallon bottle of “emergency” water stowed away in the back of a closet. It was housed in a rectangular black plastic crate . When we pulled the bottle out, the box suddenly looked wonderfully Bauhausian, a perfectly-designed garbage can for our needs. It fits under the new sink cabinet in the renovated apartment, has a low profile, and holds a good amount, and looks fine when sitting out on the kitchen floor during serious cooking sessions (visitors have actually admire it. Where did you get that cool garbage can?).
When we went to photograph it, we became conscious of a dilemma: we line our garbage can with a plastic bag (below). What else could we use? We’re wondering what a viable nonplastic way to deal with garbage is if you live in a city and are unable to compost and haul other stuff to the dump. New York City’s recycling bags are even made of plastic.
In summer, we sometimes find ourselves spending time in the badly-equipped kitchens of rented or borrowed summer houses that can be a great challenge to cook in. So we apply the concept of makeshift: When you find you don’t have a particular piece of equipment you need, improvise a substitute or “shift” the dish you are making to accommodate it.
When it comes to equipment, makeshift is an antidote to the inhibiting, very modern reliance on matching sets of pots and stylishly outfitted kitchens. It cuts to the heart of the matter: rather than letting a piece of equipment stand in the way, you come up with a makeshift solution, as resourceful people have for eons, so you can still make the delicious dish you were planning. Use a label-less wine bottle to roll out pastry dough, a coffee cup for a ladle and get by just fine with one good sharp knife (we often travel with a folding Opinel picnic knife). We heard of a woman who pulled out her ironing board when she needed more counter space.
We’ve come up with an array of makeshift solutions over the years. The example below (with a couple of recipe) will give you a sense of possibility for devising your own makeshift equipment when you need it. There’s only one rule: whatever works. read more…
Over the years we’ve been given a number of beautiful oversized platters which we love to use for celebrations of all sorts. We’ve discovered they are too oddly-shaped to fit stacked on a shelf in our renovated kitchen cabinets, but would if we could find a way to stand them up. Using wire plate display stands for each platter would prove unwieldy and take up too much room. So we started to look around for another option.
We found it in the form of an inexpensive plate holder from Crate and Barrel: basically two wooden bars held in place by dowels, with dowels placed vertically at about 1″ intervals to hold plates: a tinker-toy of a plate holder.
Our platters need bigger spacing to balance upright properly so we decided to try hacking the plate holder read more…
(Video link here.) Artist Tom Sachs, who we’ve posted about a number of times, recently made a video about plywood. He LOVES IT, uses a lot of it in his work, and has learned a great deal about handling it, which he summed up in this charming, illuminating video. It is totally after-are-own-hearts: in our the ongoing renovation of our Laboratory, we’ve made – and are making – all sorts of things from plywood…like the floors read more…
Soon summer will be here, bringing with it a crop of cucumbers (and countless other vegetables) just waiting to be pickled. But for those who are intimidated by the process of water-bath canning for shelf storage (or who just want a crunchy fresh pickle!) there is an easy solution: spices, water, vinegar, salt, and two weeks in the fridge. We love the simplicity of Kate Payne’s Fridge Pickles 101. And that’s just one of many great, fun recipes included in her fab The Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking. If you haven’t read about it already, we’re doing a free book giveaway this month. So if you’re hungry for more of Kate’s tips, simply leave a comment telling us what project around the house or in your garden you’re most looking forward to tackling this spring/summer. Make sure you do it by midnight on March 19, at which point we will randomly pick a winner.
We recently came across a photo essay of a home decorated with vintage fruit boxes. We’re talking some kind of obsession here. They’re all through the house as furniture and storage solutions, like the bed and shelves above, and this kitchen island on wheels… read more…
We’ve been mulling the idea of using a pegboard on the inside of a tool closet door, the cleaning closet door (to hang mops, brooms, vacuum cleaner hose) and perhaps even in a walk-in clothes closet where it would be useful for hanging jewelry for jewelry, belts etc. We can’t stop thinking about Julia Child’s famous kitchen (you can take a virtual tour of the Smithsonian’s re-creation of it) with it’s charming/homely blue pegboard that hung many of her copper pots and tools. When painted, a pegboard’s polka dot grid can make a pleasing visual, witness the non-utilitarian pegboard headboard we posted a while back.
As is happening more and more, as soon as we started thinking out our options, an answer appeared. This one came as a great how-to found in Kate Payne’s Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking. She takes you through hanging up a kitchen pegboard step-by-step, and has some indispensable lessons learned. read more…
photo: herbert matter, courtesy of the calder foundation
Of all the brilliant artists we feature on ‘the improvised life’, Alexander Calder holds a special place in our hearts. In addition to his monumental artworks and legendary mobiles, he was a prolific creator of household objects for everyday use. If he or his wife Louisa or a friend needed something utilitarian, he would devise a solution on the spot, with whatever was at hand.
The trove of his improvisations is vast and inspiring; each invites rethinking of common objects we often take for granted: tin cans, pie tins, wire, bits of scrap wood. His creations were not only useful, but visually stunning.
Here is the artist telling how he created a barbeque grill out of an iron garden chair after his son-in-law Jean Davidson invited a horde of people over for a party: read more…
Our friend Jacque Burke is the Communications Director for The Dutch and Locanda Verde, lynchpins of chef Andrew Carmellini‘s growing restaurant empire. She sent us a photo of this astonishing to-do list with some thoughtful commentary, and inadvertently became a guest blogger:
“I had some work waiting for me at Locanda Verde, and when I went into our chefs offices there, I was stopped dead by this to-do list sitting on the desk.”What chaos!” I thought. Just looking at it made my mind go blank. I need symmetry in my to-do lists: columns with an underlined header for each one, that these days is either a person who needs tending (AC, Luke, Josh, Patrick, JACQUE) or one of our ongoing projects (Locanda Verde, the cafe inside The Dutch Miami, MSG…) I keep them in one of these journals that I carry around with me.
Once I got over the insta-vertigo from this list, it struck me just how interesting looking it was – with the random acts of color in certain spots – and how graphic. Was this really a hapless creation? Or perhaps it is the perfect picture of that frenzied life we all lead (and by lead, I think I really mean ‘chase after beet-faced and breathless.’) Everyone’s to do list looks different, but maybe this is how everyone’s to do list feels. read more…
(they’re cheap), use painter’s tape to mask-off a striped design, then paint the spaces left and allow to dry. Then tie ‘em together with a ribbon. 
, the groundbreaking cookbook series created and published by Christopher Hirscheimer and Melissa Hamilton. We are totally smitten with their latest effort: 
, a bright red, 385-page tome documenting a year of cooking from Canal House, based on their popular 
for each platter would prove unwieldy and take up too much room. So we started to look around for another option.
. If you haven’t read about it already, 
