Of the many imaginary inventions in my head, a pop-up guest room has had many iterations. Living in a moderate-sized New York City apartment with only one bedroom, I’d love a separate, somewhat private space to offer guests who come to sleep in my big open livingroom/kitchen/workspace. My latest inspiration comes Fabrica, Benetton’s communication research center in Treviso, Ialy.’Next Cabane’ was a design exploration spurred by a foldable wooden structure found in a dark corner of an antique market in the south of Scotland. Fabrica’s designers viewed envisioned it as movable rooms that can be carried from place to place.
‘small, temporary spaces where we can set our boundaries, seek shelter or simply live a different life rediscovering the quality and simplicity of things. personal, intimate havens in harmony with their surroundings; they reflect on subjects like work, pop-up culture, loneliness, games. alternative settings were one can live in a better way with more awareness, where design is at the service of research into materials, forms and structures.’
All it would take to make the frame is a some drilled slats of hardwood, jointed with hex bolts and wing nuts* nut whose “wings” provide a grip for the thumb and finger. You tighten the wing nut to secure the form; untighten it to fold it up for storage. read more…
Marc Berenson sent us some snaps of magazine wallpaper he spotted at Steiner Studios at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The subject line read: I thought you might have an opinion on this homemade wallpaper from old magazine pages, it’s improvised
For sure we have an opinion: Although it kinda works in a public stairwell with that cobalt blue, we aren’t crazy about it since it’s so busy and we get addled by a lot of words and the pages don’t seem terribly well edited, and why look at commercial stuff? BUT…
We’ve written about the unexpected stylishiness of stacked logs before but love this particularly charming and effective storage for firewood and fallen timber: a fence of stacked logs (snapped by Susan Jacobson as she drove by in her car).
Recently, we noticed a spike in traffic to our 2009 post d-i-y lace chain link fence. Ho, are people trying to figure out how to make chain link fences look better at last? What we loved in that early post was that someone had brilliantly seen that the metal grid of a chainlink fence is really a loom for weaving (think of those pot holder looms you used as a kid). The’d transformed ugly chain link with lacey crochet.
Looking around for more iterations, we found Michigan-based artist Lambchop’s Typographic Fences project. The Michigan-based artist weaves words and phrases into chain-link fences using ordinary flagging tape. Lambchop transforms the ugly fence —we find we don’t even notice the fence— into an illuminating message. read more…
When we first saw the yellow freehand painted two-tone wall at Style-Files (below), we were of two minds: good idea but something held us back.
Then we came started to come across an iteration Remodelista found at the Norwegian company Lady Premium Paint & Colors blog that made us think it held lots of possibilities. Out-of-the-blue we spotted the freehand-by-brush two-tone painted iPad sleeve (below) at Swiss-Miss. We began to think imagine embellishing all sorts of things with free-hand two-tone paint, like pillows a la Wary Meyers… read more…
Just as we posted about the many possibilities for using plywood as a wall covering, we learned of this brilliant play on the idea: moveable MAGNETIC silkscreened tiles made out of plywood. They are the brainchild of Giovanna and Matt Taylor, a couple who had never designed before. Remembering the blue-and-white ceramic tiles of her Italian childhood, Giovanna imagined lightweight wooden tiles with magnetic backing would allow for endless applications and arrangements from wall art, to back splashes to headboards to….The couple started making them in their Brooklyn shop and Moonishco was born. read more…
On Sprinkles and Springs, we came across this diy striped tee inspired by the modish tee-shirt Marc Jacobs recently featured in his chic, stripey collection. It is a great example of I COULD MAKE THAT thinking that has infiltrated many a clever head. Sprinkles and Springs saw it and figured out how using a plain white tee shirt, masking tape and fabric paint. And then she generously posted a how-to that you could use to make Jacobs-ish stripes or your own graphic pattern (the method would also work fine on jeans, slipcovers, pillows, many fabrics…) read more…
Recently, a friend mentioned her attempt to paint her wooden kitchen cabinets white using latex paint. Several months after she’d completed them, they’d yellowed and were difficult to clean. We’ve heard that complaint before about latex-painted furniture, and experienced the way it can remain “sticky”, a serious problem with bookshelves. We’d always thought that oil-base paint was the only serious solution. Fortuitously, Jim Dillon, a reader and cabinet maker, had just commented on our ‘the magic of an orange table top + high gloss oil paint‘ post, sharing a water-base solution he’d discovered in his furniture-painting forays.
…it was one of those techniques that I heard about in passing and tried out because it met the needs of the moment – - I had a client who wanted me to build new built-in bookcases and paint them white. Somebody told me this was the solution to books sticking to painted bookcases in August humidity, and it worked too well to not try in other places.
Been carving them since 1980 when our house burned down, and only my studio was saved. All four of us all lived in that one room for a while, and the only art I could make was something small, low tech, and cleanuppable: ink, paper, and stamps. After buying some commercial ones, carving erasers was a natural move, and proved effective therapy for the kids, who spent many hours stabbing away at erasers, and swabbing with colored markers, retelling their stories of the fire illustrated with the stamps. The neighborhood kids all got into the act, too. It was a lively time!
When your house burns down, make art!!!! An amazing point of view. read more…
We thought we were so smart when we thought to blog about the hacks we’d imagined for Ikea’s Löbbo shade, which is basically a sheet of polypropylene that you form into a drum and secure with metal struts; it can be placed on a lamp base or hung from a pendant. It comes in various sizes, but we bought several of the biggest with the idea of using the sheets of polypropylene — which is pretty heat-proof —as a RAW MATERIAL with which to fashion all sorts of shades, using our trusty exacto knife. (We’ve been searching for readily-available shade materials for years.)
First thing we planne was to tailor the Löbbo shade we’ve got on a standing lamp: slice off a 2 or 3 inches from the drum-like shade to give it a more sleek, retro look. Then we’d go to town playing with the remaining sheets of Löbbo polypropylene we have, to fashion some sort of scultpural pendant light, like this one we found at Ouno: read more…
(Video link here.) We’re sometimes leary of the trend of making useful things our of ANYTHING because the object made are often so homely. We find ourselves inspired by French Designer Pierre Lota’s video introduing his video series 1 Object in 1 Minute. His assemblages of coat hangers, paper, and spoons have a strong design sense, and his videos show them to be do-able. What the video’s really do is encourage us to see visually-appealing, useful possibilities for ordinary materials and realize we could, with patience and perhaps some experimenting, do them ourselves.
One of our favorites: a spoon bent into a hook you can rest on a table to keep your handbag off the dirty floor of a restaurant, read more…
Reclaimed shipping pallets continue to be a material that inspires design-afficionados and diy-ers alike. Over the years we’ve posted many clever iterations of pallet sofas, beds, planters, wine racks, flat files (just type “shipping pallets” into our Search box)…As well as some serious research and info on the safety of pallets, what to look for, and what to avoid. But in all our navigating of the pallet world, we’ve never seen such a blow-by-blow, here-are-the-realities of actually making a nice piece of furniture out of found pallets, UNTIL we went to the website of one of our commenters, Santiago DIY, a new blog from Santiago, Chile (in Spanish and English).
There we found the real-life steps to making a platform bed out of shipping pallets, which is not nearly as simple as finding them, arranging and putting a mattress on top. Here they are: read more…
One of our secret passions is connectors — not just connectors of ideas – but connectors of physical things as well: materials you can build with. We can’t wait to try out Stick-lets, flexible, stretchy silicone connectors made in a variety of configuerations. (They’re meant for kids, but when did that ever stop us?) You use them to connect sticks and wood or metal dowels to build structures. They got us thinking about the indoor pop-up guest room we’ve been imagining for years. We’d get a bunch of 1-inch dowels and go to town.
Architects SMLXL Studio seems to have a real THING for shipping pallets, which they’ve used all through a tiny two story apartment in Prague. In many cases, it seems they took they pallets apart and reconfigured their components: thick blocks and slats to custom make furniture the exact size they wanted. Pallet has clearly become aesthetic… read more…
Spotted in a the cube room, a concept room created by designer Fabian Gatermann for a design hostel in Cologne, Germany: a fab shipping pallet bed painted like one of Piet Mondrian‘s famous “Compositions” from 20′s and 30′s.
On close inspection, it appears that the bed was made to LOOK like it was made of pallets; it seems a bit too perfectly made, its wood a bit too smooth to be from real pallets.
Nevertheless, pallets provide great inspiration, and clever use of paint can take pallet furniture to a new level… read more…
. Lambchop transforms the ugly fence —we find we don’t even notice the fence— into an illuminating message. 
