Check out Public Radio’s The Splendid Table interview with Sally about her favorite gift ideas for cooks and eaters. Most are inexpensive but give a big bang for the buck. To find more about the gifts on Improvised Life, click here for a roundup. You can also hear her favorite holiday tabletop decorations (some of which made great…
Read MoreBeing very sensitive to spaces, we have long been big on tailoring hotel rooms to our own sensibility and personal feng shui. Photos of the newly renovated Hôtel Baume in Paris made us think of the many strategies we’ve developed over years of traveling to shift the feeling of not-quite-right, often OVER-decorated hotel rooms and make them more comfortable. Here are our tricks and tips, with examples:
Read MoreWhen we looked closely at images of the invalid Matisse sitting in bed or in a chair making his beautiful paper cutouts, we realized that he used an adjustable bed table similar to one we’ve had for years. We came across ours while trolling Ebay for mid-century furniture nearly 20 years ago. Billed as a Danish…
Read MoreWhen our friend Tom Fallon’s Shelter Island cottage was featured in Hamptons Cottages & Gardens, we realized just how many lessons about home design and LIFE we learned from him over the years. Here they are, with pictures by Jason Penney.
Read MoreWe have a thing for industrial materials: the mysterious raw materials used by various industries that were traditionally off-limits to the public. Years ago, we learned that if we could find a source, we could buy them like anyone else. Recently, we had an adventure and lesson in the vast possibilities of rubber products (and made some big discoveries we didn’t expect).
Read MoreSince when is it hip, slick and cool to lie in bed and stare at your clothes and shoe racks––no matter how neatly organized––when you’re rustling up romance? I’m talking about a very particular theme of design porn these days: highly-styled, out-in-the-open clothes racks that make me wonder: What would happen in this uber-neuter scheme if…
Read MoreDuring the week we spent looking after a friend in the hospital, we found ourselves applying design thinking to many little ways to make our friend comfortable. Like many prototypes, the phone table we’d devised needed tweaking after it had actually been put to use. We asked ourselves: What problem do we need to solve? and then What can we use to solve this problem?.
Read MoreWe’ve long wondered why we see so many ugly black flat-screen televisions proudly displayed on walls of living rooms. One of the best disguises we’ve seen for flat-screens is a painting or mirror that sits in front of the TV on special hinges that lift it up when you want to watch TV. An especially beautiful iteration of this idea is like a minimalist abstract painting, but is a panel made of antique Flemish linen.
Read MoreAngled headboards are much more comfortable than straight-up-and-down, right-angled headboards. Check out some examples of REALLY comfortable angles, bed frame possibilities AND a way to DIY an angled headboard yourself.
Read MorePlastic milk and soda crates are often used as design challenges for architecture students, who morph them into interesting useable structures. We’ve found uses closer to home.
Read MoreA reader alerted us to Maya Donenfeld’s great book Reinvention: Sewing with Rescued Materials. Donenfeld writes the popular blog Mayamade. We are impressed by her philosophy which underlies every project: to create something new from what already exists. She loves the challenge of making “something out of nothing” (and so do we).
Read MoreOur post about trying to figure out how to clean a thick wool rug ourselves reminded us our favorite reference book about anything to do with keeping a home: Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House. The fact is, there IS science behind all the things you might want to know about…
Read MoreWhen we discovered that a glorious thick, Luis Barragan-esque wool rug had a few less-than-pristine-spots we wondered: How DO you clean a rug at home? We wondered if Dyson’s proprietary Zorb Carpet Maintenance Powder would work with our cheap, noisy, trusty, Mighty Mite. So we tried it.
Read MorePartial sheetrock walls in unexpected graphic shapes and proportions, without moldings or adornments, can add a modern architectural element to a room.
Read MoreWe found this bit of unexpected brilliance on Rough Linen‘s slideshow of reader’s applications of its lovely linen products. A rustic zinc bucket hung above the table serves as an easy to reach wine cooler: practical, charming, fun. It is the very inspired improvisation of Austalian stylist Kara Rosenlund. We also love the bunch of…
Read MoreRecently while browsing photographer Ellen Silverman’s website, we came across this picture of Sally’s old one-bedroom apartment, where Ellen photographed a lot, both to document the space and to do food and still-life photography. The room above was a minimal, mutable space Sally used as both office and photo studio, as its south light was…
Read MoreThese very beautiful cloth-draped sofas Max Zambelli teach an essential lesson: ordinary raw materials, artfully arranged, can easily outdo “done”. Zambelli has tucked and smoothed in just the right places, leaving the rest to fall as it may. It’s a chic play on drop cloth covered sofas. Of course, it has much to do with the shape…
Read MoreRecently at Style-Files, Danielle de Lange was mulling whether to buy the pricey ($1,000), chic or a Ikea’s cheap, rather clunky and traditional alternative, the Ektorp chair ($199), below. She inadvertently pointed out a great lesson in slip-cover assumptions: the usual, standard approach with piping or neat seams is NOT the only way to go. Paola Navone devised a…
Read MoreWe stumbled on some compelling photo placemats done as a public art project for Atlanta Celebrates Photography: photos printed onto large size paper, perfect IF you have a big color printer. The standard size of a placemat is 12″ x 18″, bigger we can print, although we suppose, we could have them done at Kinko’s. The…
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