On the heels of the yellow tape beam-of-light illusion, a simple yellow triangle painted on a flight of stairs transforms it from utterly ordinary to quietly surprising and wonderful. What is it about a simple yellow triangle?
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The Geometry of Partial, Architectural Sheetrock Walls
Partial sheetrock walls in unexpected graphic shapes and proportions, without moldings or adornments, can add a modern architectural element to a room.
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geometry painted walls
Spotted at French by Design a weeks ago: simple geometry shapes in related hues make for a pleasing optical illusion (our favorite). You get a feeling of light falling on the wall. We recommend Benjamin Moores flat matte Aura paint. It hides the flaws in imperfect walls and gives a deep, slightly chalky feel that…
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color inspiration: pink, acid yellow + a blue geometry
We always have our eyes for ideas we could use at home, office, spaces we need to support us and lift our spirits. The right color can do that. Since we’re not being entirely comfortable picking colors on our own, we look to ways other people have done it for inspiration and guidance. First we…
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copy this: the ‘broken geometry of berber designs
We spotted this charmingly painted wall of a Berber house in Ouno’s great post about the beautiful “broken” geometry of Berber rugs from the Beni Ourain region. We were intitially inspired by the idea of chalking or painting an image/pattern like this on the side of ANY building – a sort of mental d-i-y fantasy…
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Useful Analog Method for Visualizing Designs + Patterns
We’ve long been enamored of quilter Denise Schmidt. Her minimalist work is rich with color, geometry, presence, and tends to be hung on wall as art works rather than put on beds. In her workshops, she teaches an analog method for laying out pattern that can be applied to home design as well.
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Doable Ideas from a Luxe Tuscan Home
New York Times’ T Magazine recently featured a tour the Tuscan home of Roberto Baciocchi’s, architect of Prada and La Perla stores. There are a wonderful slide show and video of the luxurious mashup of antiques, art and materials — including bark painstakingly harvested from 300-year-old pine trees —in a medieval-era tower that adjoins a mid-Renaissance…
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The Wonder of Room-Size Shadow Boxes
Our friend Susan Dworski recently email us a link to artist Anila Quayyum Agha‘s room-size shadow box with this note: Sally – this is pretty fabulous. So simple a concept, so detailed the craft, so profoundly spiritual the effect. And she is right. ‘Intersections’ is large-scale shadow box composed of Moorish patterns suspended in the middle of…
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Design Element? A Big Colored Triangle or Two (Issey Miyake)
We’re smitten with the vivid crimson aluminum triangles suspended in mid-air in the Issey Miyake store designed by Tokujin Yoshioka in Tokyo’s commercial Marunouchi district. WHAT IF we had a huge, light-weight, vividly-colored triangle to move around our space?
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Cut Out Geometries in Walls and Cabinets
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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Copy This: Painting Geometries on Your Wall, or Floor
We are smitten with this radical optical-illusion color block. Even without the table and chairs, there is something thrillingly startling about painting a bright, bold geometry over everything on a wall. (When we search GEOMETRY on Improvised Life, we find it a recurring theme. Perhaps because it seems like a do-able way to shift a room using…
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Alicia Nunez House: “A Balanced Personal Ecosystem”
We recently stumbled on two images at Aqqindex simply titled “Alicia Nunez house”. We were knocked out by the feeling of the space and its many interesting ideas: concave ceiling and angled walls, built-in niches, bricks positioned sideways, a long ledge for sleeping and reading with more niches…the living area steps up, from shiny dark tile to a…
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Plywood Love: Bauhausian Kitchen Storage
This kitchen refurb by Hearth used plywood as cabinet storage in an elemental Bauhausian way. We love geometry of the squares and rectangles, the the grain showing through the washed finish and the holes instead of handles. …and are reminded once again the appeal of sliding panels… via Desire to Inspire
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Le Corbusier’s Wall Built Tight-to-The Window, and Ours
This image of a room in Villa Savoye, the Le Corbusier-designed modernist villa in the outskirts of Paris, defies notions we had previously held about the WRONGNESS of having a wall run right into a window. That is what we encountered when we bought our laboratory space; we saw it as a major design flaw,…
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A Rusty Corrugated Shed with a Modern Interior
In our continueing search for examples of the incorporation of organic and decayed materials with modern functionality, we present Australian architect Raffaello Rosselli‘s lovely repurposing a corroding tin shed in Sydney to create a small office and studio apartment.
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Murals Inspired by Frescoes to DIY or Buy
These images Castello Sonnino’s frescoes that Peggy Markel emailed us from Tuscany got us thinking about mural services we’ve come across in our wanderings, and just what images we would put BIG on a wall.
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Murphy Bed with Storage Design: Our Life-Size Prototype
Sometimes people adept at designing things get jammed and stuck by thorny design problems. When that is the case, making a prototype with moveable parts can help to test out various iterations. You can shift them around and play with them to see how they will actually work and feel. Somehow, I had forgotten this essential technique until a friend reminded me and got my stalled hideaway bed/storage/bookcase unit project MOVING.
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the pleasures of ‘dirty pink’ in home decor
“Paint one wall in your bedroom pink”, Maria Robledo advised during the course of the Laboratory’s renovation. My generous friend with a brilliant eye for color had become my ad hoc paint color advisor. “But have it be a dirty pink, and paint it glossy” she went on, “not a bright loud pink.” Then she helped me pick…
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studiopepe’s fab green moveable room dividers (diy?)
We are always on the lookout for moveable room dividers that we can use to define a space in many ways, as mood or need dictates. We are taken with these moveable walls spotted at Desire to Inspire’s recent Studiopepe round-up. They appear to be made of two-by-fours faced with a thin plywood panel, and affixed to…
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what a pink outdoor wall can do
Spotted at Still + Company’s website: a fab pink wall outdoors. Wonder where it is? We’re told it’s Luis Barrigan’s. We didn’t recognize it, though we’ve written about him, smitten, in the past. Check out Our Lesson in Pink.
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