kitchen

sliding walls and (garage) doors

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 | comments (6) | in cool spaces, elements, garden, hard, inside, kitchen, materials, outside, walls + windows |

cool round kitchen tools: knife holder + dish drainer

Todd Selby/The Selby

We were scrolling through The Selby when we spotted these round magnet knife holders in a house in Connecticut. They are a nice sculptural change from the usual foot-long-or-so bar knife holder – the knives look like they’re floating. We hunted them down online here…

And then almost immediately we came across this re-thinking of a dish drainer by Paulina Deltour for Alessi: another round tool that has traditionally been a rectangle. read more…

07.29.10 | comments | in gifts, housewares, inside, kitchen, solutions, stores |

working at the kitchen table (andrea zittel)

Andrea Zittel

While we were writing about Andrea Zittel the other night, we stumbled on a post from her blog called “Still Working on the Kitchen Table“.

The photo shows one of her half-done billboard paintings on the kitchen table, in a living space that is clearly in action, work and living woven together. Even though Zittel could try discipline herself to work in her studio – a shipping container fifty feet from the house –  she doesn’t. She works where it feels best, and things happens organically…

“When I was twenty and studying art in undergrad, I house sat for my parents one summer and built my entire senior show in their kitchen. I remember the feeling or horror one day when cutting out a shape with the jigsaw and accidentally making a slice into the tabletop that my mother had hand stained when I was an infant.  Three decades later and I’m still making most of my work in the kitchen…”

We wonder how many BIG THINGS in the world were figured out at the kitchen table?

(In the background, you can also see the cardboard shelving we were so taken with…stuff beginning to be stored in it.)

Related post: Andrea Zittel: Investigative Living

07.20.10 | comments | in eating, furniture, inside, inspiration blogs + sites, kitchen, paths + processes, people, projects + play, working |

before + after: lydia’s kitchen renovation

Ellen Silverman

A couple of weeks ago, we started posting about Lydia Wills’ former studio apartment in New York City; the 600-square-foot space had so much going on, we had to make it a series…

Here’s her renovated kitchen which, when she moved in, was the most generic of New York City apartment galley kitchens (there’s a gratifying “before” after the jump). A few years ago she ripped it out and rethought the original space. The question: How to create a pleasurable, efficient kitchen without moving any walls or spending a fortune?… read more…

07.08.10 | comments | in eating, elements, hard, inside, kitchen, lighting, materials, reimagine, solutions |

lydia wills’ apartment: before + after + in between

Ellen Silverman

Knowing that Lydia Wills was about to move to a bigger apartment, we enlisted Ellen Silverman to photograph her 600-square-foot studio near Gramercy Park. We’ve known Lydia for years and have watched her apartment evolve into a home with lots of good ideas, far too many to cover in one post. So we thought we’d do the broad strokes now and then focus on specifics during the next few weeks. The real story of Lydia’s apartment is that it slowly evolved, as Lydia did, growing out of one thing and into another, as she discovered furniture, fabrics and lighting that resonated with her life.

Lydia has been sewing since she was young and loves natural textiles, which she used to define the space (often incorporating unusual and vintage fabrics). Over years, she discovered and fell in love with the work of Scandinavian and European Modernist designers. She bought some enduring, beautifully designed pieces of furniture and lighting (mostly on Ebay, for a fraction of their cost), like the leather chair by Yngve Ekstrom, the fantastic table by Bengt Gullberg and the chandelier by Eric Hoglund.

Since there is nothing more gratifying than seeing before-and-after photos, we’ll start with a picture of what this apartment looked like BEFORE, when someone else had it: read more…

06.23.10 | comments (6) | in before + after, cool spaces, elements, furniture, inside, kitchen, paths + processes, reimagine, rooms |

real life is messy

Periodically we like to feature the messy workspaces of artists as a reminder that being creative often means making a mess…We see it as an antidote to the shelter-magazine vision of a nice neat life that has infiltrated our heads over the years.

To take the idea a step further, we thought it would be fun to run a picture of Sally’s hacked kitchen as it was photographed for just one such magazine (note the artfully arranged array of photogenic foods) alongside an i-Phone photo Sally took one day when all-hell-was-breaking-lose in that same kitchen… and she couldn’t keep up with all the things she had to do, not to mention close the cabinet door, or break up an Amazon box to take to the recycling bin or even pick up a paper off the floor.

A lot of that stuff on the counter are objects waiting to be photographed and half-done projects for ‘the improvised life’, amidst bills and lists and…

The truth of that kitchen is that it waxes and wanes… gets messy then neat…out-of-control then serene and collected, and back again. Real life and making and doing is a wild business: work….in….progress….

Related post: On Things “Not Looking Good While You’re Working on Them”

What Unkempt or Messy or Shabby Can Mean

Kitchen Cabinets as Furniture

M.F.K. Fisher’s “Mystic Materialism of a Hungry Woman”

Fling and Be Flung

06.02.10 | comments (1) | in before + after, inside, kitchen, living, paths + processes, projects + play, rooms, strategies |

hacking a kitchen island + sally on splendid table

Ellen Silverman

This weekend, public radio’s The Splendid Table will be airing host Lynne Rosetto Kasper‘s interview with Sally about modular kitchen cabinets. Sally has been an inadvertent proponent of the European practice of owning your kitchen, installing it in a rental apartment and taking it with you to your next space. Years ago, she designed a kitchen in a space she thought she’d be in forever; when things changed, she took the kitchen with her. After all, a kitchen is really just an arrangement of individual cabinets bolted to the wall. (Click here to see check out the kitchen-related posts below. )

Since her new space was smaller, Sally also hacked the center island, read more…

05.21.10 | comments (1) | in elements, food, inside, kitchen, reimagine |

 
 
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