Sally Schneider
Wandering around Harlem recently, we spotted this structure in the back of someone’s brownstone. It appears to be a clever combination porch and treehouse, literally built AROUND the tree growing in the yard.
Whoever made it clearly didn’t want to mess with the old tree growing very close to the house. So they found away to…embrace it.
read more…
This wonderful image got us thinking about umbrellas: the brilliance of the IDEA and the brilliance of the actual creation.
Somehow, that led us to this beautiful glowing dome made out red umbrellas that seemed to appear suddenly out of nowhere around a lamp post in the centre of Rotterdam. read more…
(Video link here.) About 6 months ago, we got an email from Merete Mueller, a friend of a friend who was just finishing up a film about the Tiny House Movement.
The film, “TINY: A Story About Living Small” follows Christopher Smith and my attempt to build a tiny house from scratch with no building experience in the mountains of Colorado. It also explores the lives of other Americans who have downsized their lives into houses smaller than the average parking space.
We’re interested in innovative design and environmental sustainability, but most of all, we’re interested in “Home”—how we find it and how we know when we’re there, the small, strong details that make us feel comfortable and at-ease in a place.
Through homes stripped down to their essentials, the film raises questions about sustainability, good design, and the changing American Dream, and what we REALLY need to live well and happily. It’s also the story of Merete and Christopher embarking on a project without knowing what they were doing; they could LEARN what they didn’t know. And did. (TINY just premiered at South by SouthWest, an independent film festival. Way to go!!!!)
We already love the film for this wise nugget:
For some people bigger isn’t necessarily better. The world gets a lot bigger when you begin to have more cash and time. read more…
rita willaert
In the small country of Burkina Faso near the border to Ghana, it is common for dwellings to be painted with intricate patterns using colored mud and chalk. The patterns tells stories of the community’s culture.
We are amazed at how modern these rustic wall paintings are, and imagine how beautiful they would be adorning the side of a building or a garden wall, a floor, a headboard perhaps.
photo via hno (henk nouwens) flickr
Holton Rower spotted this amazing image on henk nouwens flickr. It is titled ‘The Cantilevered Void House’ and accompanied by these words:
“Standing immobile throughout the day, these vivid objects, with their fantastic shadows on the wall behind them shifting and elongating hour by hour with the sun’s rotation, exuded a kind of darkness for all their color.” Cantilevered structures self-supported over the void. From: The Gormenghast Novels
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Who knows what the story is, whether the house is real or fake? Is it a fantastical image from The Gormenghast Novels
We’re smitten with this simple cantilever plywood chair (tiny angle braces clearly showing…could we diy this?) read more…
We love checking in to Cabin Porn a site which provides “inspiration for your quiet place somewhere”, which right now, is in our heads.
Recently, we became smitten with this hut overlooking Lake Bonney in the southeast of South Australia. All we know is that “it was built over 5 years with salvaged materials”; no other details were given. So we looked close at what those salvaged materials might be: we saw corrugated aluminum, windows, concrete blocks, reclaimed timber, a door, some sort of thin modern glass, driftwood…
Inspired, inspiring. A place to think…
Related posts: house tour: laura handler’s montana log cabin
cabin porn fave of the day: garden cottage, netherlands
‘tiny homes: simple shelter’
favorite escapist blog: cabin porn
the unexpected stylishness of walls of stacked logs
photo: jesper ray
We’ve been getting an increasing number of emails from readers their shipping pallet improvisations, as they push they realm of pallet invention. A recent favorite: this swell, stylish staircase by Natasha Figueroa and her husband Dan Husted who live in an up-and-coping gallery district in Copenhagen, Denmark.
We have a private gallery/studio located in Kødbyen, which is the old meatpacking district. Lot45 is the name, and it is an old ‘skin-house’, where they used to hang the hides for curing. Since we did all the work ourselves, we kept the budget quite tight and try to re-use as much as we could. Seeing as the meatpacking district still functions, there are a lot of old pallets laying about. Dan designed and built this so that it can also function as a hang-out during openings & parties.
Their pallet staircase functions as an old fashioned stoop where their friends do indeed hang out… read more…
We’ve browsed endless catalogues that feature chic, expensive house numbers. We’ve always preferred the ones Isabel Rower devised out of washi tape. Then we saw THIS wonderful graphic house number done in ordinary paint. It could be any size and color(s) you want. The trick would be in finding or making a template that makes for beautiful lines, though freehand could be really beautiful.
via Japanese Trash
Related posts: impromptu tape house numbers
color inspiration: pink, acid yellow + a blue geometry
painted miracle: pink-washed plywood
for stylish d-i-y shipping pallet furniture: paint it black!
rough, hand-painted stripes on walls
transforming cheapo materials with paint
color-painted panels as decorative element
what a painted slab of plywood can do (d-i-y)
This Vancouver house carved out of stumps in the early 1900′s is our idea of swell, the perfect eccentric, elemental, minimalist retreat:
“…3 rooms.The lower stump on right was the kitchen, the lower part of the highter stump on the left was the living room. The bedroom, doorless, was reached by a ladder removed in daytime to the kitchen…”
It reminds us a favorite young adult novel we’ve read a million times: read more…
photo: sally schneider
We recently found some photos that we took in the fabled Chelsea Hotel’s a few months before anyone knew it would be closing. (Click here to listen to Leonard Cohen singing Chelsea Hotel,which he wrote for Janis Joplin, while you read on). We’d been to artist John Wellington’s birthday party in one of the rooms there, and as we were clumping down the iron stairwell on our way out, we couldn’t help but admire the wild graffiti that adorned the fire extinquishers in the corner of each landing: an ubiquitous, essential tool made into something grander than it’s usual self… read more…
frank bayh & steff rosenberger-ochs
When the building of the ‘stuttgart 21′ train station commenced, demonstrators started setting up camp on the location to prevent what is predicted to be the largest construction site in europe. German photography studio frank bayh & steff rosenberger-ochs captured make-shift homes devised and occupied by the protesters in an exhibition called ‘the development of new urban quarters in the heart of the city’. Design Boom has done a great post on it, with lots of photos:
The ad-hoc complex has resulted in a colorful and organic mixture of materials including tarps, umbrellas, sticks and blankets, all compiled into the metropolitan dwellings. The personalized teepees showcase a different type of architectural expression springing from necessity into accidental and eclectic structures. read more…
…fuels our imagination…gives us a lovely vicarious experience: a fantazoom to will lead who-knows-where?
via Cabin Porn
Related posts: favorite escapist blog: cabin porn
‘tiny homes: simple shelter’
voyeur: suzanne shaker’s interiors
evocative ideas from “the best of the selby 2010″
inside björk’s house (we’re back!)
photo: Alex Soth
A couple of weeks ago in the New Yorker, Vince Aletti wrote a brief description of an exhibition of photographer Alec Soth’s work:
Soth’s subject here is elusive; he seeks out people who’ve gone off the grid, tracking survivalists, drifters, and recluses to their makeshift lairs…
…Working through his own ambivalence—what he describes as “the desire to run away and the knowledge that you can’t”—Soth take us to a place that’s almost as seductive as it is forbidding.
Our own ambivalent ”desire to run away” — the fantasy that it is possible, the possibility of stepping out of our lives — sent us to Soth’s website to see his work. We culled some intriguing images of makeshift spaces and things from the many projects he features. They are original, eccentric, mysterious, resourceful, reflecting very improvised lives. With each one, we wonder about—and imagine— the backstory. read more…
photo: kurosawa kawaraten
Never have we seen such a complete transformation of a house as that masterminded by Japanese architecture firm kurosawa kawaraten with just… paint – a paint job taken to the nnnth-degree. According to Design Boom:
“…none of the exterior or interior structure is changed, only a thin coat of white paint is applied to the surface. Only by adding white, the form is accentuated; white creates a modern and abstract version of the previous building.”
Modern and abstract is what this previously ordinary house became… read more…
photo: stephan tamiesie
Many of the blogs we read have direct practical applications to our lives; they give us ideas we can use in our home, office, traveling, relationships, work, self-image…
One category of blog is really for pure escapism; they offer us a break from our usual routine and vision. Of late, our favorite is Cabin Porn, pictures of cabins all over the world. Some of the images are accompanied by a bit of interesting commentary, like The Best Hut built by Jono Williams (and friends) in New Zealand.
“Built for less than $1500 using mostly scavenged or donated materials, the treehouse includes solar panels, rainwater collection, a gas-fired outdoor bathtub and a radio-controlled drawbridge.” read more…
