mexico’s brilliant make-shift

One of things I love about Mexico is the country’s embrace of the make-shift; people are great at rigging what they need with whatever they have access to. Inventive solutions to all kinds of problems and needs are everywhere, as I discovered on a recent vacation in Sayulita, Mexico, a fishing village-cum-surfer-paradise about 35 miles…

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rule for living: apologize every day

My friend Holton Rower, who is an amazing artist, created this sign on his studio door using colored tape. It’s a really great reminder that instantly shifts your perspective: about being more mindful of the potential to hurt someone’s feelings, including your own, maybe especially your own. Just about everybody I know judges themselves harshly, with unspoken words…

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catalogue your storage with snapshots

A picture of some gorgeous ceramic paper plates by designer Virginia Sin sent me to her website, an odd mix of her advertising and art works, and practical inventions. My favorite, filed under “Passionately Curious”   is her system for cataloguing her shoes by pasting a polaroid image of the shoe right on the box.…

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blank-canvas furniture

A while back, the N.Y. Times reported on a stylish mom whose muslin-covered John Derian sofa became a canvas for her daughter and her seventh grade class to decorate with markers. The article didn’t say whether she’d intended the white muslin sofa to be painted on or whether the blank canvas she’d meant only to…

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