Years ago, I learned a savory uncooked Lemon and Oregano Jam from Mario Batali. Once I learned the basic formula, I found myself improvising on it endlessly,until I devised a sweet citrus jam the inspired many impromptu desserts including Lemon or Tangelo Parfaits that taste like a Creamsicle.
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When enlisted to design a compact tea shop in a limited footprint, Brazilian architect Alan Chu created a giant puzzle box whose color blocks unfold to reveal its wares. Seeing it unfold gives us lots of ideas for maximizing our own storage spaces, and making them visually appealing. With each panel that is opened, the…
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For our morning read, we opened our dog-eared copy of Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses at random and found this perfect, heartening hunk of philosophical cake, a perfect accompaniment to the great DVDP’s luminous gif:
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How often have you found yourself late for a birthday party and casting around for a way to wrap your gift? We find ourselves in that position so often, we’ve begun to keep a photo archive of hasty, curiously chic gift wrapping solutions, sometimes made with only a few elements, like the startlingly-sensual beauty from artist David Carrino, below…
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We were surprised to learn to that some of the most popular books on Amazon these days are coloring books for adults, with titles like Enchanted Forest: An Inky Quest & Coloring Book and Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Coloring Book. One bills itself as Balance (Angie’s Extreme Stress Menders Volume 1) . All feature…
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I am continually knocked out by the clever design ideas interior designer Susanne Shaker comes up, like this hand-painted De Gournay wallpaper that instills the serene feeling of Nature in a bedroom.
It got me wondering if there was a way to have one of the many wall mural companies around custom-make a wall covering from an open-source digital archive image.
These two quick, compelling videos (and recent research) make the case for “functional fitness “workouts that are pleasurable AND integrated into your life, rather than having to take place in the confines of a gym.
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Creative director/editor/stylist Fritz Karch’s official bio begins:”he became an active collector at age eleven and has always been an ardent believer in the benefits and pleasures of hunting and gathering.” Recently, he collaborated with Rebecca Robertson on Collected: Living with the Things You Love, a tour of fantastic, often eccentric collections around the world, and an entry IN to your own creative collecting.
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When she turned 61, Anne Lamott decided to “take the opportunity to write down every single thing I know, as of today.” It is a seriously good distillation from decades of living.
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This winter, I found myself cooking up slow-cooked stews of various kinds including Boeuf Bourguignon (a classic French stew) and freezing them, so I could have a stock-pile of instantly-heatable dinners for myself when things got busy AND use to throw last-minute dinner parties. When spring finally arrived, I found myself no longer hungry for the…
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Designer Oskar Zieta’s Tefla mirrors reminded us of how GREAT oddly-shaped mirrors can be in adding fluid, sculptural “windows” to a room. Although Zieta’s mirrors are thick with beautiful jagged edge, the essential idea would work fine cutting regular mirror into organic forms, freeform or using a template.
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Out of my diary of dinner parties I came across recently dropped a thank you note with this lush image by Frida Kahlo. It’s called “The Bride Who Gets Frightened of Seeing the Open Life”, (or as some have translated, “Life Opened” (“La novia que se espanta de ver la vida abierta“). The postcard, which…
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Nestled in one of graphic designer Pamela Hovland‘s very cool folded magazine page envelopes I received recently, was the brilliantly mutable, multipurpose business card she designed years ago. To me, a perfect business card is one that never gets out of date, and this is one.
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During a visit to Christoph Niemann’s website recently, we found ourselves smitten with the images of his workspace. They were full of decidedly straight-forward, practical ideas with a sort of deconstructed charm: back-to-back work tables on simple pipe frames, articulating task lights, flat files that serve as additional work surfaces. Niemann wrote us that the…
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(Video link here.) The Japanese YouTube channel Miniature Space has married the satisfying addictiveness of food shows with doll-house fantasy-thinking into strangely mesmerizing videos that we can’t seem to get enough of. Miniature Space prepares real food in teeny cookware. Some videos focus on assembly, like a layer cake and a sushi plate. Others require actual cooking (over a tealight),…
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Want to see a very cool house appear before your very eyes? Watch as the Blu Home‘s team delivers, sets, and unfolds a prefab Breezehouse in one day, making it watertight before the impending rain. (Video link here.)
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The pristine, white sculptural water pitcher featured at A Cup of Jo is so pretty, it briefly made us consider abandoning our tried-and-true DIY ones, below. It holds about 2 1/2 quarts, has a footprint of 10 x 7 x 4 1/2 inches and is available at Amazon for under $30, a bargain. We love our homemade…
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Holton Rower sent us this astonishing image of scaffolding festooned with flowers, an utterly magical arbor to walk under. We wonder who made this ephemeral artwork, and where it was? We found two haiku to go with our imagined walk through it:
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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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