These 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…
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www.sha.org/bottle/wine In tandem with Anthony Giglio’s summer sparkling wine recommendations, it seems fitting to reprise the idea we published a couple of years ago: using water or wine bottles as plant watering globes. These are simply inverted bottles that you fill with water and slam into the moist soil of a containered plant; they will slowly trickle…
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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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Maria Robledo forwarded this image of a wildly-wrapped gift a friend received. Her words: Thought ud like this wrapping! Totally up our alley: newspaper, duct tape, string. Perfect! Related posts: diy stamped gift wrap (from erasers + potatoes) gift: endlessly useful furoshiki cloth…you can even wear it reader improv: ny times illustrated wrapping paper an artwork…
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A slab of wood on a repurposed base made fab by the orange lacquer surface: the miracle of high gloss paint. The secret to getting truly shiny high gloss is to use oil base (alkyd) paint. When we did side-by-side tests of high gloss alkyd and water-base latex paint we made a big discovery: the…
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Ever since seeing designer Max Lamb‘s polystyrene bookcases, we’ve been huge fans of his work. He loves making things and lends an artist’s eye to fine craftman’s projects, documenting each step of his process to share on his website. We’ve learned a huge amount from looking at Lamb’s projects, many of which are do-able by…
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Architects SMLXL Studio seems to have a real THING for shipping pallets, which they’ve used all through a tiny two story apartment in Prague. In many cases, it seems they took they pallets apart and reconfigured their components: thick blocks and slats to custom make furniture the exact size they wanted. Pallet has clearly become…
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Ever since we saw Brazilian sculptor Hugo Franca‘s wondrous furniture hewn from fallen trees, we view the occasional fallen tree the many trees blown down by Hurricane Sandy in our nearby park as POSSIBILITY. Franca has turned the big trunks into places for people to lounge, read, hangout, play in Sao Paulo. We want to “beam”…
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We’ve been amassing quite a collection of pictures of stacked boxes and crates being used as shelving. And lately, they’ve included crates and boxes that are painted on the inside, outsides left their natural shelves. This simple embellishment presents the colors as a sort of surprise, that lends a lot of charm to the plain box…
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We’ve been getting an increasing number of emails from readers their shipping pallet improvisations, as they push they realm of pallet invention. A recent favorite: this swell, stylish staircase by Natasha Figueroa and her husband Dan Husted who live in an up-and-coping gallery district in Copenhagen, Denmark. We have a private gallery/studio located in Kødbyen,…
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As we’ve mentioned, ‘the improvised life’s laboratory is something of an homage to plywood. We’ve used it for many things, from window sills to cabinets to floors. We love the stuff, and are constantly hatching plots in our head for furniture, housewares, endless inventions. So we are smitten with carpenter and author Philip Schmidt new book PlyDesign which…
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