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).
Spotted on Claton Cubitt’s tumblr and worth checking out full size: “cargo bike incorporating a shopping cart and chain link fence, with a blood-red wrought-iron cowcatcher (and cup holder), New Orleans.”
The awesomness of the human imagination! This practical AND aestheric considerations here are stunning…
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…
Spotted in Design Milk’s recent story about Rua Confettora, unconventional, international design shop in Brescia, Italy: a white-painted ladder used as the support for glass shelves: instant, rustic/modern chic, made from ordinary materials.
When we hunted around, we discovered that Lab::Istanbul’s had created a line of shelving based on the idea: read more…
We SO love the crazy-imaginative prom dresses industrious students make to antidote and poke fun at over-the-top prom-ism. We’re adding this curiously-girlie-though-made-of-cardboard one to our collection that includes the divine…
Of the many inspired DIY ideas to be found in the rustic Sunset House we posted previously is a beautiful and rather startling floor made of wood “bricks”. We’d never thought of simply cutting the ends off wood planks to make wood bricks. Industrious owners Lilah and Nick made a pattern of the wood bricks, end-cuts-up, above, and then grouted it with cement, which makes some bricks darker, while others take on a muted silvery sheen. read more…
Over our many years of traveling to West Virginia, we’ve admired a number of eccentric, cozy dwellings, including a school bus with a giant stone hearth built onto it, nestled by a river. But this shack we spotted at Cabin Porn incites serious envy.
A couple named Lilah and Nick built the Sunset House using lumber from a barn on their property which was cut and milled from the land by the previous owner many years ago. All the windows are reclaimed from junkyards over their history of thrifting together. read more…
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…
Spotted at the PegandAwl Etsy shop (above) and Martha Stewart Living (below) simultaneously: bath tub trays/desks made out of a wood (reclaimed or new) board. Beautiful (and a relief from those wire grid tray) but we worry about the board sliding off the edge of the tub. MSL advises screwing on wood struts below. We’ve got another approach…
“Wake” by Michael McGillis is a 95-foot long pathway enclosed on both sides by brightly-painted cut logs; it’s on display at the Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota. Although the installation is apparently a commentary on humanity’s disruption of nature, for us (barbarians!) it’s an idea for embellishing the logs we hauled home after Hurricane Sandy, or still have our eye on out in the park…or a way to sparkle up part of a stash of fire wood. read more…
(Video link here.) Susan Dworski alerted us to this stunning video, in an email with the subject line: “ah, the improvisational human spirit”. It’s about a remarkable orchestra from a remote village in Paraguay — a slum built on landfill — where its young musicians play with instruments made from foraged trash. The village’s inhabitants eke out a living by culling saleable items and materials in the huge dump. When a half-destroyed violin was found, Nicolas Gomezhad the idea to rehabilitate it using found materials; the improvisation of other instruments followed.
It is astonishing to hear the wondrous first strains of Bach’s Suite No.1 in G major Prélude played on a cello improvised out of “an oil can, wood that was thrown away in the garbage…its pegs made out of an old tool used to tenderize beef and to make gnocchi…”
…And to hear how these kids lives have been changed by music: “When I listen to the sound of a violin, I feel butterflies in my stomach.” Says Music Director Favio Chavez, “The world sends us garbage. We send back music.” read more…
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, we followed the New York Time’s blog Storm Aftermath: Live Updates and hit upon an amazing post called “Finding Good Neighbors in Wake of Disaster” by Marcus Yam. Because it had no hyperlink, we excerpted much of it below. The gist: neighbors are one of the best resources you can have, both for tangible help, moral support and for unexpected collaborations in problem solving. Amidst the horrifc devastation of Sandy, this has been the ongoing theme.
Then on Sunday night, CBS’ 60 minutes covered the amazing community of Belle Harbor, Queens, where over 100 houses were burnt to the ground by fires during Sandy. (Video link here.) It is a stunning 13 minutes about what the word community really means. read more…
When we wander around the city and see a discarded shipping pallet on the street, we mentally embrace its instant and deeply pleasurable design challenge: What could we make with this?
Lately, we’ve seen them cleverly used as day beds, with minimal work on the pallet itself, unless you feel like finishing or painting them. Stack ‘em and top with a foam slip-covered cushion. read more…
