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…
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…
One of the pleasures of meeting Sebastian Nurmi and his wife Ülle when we were in Finland was the quick tour of their home on Bovik Farm. It is an amazing combination of charm, style, warmth and REAL… read more…
Announcing our latest book giveaway: Leslie Williamson’ Handcrafted Modern: At Home with Mid-century Designers, published by Rizzoli. Photographing with only natural light, Williamson documented details of the homes of fourteen mid-century designers, artists and craftspeople, including Jens Risom, Eva Zeisel, Harry Bertoia and Walter Gropius.
We love that the photos show the homes exactly as they were when the designers lived there, as with the image of Walter Gropius’ desk. You get to experience the personal touches that actually make a home feel like a home. Williamson set out to shoot the homes not only as examples of modernist design, but also to capture how these designers crafted homes that were meant to be lived in. Her exploration into the nexus of art and function, and forgoing design perfection in the name of a livable space is one that is close to our hearts. read more…
We’ve found a ton a great ideas in Artists’ Handmade Houses, the prize in our latest book giveaway. Check out this lovely outdoor “room” that Constantino Nivola created on his Long Island property.
In his garden, Nivola constructed outdoor “rooms” suggested by freestanding architectural structures, such as the wisteria-covered pergola, fireplace, bench, and wall shown here. The artist and his daughter, Claire, would paint murals on this wall using water-soluble paint, which over the course of several years, would wash away. The two would then whitewash the surface and replace what had been there with something new.–Michael Gotkin
Beautiful ideas, both: the outdoor “rooms” and the impermanent paintings…
We are thrilled to announce ‘the improvised life’ latest giveaway: Abrams’ lush coffee table book Artists’ Handmade Houses, with text by Michael Gotkin and photographs by Don Freeman. It is a sublime collection of thirteen homes created by artists and master craftsmen, both infamous and little known. We first learned about it when we saw images of sculptor Raoul Hague‘s eccentric, inspired cabin in Woodstock, New York on Mondoblogo. The title of the post was “Who the Hell is Raoul Hague?“, which we didn’t know either. But we were smitten by Hague’s rustic, beautiful, wildly improvised home and workspace, especially his bedroom with its pivoting lectern rigged to make it easy to read in bed. read more…
Recently in a wordless post called simply Casa Malaparte, Atelier featured some elegant, elemental tables made by placing a flat surface-on-pillars-or-stones; they reminded us of our favorite Le Corbusier table, a slab of concrete on a concrete block base. It sent us rooting through our file of slab-and-pillar tables, a great formula for oddly chic d-i-y tables. Pillars can mean many things, like the oil drum-and-wood-slab-table we clipped from Style Files some time back: read more…
For the past few years, we’ve been learning about how beautiful concrete blocks can be as a building material. The latest “lesson” came with a visit to the late Alexander Calder’s home in Connecticut for a birthday party for his daughter, who is a friend of ours. An artist who worked in a wide variety of materials, Calder built several buildings on the property over the years, out of ordinary cinder block. The austerity and simplicity of the architecture, coupled with abundant windows and elegant roof lines (and the fact of Calder having made incredible artworks in them) make the block buildings compelling. They fly in the face of the the notion that cinder block structures are generally nothing but ugly. So we walked around in the twilight and took some photos…
It snowed AGAIN last night in New York City so we thought it fitting to post New York Magazine’ SWELL slideshow and story about the snow fort Steve Burns made in the courtyard of his chic-o apartment in Williamsburg, during the blizzard of a few weeks ago.
Piling the snow took about three hours, digging it out took a bit longer because I did it myself with a shovel and a really big serving spoon. All in all, I’d say about eight hours of work.
When we wrote about clipped-together cardboard box shelving a while back, we mentioned wanting to paint the cardboard boxes – coat them with something to change their look (we were thinking rubber paint) – knowing that the cardboard would swell slightly and become….something else: not smooth but sculptural, possibly even stronger once it had dried. After a few comments to the effect of: “bad idea…YOU CAN”T paint cardboard”, we put the idea aside. Then we saw Andrea Zittel’s wonderful cardboard construction, with its cryptic blurb:
“For the last year there has been a teetering pile of cardboard boxes precariously stacked against the dining room wall. Today the masterpiece was finished and installed…. Walla!”
Look at that!!! we thought as we sailed from one website to another discovering Andrea Zittel. FOR YEARS she has been following her imaginings and exploring ways to define and organize space, question assumptions about it, experiment with new ways and systems for living.
Zittel’s not-quite-finished website is all about her work as a – WHAT? -, an installation artist-designer-sculptor-lifestyle thinker and investigator… She is the driving force behind A-Z West,”an institute of investigative living”read more…
Remodelista posted some terrific pictures of my friends Suzanne Shaker and Pete Dandridge’s perfect summer house on Shelter Island, 2 hours from New York City. Suzanne, an interior designer and stylist, and Pete, an art conservator, worked with Deborah Burke & Partners Architects to build the 1250 square foot from-scratch house. It seems incredibly spacious, due in part to large glass doors and picture windows (one whole side of the house) that bring in the surrounding woods and nature, and a 20-foot dining/living/kitchen area. Ample storage keeps the minimalist house from looking cluttered.
What Remodelista doesn’t mention is that the house was made on a strict budget – less than half of what a house in this part of the world would normally cost. Every design decision was meant to be both beautiful and practical, if not always easy; the budget demanded that Suzanne and Pete give up some ideas they’d seen as essential, and become more resourceful in finding solutions. They went with inexpensive materials in many places, to spend more on others. read more…
If you ever need a big dose of delight and wonder, watch David Attenborough’s 4 minute beauty of a video about the bower bird of New Guinea, who creates astonishingly-decorated homes using careful arrangements of orchids, tree ferns, moss, the shiny wing covers of beetles, orange fruits, glowing red leaves, acorns, black fruits…with a clear sense of aesthetics!
It reminds me of the way kids create fantastical houses out of whatever they find. Only a bird did it….(At least one leading naturalist of the 19 century thought the bower birds little homes were made by a race of pygmies.) read more…
, published by Rizzoli. Photographing with only natural light, 
, with text by Michael Gotkin and photographs by Don Freeman ends tonight at midnight EST so you have a few hours left to enter. 
