photo: mikołaj molenda, jacek majewski
We are completely smitten with this jazzy floor at Relaks Cafe and Bike Repair Shop in Warsaw, Poland. Conceived of by Super super and Moko Architects as a low-budget flooring solution, it’s a modernist mosaic made out of scraps and offcuts of plywood, chipboard, mdf, maybe some cork and non slip rubber tiles… read more…
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While we were poking around floral designer Emily Thompson’s website, we came across this swell little tabletop decoration: pillar candles
Related posts: fab bird’s nest wreath (+ other found holiday decor ideas)
diy holiday wreaths (out of just about anything)
alt christmas trees made of string lights n’ things to d-i-y
d-i-y tape trees for walls, windows, or…
alt (wall) Christmas trees
holiday tabletop decor from the farmer’s market
welt als tastatur (1996), by thomas feuerstein
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.
via Uncopy
Related posts: glossy white tile wall as erasable white board
rug and tile designs as painted floor (or wall) inspiration
christopher niemann’s fab color-tiled bathrooms
insta fridge fix: dalmation spots
d-i-y reverse painted glass as wall covering and…
photo: sally schneider
This morning, I went into Marcus Garvey Park to check out the damage Hurricane Sandy did to the huge old trees. They mean a lot to this part of Harlem, as most of the neighborhood hangs out under during the temperate months.
Several trees were down, whole root systems turned on end, including one oak whose trunk was more than 3-feet thick (how old must it be?). Many trees had branches sheared right off, hanging at weird angles like broken… limbs.
A few people stood around the the fallen oak talking about how sad it was, tempering their sadness with the memory of greater damage that had been wrought by Sandy: there had been truly terrible losses and suffering.
I wondered what good could come from it all and from these fallen trees. Then I thought of hauling one home. read more…
photo: courtesy of tillett and rauscher inc
We were instantly smitten with this kitchen, for its spareness and simplicity (on the upper East side of Manhattan no less), but especially for the marble slab table with a rough, unfinished edge. Such a simple detail to leave undone, yet the effect is bold and surprising. It could be done with any stone surface.
It is the vision of D.D. and Leslie Tillett, influential post-war textile designers whose townhouse on the Upper East side of Manhattan served both as family space and workspace for the textile design and printing. They are the subject of a retrospective that has just opened at the Museum of the City of New York. “D.D. liked surfaces to have broken edges. She had a ‘Wabi-sabi’ aesthetic,” says her son Seth in a recent New York Magazine interview.
We’re going to run over and see it as the house appears to be full of adventurous design ideas. In addition to rough-edged table tops… read more…
A perfect impromtu side table, made from worn stacked boxes, each worn in a unique way as to contribute to a striped, graphical design. This is the kind of thing that salvage places are perfect for…
via Japanese Trash
Related posts: d-i-y vintage-box furniture (and obsession)
dreaming of a rietveld crate desk
cardboard, crates + chairs as building materials
led-illuminated shipping pallet bed
alt bookcases: stacks on stands
photo: mikko ryhänen
We love the glossy white wall tiles used as white board at Bar & Co. a bistro-style bar in Helsinki, a great idea for a kitchen wall. We’re suddenly viewing our oversized rectangular bathroom tiles in a new way: message boards (with the possibility for leaving little wash-off-able notes in a normally scriptless room). read more…
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…
When we saw this image from Natural Style Outdoor Spaces on Style Files, we immediately thought: shipping pallets would make a perfect base. You’d hardly have to desconstruct them. Just clean them up (stack if desired) and place slip-covered foam cushions on them (here’s a how-to), for chic lounging pallets that would work inside or out.
It’s curious how inspiring shipping pallets have become…We find ourselves building with them in our heads like some sort of mental Tinkertoy…
What are your ideas?
Related posts: the scoop on safe shipping pallets (shipping pallets 101)
ps: some possible dangers of wood shipping pallets
led-illuminated shipping pallet bed
brilliant D-I-Y pallet desks, tables, stairs
D-I-Y: pallet chair (and stool and lamp)
photo: timmerman photography for blank studio
We’re crazy for rusted metal. We love the intentionally-rusted corton steel planters used at the High Line have amassed a strangely beautiful collection of pieces we’ve found in our wanderings, like the three-sided forms we use as book or artwork stands. So we were smitten when we saw images of this very modern house designed by Blank Studio, with its juxtaposition of rusted corrugated metal and plexiglass. It made us run to look up how to intentionally rust corrugated metal (which you can do using photo acid and other methods).
It gave us some ideas for the ancient garden chair we’ve set out on the terrace to see what would happen if we let it rust, intentionally. read more…
handlernyc.com
One of the images Laura Handler sent us of her Montana Log Cabin was her “shrine”, with these notes:
A Mexican Day of the Dead smoking shrine found in Oaxaca Mexico – note the cigarettes on top.
I have not smoked for eleven years – it’s working!
We know quite a few people who have created personal shrines over the years: arrangements of privately meaningful and sacred objects, quotes, images that remind, give power, hold an intention or a wish…
..like this one of a friend; it changes every once-in-a-while: the placement of elements shift, new pieces are added in. Anything can be a shrine: the configuration and meaning in the eyes – and heart – of the maker. read more…
photo: sally schneider
Since we started showing friends around our new space, several remarked on our shower hook solution. While our plan originally was to install hooks to hang towels on the bathroom door as we had in our last space, in reality, we couldn’t bear to hang anything on the beautiful 8-foot high-gloss-painted wood door. So where could we hang our towels to dry? Towel bars weren’t an option a) because we find that they take up a lot of space and don’t still dry towels properly and b) we didn’t want to take up so much space in our wonderfully minimalist bathroom. We’d worked hard to make it’s limited space LOOK spacious, and towels-on-walls would just close it in.
Our solution, at first makeshift, now permanent: we hung pot-rack hooks over our shower bar to hang towels on. read more…
A couple of weeks after we posted the versatile tinkertoy plate holder we’d bought at Crate and Barrel and hacked…er…tailored it to suit our big platters, we discovered that Crate and Barrel had done some hacking as well. They added an edge and painted them rustic white, and are using them throughout the store to display all manner of goods, from CD’s to framed pictures (photo at bottom). We bought another set, thinking we’d found the perfect customizable holder for all kinds of things…
That is, until we stumbled on the Rationell Variera storage rack at Ikea. For $4.95 you get an accordian-style expandable stainless steel base read more…
photo: adam mørk
After we posted about clear white board paint, which would allow you to write/and erase any wood or painted surface, Diary of a Tomato alerted us to the very cool alt-whiteboards spotted at Noma Foodlab, an ambitious restaurant and food “experimentarium” in Copenhagen. In the huge high-design loft space, big slabs of glass are afixed to the walls to display notes and lists.
Just to make sure you really could write on glass and then erase it, we tried marking the bottom of a jelly glass with a Sharpie… read more…
photo: sally schneider
Since moving, we’ve realized the insane number of details that comprise “a life”: where is a good dry cleaner in our new neighborhood, what to use for hooks for towels until we find ones we like?…it is endless. We’d bought a nice-looking toilet roll holder only to discover to discover that it would be “a project” – time we don’t have – to install on our sheetrock wall. So we devised one out of…rocks that we’d brought from the other apartment. (We’d hauled them from the beach years ago because they are so incredibly useful and wonderful to look at: a sculptural bit of nature.) read more…
