We love this detail from a home designed by i29 Interior Architects: a spray of cut-outs in a wall of cabinetry. It breaks up the uniformity of the cabinets in a random, rather artful way. It applies a technique we love — unexpected holes cut out of walls — to cabinets.
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One of the most delightful Instagrams we know of is Abstract Sunday, an ongoing array of illustrator, author, artist Christoph Niemann‘s stunningly imaginative work. Our favorite theme is his re-envisioning of the most ordinary everyday object — a banana, scissors, a twig —into something totally unexpected, charming, and illuminating, like his wondrous Bouquet of Abandoned Ideas,…
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Eggs are an ancient symbol of new life emerging, which is what Spring and Easter are all about. So here is our compendium of our favorite egg strategies, both to eat and to decorate. Photographer Tessa Traeger took the beautiful image at top; her portfolio of gorgeous egg photographs is, in itself, a wondrous Ode to the egg…
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Bombarded by imagery all day at work, Sam Shadid, the renowned mastermind behind ads for Calvin Klein and Banana Republic, prefers an ultra-minimalist home with the feel of a luxe high-design hotel room. It was recently featured in a slideshow in The Times’ T Magazine. Although we find his sensibility crazy-austere, we LOVE a couple of…
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At the height of a recent crisis a few months ago, our friend Chris Eldredge send me this note: I’ve been reading Jack Kornfield’s “A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life” and saw this. I thought it might interest you. ( I changed a bit of the wording where…
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We’ve long relied on our friend Anthony Giglio for advice on wine-and-food pairings. Here are a handful of Anthony’s “Pasqua Picks” to pour with any roast on Easter, chosen with help from his friends at Super Buy Rite Wines & Liquor in his hometown of Jersey City, New Jersey.
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When we saw artist Charles Pétillon‘s magical installation “Balloon Invasion” —architectural spaces and landscapes spilling with white, inflated balloons — we thought “What an instantly surprising, fun, inexpensive way to totally transform a space”, for a party or otherwise. (Video link here.)
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This wondrous image by photographer Lissette Solórzano reminds us that to leap is often a way to FLY. It seems just right for the first day of April when all sorts of new enterprises are afoot in the natural world… …ours too, if we just say yes…
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Inspired by Anthony Giglio’s instagrams using my herb-salt on pork, here’s the basic herb salt method and a recipe for Herb Salt Lamb, whether racks or leg (or cookies for that matter), along with a dazzling presentation…Enough in advance of the coming holidays to get shop and enjoy a stress-free celebration.
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Easter, Passover and the innumerable rites of spring used to make me anxious and defensive. Tales of death, rebirth, joy and sorrow, suffering and salvation, history recited, vows reaffirmed, sacred foods eaten: traditions created to allow tribes to regroup, bond, and go forth again into an uncertain world. Part of me bridled; I wanted to…
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In one of the images on the feature 1st Dibs did about interior designer Suzanne Shaker recently, we spotted this clever long shelf made of two different materials, which makes for an unexpectedly interesting shelf unto itself, whether or not it holds objects or art. It was designed by Rogers Marvel Architects for a row of modern townhouses built in…
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(Video link here.) If you look closely, you’ll see Jimi Hendrix in the backline of Buddy & Stacy doing “Shotgun” on a 1965 Night Train Television Show: a curiously invigorating Monday morning wakeup. In just a few years, Hendrix came a LONG way to his wild, passionate, loud, bluesy, no-holds-barred, pushng-all-limits, seriously-amplified music,
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After a series of hair-raising technical glitches and outages, our server has been majorly upgraded. Just to make sure everything’s working fine, we’re sending this fab gif out as a test. TESTING TESTING! DO YOU READ ME? via Dezeen
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I’ve discovered that —perhaps due to misunderstanding the loaded word “mother” — many people believe that vinegar is some mysterious substance, difficult-to-make, and too holy to mess around with. I’ve been making vinegar in my down-and-dirty, small-space, defying-the-accepted-wisdom-way for years. Not to mention, blending vinegars, as well as flavoring them.
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We have Jason Kottke to thank for chosing the choicests bits of Elle’s hilarious interview with Fran Lebowitz about fashion. But even then, it’s worth reading every bit of her unique LOL commentary.
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Although we are huge fans of using tree parts and the natural world as furnishings, we were stunned to see this wildly impractical coffee table made of what appears to be bundled branches or driftwood of some sort. Is it just us or do they have strangely phallic shapes? (Not that we don’t like phallic shapes but…er..seems a bit…
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Stumbling on this fragment from Rumi’s wondrous poem The Fragile Vial got us thinking about seeds… Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it. Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing, where something might be planted, a seed, possibly, from the Absolute. Images of seeds viewed through an electron microscope…
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Pamela Hovland, who designed Improvised Life’s first site design, periodically sends us notes in improvised envelopes she makes out of pages torn from magazines and catalogs, whenever she comes across a compelling visual. We were charmed to get her Spring greeting in the form of two letters, both with images of people LEAPING on the outside,…
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As ever, Neil Gaiman nails it. But there’s a question in his wonderful words, one that many people we know have been asking themselves: What Do You Have that Nobody Else Has? What is the particular flavor/quality/aspect/talent/vision unique to you? And even more importantly, what are ways it can thrive in the world? Ko Im over at…
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Kirsten Camara’s Analog Memory Desk has a holder embedded in its legs for scrolling huge rulls of butcher paper over the desk’s surface to make “a sort of tablecloth of memory”. It can record months, possibly years of ideas, drawings, doodles, mind maps, phone numbers, calculations etc. She has made detailed blueprints so you can build your own. Or you try these other methods of analog idea-capturing.
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