(Video link here.) When we checked in on Pascal Anson’s YouTube Channel and saw a video called “The Present”, we thought we’d see Anson demonstrating a clever way of BEING present. Well, we did, sort of: Pascal Anson’s inimitable way of…giving real presents/presence.
In the days after our move to Harlem, friends came to help with the massive amount of unpacking, disposing of paper and boxes, and figuring out how to make the unfinished space as livable and pleasant as possible. As is typical with well-layed plans, ours did not go altogether smoothly. read more…
We are smitten with these vintage plywood children’s chairs whose very direct, modern lines and whimsical port holes make us envision an adult version. (Turned on it’s side, a chair could easily morph into a table…). There’s something Donald Judd-esque about them, softened by the curved corners. They wouldn’t be too hard to copy…They look like something we’d find in Furniture in 24 Hours…
On Ikea’s impossible-to-translate blog, Livet Hemma, we found this image of the two-toned fabrics European Ikeas are selling. We’re not crazy about the color scheme but love the idea: why not overlap vividly-colored tablecloths or large swathes of cotton or linen to make a color block table? Unhemmed ends are CHIC.
The great DVDP devised a gif out of origami artist Jun Mitani’s flickr photostream: a lovely reminder of the possibilities inherent in simple sheets of paper…
…which reminded us of Between the Folds, a wondrous video clip we posted about origami’s cosmic potential.
Innovative uses for shipping pallets continue: here a play on shipping pallet gardens, painted bright colors and hung on a wall. In a post we wrote about how-to transform a shipping pallet into a vertical, layered garden, some readers brought up the question of food-safe paints for pallets that will house herbs, greens, nasturtiums and other edible plants. Kate Payne of Hip Girl’s Home (whose book we’re featuring in a giveaway) took the initiative and emailed the Old Fashioned Milk Paint folks, who make a completely non-toxic, zero VOC paint and sealant. Wrote Kate: “…air quality matters here, but so does sustained exposure to moisture and possible leaching, this is a great question!”
(Video link here.) Dig this video made by composer Diego Stocco in conjunction with Burt’s Bees. Stocco creates a great beat, simply by shaking tree branches, flicking orange peels, banging on coconuts, mashing his hands through cooked rice, and sifting his hands through almonds – all amplified. Even the buzz of bees make an appearance. Just a reminder that you can find (and make) music anywhere.
We are completely smitten with the pink-washed walls in this photo from the Milan Furniture Fair. It looks like plywood to us (or we imagine it as that) color-washed with an incredible shade of pink…(though it may also be a surface unevenly painted in close shades of flat pink paint)
It made us start thinking about the possibilities for not simply painting plywood uniformly opaque, but washing it with rich ever-so-slightly-diluted paints in unexpected colors so that the grain shines through and the surface is made interesting by imperfection.
(Video link here.) D-i-y shipping pallet creations are among our most popular posts, largely we imagine because of all recyclable materials, pallets offer a cheap (or free) source of an entirely natural material: wood. We’ve done A LOT of posts about pallets – including how to tell a safe pallet from a possibly toxic one – and we’re always on the lookout for new ideas. We found a trove in this video put together by The Canadian Wood Pallet & Container Association; we lost count at 150 in the short 2:30 second video.
Spotted at Accidental Mysteries, a boy (or is she a girl?) wearing stunningly chic, rigged glasses that seem to be more for look than practicality: there appears to be no glass. Who cares? For sure they give him a new virtual lens to look through and a unique identifying style. (We had a friend that used to wear lensless glasses for that very reason; they would change his ‘head’, shift his identity and offered a buffer from the world.)
Lately, we’ve come across some extraordinary uses for OSB – oriented strand board (also known as waferboard) – a cheap, strong, durable building material made from pressed tree chippings and resin. It’s generally been viewed as garbage, something to use for structure and hide, until open-minded designers started to explore its potential and beauty.
Architect Carl Turner’s use of it to clad the interiors of two barns borders on obsession; it is everywhere as itself: as walls, beds, sofas, benches, even an interior pod that houses a bathroom and utility room. read more…
Today Remodelista featured Garde, a new shop in Los Angeles that sells “stylishly understated” housewares. We are smitten with the poplar-top table’s Garde’s owner Scotti Sitz designed to display her wares, and which are available by custom order.
The bases appear to be an ingenious use of simple copper plumbing pipe. We’ve thought of all the times we’ve found ourselves in the plumbing department of our local hardware store, mulling the possibilities for copper pipe, t-joints and other fittings. Copper, left uncoated, is beautiful shiny or dull.
We recently came across a photo essay of a home decorated with vintage fruit boxes. We’re talking some kind of obsession here. They’re all through the house as furniture and storage solutions, like the bed and shelves above, and this kitchen island on wheels… read more…
We are smitten with this room divider featured a while back on IkeaHackers: it is a rather visionary transformation of a simple material by Marloes van Heteren of SOLUZ and Remco Wilcke of CUBE Architecten. Clear glass Ikea rectangular vases, in two sizes, were painted white inside, to make reverse-painted glass, a compelling material we posted some time ago. They are used as “bricks”, staggered with light shining through, and cemented with strong transparent glue.
The effect is of a curiously light wall that can be made in a variety of shapes to define a space, read more…
(Video link here.) This morning, we found several emails from readers alerting us to this video that is flying around the internet like wildfire. It’s about 9-year-old Caine who devised an elaborate arcade out of cardboard, great quantities of packing tape, plastic toys – whatever he could find – over the course of a summer vacation hanging around his dad’s used auto parts store. You can read the backstory here.
Though for us a bit too long and treacly toward the end, it is really worth checking out the first 6 or so minutes to witness the work of a truly inventive mind, and BIG spirit, who made a great deal out of what was at hand. ”No” does not appear to be in his kid’s vocabulary.
One of the best lines is from Caine’s dad, when his son said he wanted to buy a claw machine: “Why don’t you just build it?”… a perfect question. So Caine did.
We can only imagine what a kid like Caine might grow up to be, and do.
