Over the years we’ve been given a number of beautiful oversized platters which we love to use for celebrations of all sorts. We’ve discovered they are too oddly-shaped to fit stacked on a shelf in our renovated kitchen cabinets, but would if we could find a way to stand them up. Using wire plate display stands for each platter would prove unwieldy and take up too much room. So we started to look around for another option.
We found it in the form of an inexpensive plate holder from Crate and Barrel: basically two wooden bars held in place by dowels, with dowels placed vertically at about 1″ intervals to hold plates: a tinker-toy of a plate holder.
Our platters need bigger spacing to balance upright properly so we decided to try hacking the plate holder read more…
(Video link here.) Artist Tom Sachs, who we’ve posted about a number of times, recently made a video about plywood. He LOVES IT, uses a lot of it in his work, and has learned a great deal about handling it, which he summed up in this charming, illuminating video. It is totally after-are-own-hearts: in our the ongoing renovation of our Laboratory, we’ve made – and are making – all sorts of things from plywood…like the floors read more…
Recently, Manhattan User’s Guide featured a chic cast iron book bar from Beekman 1802 in a round-up of gifts under $21. It’s designed to hold open the pages of a book, while providing a horizontal guide for reading. It is 7 inches long by 1/4 inch square and weighs 4.4 ounces; with shipping, it costs $23.
We thought it was a great idea, being non-fru-fru, elemental and totally utilitarian, qualities we value in our attempts to keep things minimal. We wondered if we could fashion one ourselves out of a softer metal – say copper, which would oxidize nicely but presented no danger of rusting. read more…
We never cease to be amazed at the uses people have come up for shipping pallets. Their boxy form naturally allows for building block type constructions of all kinds. DE-constructed, they afford an unpredictable variety of rustic, often beat-up woods, in roughly 2 or 3-foot lengths. The chicest application we’ve seen lately are these floors made by Arctic Plank.
Arctic Plank “upcycles” the salvaged wood boards, though doesn’t say exactly what that process entails. It looks to us like they sand, stain and finish the boards to create a unique patina. To deal with the short lengths of wood, they smartly cut the planks to make in zigzag, herringbone or parquet patterns. These look much more finished than aligning boards vertically, which makes for a rag-tag look that has a completely different kind of charm. Arctic Plank‘s floors got us thinking about just what the possibilities for shipping pallet floors might be… read more…
A most beautiful wall: cool modernist, geometric bricks and hunks of painted wood (Japanese, of course)…makes us crazy to find bricks like this…
We didn’t find a thing via google until we stumbled on Mondoblogo‘s post of some wonderful brick constructions posted in Apartamento Magazine. read more…
…by Dominique Falla, as an entry to this years Positive Posters competition:
For too long, people have viewed themselves as separate and I wanted to represent a multitude of individuals using the nails, and then coloured string to show how we are all interconnected, and that together, we can make something beautiful.
It kind of reminds us of an elaborate Cat’s Cradle...
…do-able at home even…with just some nail’s and string…
When Style-Files recently posted about furniture maker and interior designer Katrin Arens, we couldn’t help seeing a shipping pallet in her rustic dish rack. Or vice versa…
…h-m-m-m…take a slat or two away, or pull the whole thing apart to build with the slats you like…it’s a simple configuration…
…there appears to be no end to what a shipping pallet can be.
We are slightly obsessed with the idea of using Lego’s to make functional objects that we can really use; it’s kind of a mindgame we play with ourselves that we hope to put into action one day, since you can now buy as much of any color Lego as you want at Lego stores across the country. We are inspired by two recent finds: London-based designer Sebastian Bergne‘s Lego greenhouse, that has live plants and vegetables growing within.. read more…
Speaking of tinkering, while we were culling photos from Artists’ Handmade Houses for our recent giveaway, we came across a photo of Constantino Nivola’s living room in his house on Long Island (see photo below). In the back corner, partially blocked by a chair, is an intriguing light made of Tinkertoys and shiny rolled paper. OMG, Tinkertoys! Unbelievably brilliant…so we went searching the internet for more pictures of his wonderful idea. We found only this photo, in which you can barely make out a fab ceiling light made of Tinkertoys: 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…
We were interested to see Ikea’s blog Livet Hemma‘s recent take on an idea we posted months ago: clipping boxes together with big binder clips to make somewhat freeform and sculptural shelving. We looked at their iteration of the idea, wondering if they’d seen our post, or if they’d just thought it up themselves. We were reminded of the startling way that an idea can shoot up like spring crocuses in many places at once, as though it were in the air. And that part of the nature of creating things is culling ideas that already exist and tailoring them to suit your own vision. To quote film maker Jim Jarmusch: “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonated with inspiration or fuels your imagination…” (Check out the full quote in the previous post.) The Ikea shelves are a great example.
What ideas would we steal from Ikea’s version of clipped-together shelves (that they may have stolen from us)? What would we change? read more…
Recently, the New York Time’s reported that legendary chef Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago will soon open a restaurant that “if all goes according to plan, could be the most difficult, ephemeral and stressful in culinary history.”
In his new restaurant, Next, the menu will change radically every three months; it will, in essence, become an entirely different restaurant, drawing from a different place and time: the classical French repertoire of Escoffier, Kyoto in springtime, Palermo in 1949. It might even be designed around a single day. (Next’s website is spectacular.)
Having been awarded three Michelin stars for Alinea, and survived tongue cancer (with the threat of losing his sense of taste), Achatz seems to be programming personal and professional challenges for himself. Achatz’s view is that success in such a potentially difficult endeavor depends less on cooking skills than on creating great systems (which he and his team will plot out weeks in advance on an spreadsheet). We were mulling this idea over as we looked at the slideshow of Achatz’s artwork-like dishes when we suddenly focused on the picture of him and his partner standing under bright yellow scaffolding during Next’s renovation.
Our mind began to fly with ideas for things we could construct with scaffolding and it’s endlessly configurable lacquered metal parts.
Artist Ethan Greenbaum‘s work gave us lots of idea for home works made of concrete block. He has figured out ways to make them seem both light and somehow charming, by using plasticine and colored acrylics instead of cement as grout. Plasticine is a kind of clay that won’t harden so maybe it actually IS a good idea for certain homemade pieces where you don’t want the commitment of concrete, or it’s permanence. We love the idea of painting the cement grouting with Greenbaum’s whimsical colors, to transform a dreary block wall.
We also love Greenbaum’s plasticine-covered block structures; although the always-soft plasticine might not be feasible in the long run, it makes us wonder what would be: what could we coat concrete blocks with to give them a surprising and less heavy look, while preserving blocks’ elemental form ? And his idea of combining blocks of different sizes is a revelation, making us see ever more possibilities for “random” assemblages of concrete blocks as table bases, bed platforms, odd storage units… read more…
Lately, we’ve been seeing some wonderful rough plays on the idea of “faucet”. Our favorite is this sublime one made from a gracefully bent copper pipe spotted in a house tour at French by Design…though we are totally charmed by the “shovel faucet” devised by Evan and Oliver Haslegrave, two brothers whose seriously imaginitive d-i-y renovation was featured in New York Magazine last fall… read more…
for our recent giveaway, we came across a photo of 
