The harsh reality of white-painted floors like the ones in our ‘laboratory’ is that they are prone to scratching and losing their pristine look FAST. Since our plywood floors were painted a beautiful oyster shell white (THAT story to come in a later post), it has been our personal challenge to GET OVER the fact that they will get nicked, scratched, stained and who knows what else…
The solution: to view them as a canvas to paint as we wish, when we wish, WHAT we wish. We’ve started a mental file of possibilities. The zig-zag pattern on this rug would translate easily to being painted on the floor read more…
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…
We often post ideas on ‘the improvised life’ that we might never make, like the futurist cinder block artist Tom Sachs displayed at recent exhibition Space Program Mars. There is a simple, practical logic to this: these creations remind us of do-able possibilities that, had we the time or wherewithall, we COULD make ourselves.
Sach’s wonderful block is made with ordinary materials: plywood bored with holes, flat corner irons, flat-head screws, possibly a skim of concrete for texture. We find the image infiltrating our prejudices, shifting the notion of what a cinder block can be, offering up the possibilitiy that we can view our daily norms in radically different ways, and maybe, with stuff hidden in our tool chest or at the hardware store, create something new.
Having no hidden rooms in our apartments, we have written a number of posts mulling ways to make an “instant”, impermanent guest room in our space. They are usually along the lines of something a kid would make, since secretly, we love the feeling of forts, teepees, treehouses. We are always on the lookout for materials with which we might quickly rig such a private space in our big open room, to enclose a guest bed, be a meditation room, a hideout.
So we were smitten when we read about Fort Magic, a kit full of PVC pipes and connecters and clips with which you can make Tinkertoy-like structures to attach sheets or fabrics. Designed for kids but it see,s perfectly suits our adult fantasies. read more…
Some time ago we wrote about IdeaPaint, special paint that can turn any surface into a dry erase “white board”. You can write all your brilliant ideas on it with markers, then wipe them off when you don’t need them anymore. Now the IdeaPaint people have come out with a great variation on the theme: CLEAR IdeaPaint, that can be painted on virtually any painted wall or wood surface. Paint it on your exotically colored wall, or a plywood wall or door. It ain’t cheap—about $225 covers 50 feet.
But as we settle into our new space and laboratory, we’re constantly thinking about the possibility in writing our many ideas on walls…and then erasing. We’re reminded of the folks at IDEO, read more…
After we posted Tom Sach’s wonderful ‘love letter to plywood‘, and mentioned our idea to clad our ancient fridge in plywood, a reader sent us the results of her hungry search for MORE Tom Sachs. Somewhere along the line she stumbled on Sach’s video COLOR, about the strict paint color code he uses in his studio. But it goes way beyond that subject. It will really make you begin to notice colors – the particular color of the colors all around us.
The whole world as we experience visually comes to us through the mystic reality of color.
Like all things, tableclothes come with a notion that there is a right way to use them: ironed, placed symmetrically, covering the whole table PROPERLY. We found these pictures of alt-clothed tables secretly liberating: tableclothes all used with defiant and beautiful little shifts on the norm, the vision of stylist Hans Blomquist.
We love the unironed cloth with a crisp runner being placed askew, above, and… read more…
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…
We love this chair by monocomplex design studio because it illustrates an essential lesson about cardboard: when sheets of it are glued together they become an incredibly strong material, a homemade laminate that can be used like wood. Here, the designer glued together 127 pieces of cardboard (recycled boxes, not pristine sheets) until he had a big roughly-arm-chair-size block. Then he sculpted it with a grinder and saw, gradually tailoring a chair to fit his body.
You can watch the process here, a 1.5 minute revelation. read more…
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…
Le Corbusier’s beautiful table “Tronc d’arbre“, designed in 1956, made the hairpin leg table famous, and brought notice to its simple formula: a wood slab or plank top + a set of hairpin legs. That formula has inspired a multitude of iterations over the years; it is a relatively simple and impressive d-i-y project, made even easier by a hairpinlegs.com, a whole website offering different kinds and sizes of hairpin legs: 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…
This makeshift pull’s austere beauty comes from having been made from Gorilla Tape, a super strong opaque black tape made by the Gorilla glue people. Our friend chose it because the pull had to be able to open a door held closed by strong magnets (which he’s using to gradually “train” the 8-foot warped plywood door to straighten out…which it is.)
We love the pull so much, and think it looks SO good, we might just leave it… read more…
As a tribute to the 80th anniversary of Alvar Aalto’s famous stool “60″, Artek commissioned Mike Meirè to make a fresh interpretation of that icon of Finnish design. Here, the artist painstakingly handpaints the simple elements of the stool: 3 bent-ply legs, one round seat (showing just how difficult it is to paint a straight edge). It gave us new ideas for transforming the fabulously versatile stool (which we’ve blogged about at great length), copies of which are available at Ikeas in Europe and on Amazon (prime them before painting as the wood has a sealer on it).
The video is also a curiously relaxing, mesmerizing 2+ minutes mediation on paint and process, with lovely music… read more…
We love the surprising “flower arrangements” created by Sania Pell, author of Homemade Home for Children. Carrots, radishes, herbs and other market treasures give earthy charm to a glass vase of flowers. Great!
, a kit full of PVC pipes and connecters and clips with which you can make Tinkertoy-like structures to attach sheets or fabrics. Designed for kids but it see,s perfectly suits our adult fantasies. 
, that can be painted on virtually any painted wall or wood surface. Paint it on your exotically colored wall, or a plywood wall or door. It ain’t cheap—about $225 covers 50 feet.
, a super strong opaque black tape made by the Gorilla glue people. Our friend chose it because the pull had to be able to open a door held closed by strong magnets (which he’s using to gradually “train” the 8-foot warped plywood door to straighten out…which it is.)
. Carrots, radishes, herbs and other market treasures give earthy charm to a glass vase of flowers. Great!
