before + after

Clawfoot Tub Sofa to DIY or Buy

We’ve watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s many times and never noticed the very makeshift decor of Holly Golightly’s apartment: the crate coffee table…luggage storage bins…and…the wonderful clawfoot tub sofa. THAT set us on the hunt…

How to Get Stains + Mildew Out of Fabric + Tyvek a L’Ancienne

Whenever I can’t get a stubborn stain out of a linen napkin, tablecloth or a blouse, I do what my Greek great-grandmother did: I squeeze lemon juice onto the stain and put it directly in the sun. When I lived in a south-facing apartment with no outdoor space, I’d open the window and rig ways to…

Are You a Feng Shui Survivalist?

Over the years,I have discovered I am part of a secret underground of people who quietly shift spaces they stay in to bring them closer to their personal sense of harmony, or to infuse beauty into the downright ugly, improvising using whatever was at hand. Here are some recent adjustments I made to the lovely country house a friend and I stayed in recently, and the logic behind them. My friend said they made the place better. What do you think?

Laura Handler’s Checkered Duct Tape AC Surround

Designer Laura Handler, whose chic Montana cabin and cool teeny ‘everything’ vial we’ve featured, sent us images her latest brilliance. The Harlem building in which she recently renovated her apartment is having the bricks repointed, which is seriously messy work. To keep dust OUT, Laura first made a barrier of blue painter’s tape around her (very cool)…

Spots and Spills on Fabric, Rugs, Clothes: If You Can’t Beat’em, Join’em

We love artist/designer Dominic Wilcox‘s fix for red wine spilled on the carpet (below): Don’t bother trying to get it out…paint a pattern around it. It gives us ideas for fixing clothes and table linens that have impossible-to-remove stains or spots. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em: transform them by emphasising the transgressions,

When Broken Tools Reveal New Usefulness (Su Tung Po)

The other day I was reading a poem written by Su Tung Po in 1097, over a thousand years ago, and realized that it was talking about me, right now in 2015, using such perfectly wrought words, I saw the most ordinary moment differently. Here is a fragment*

Disguises for Computer Cables + Other Ugly Stuff

As we scroll through design sites, we periodically spot some new gadget for keeping ugly computer wires in check: reels that wind them up, dongles that collect them behind your desk… Perhaps the BEST improvisation we’ve seen is in Christoph Niemann’s workspace. The inspired illustrator/artist/author disguised an ugly black cable by placing a black and white image…

DIY Beautifully Chalky Limewashed Walls

When friends renovated their NYC brownstone, they made wonderfully varied walls — high-gloss painted walls next to beautiful flat, chalky ones achieved by careful plastering — that made the rooms incredibly beautiful.

I copied their high-gloss walls in my Harlem space, but wondered how I could achieve the chalky effect of plaster myself. The answer recently presented itself in a great DIY by Justine Hand for Remodelista.

Vicarious Home Building: Blu Home’s Breezehouse

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.)

Transforming Wall Bed-Bookshelf-Storage Unit

Last May I posted the life-size prototype I made out of FoamCore to help me design a complex combination of berth-style (sideways) wall bed, storage and bookshelves for my space in Harlem. I had been struggling with the design problem for some time: how to make the massive volume of the wall-bed blend into the structure, so you…

Laura Handler’s White Painted Floors: How-To

On the continuing theme of the viability and ‘how-to’ of white-painted floors —sparked by a reader’s question —we asked designer Laura Handler how she painted the parquet floors of her 1950’s coop white. Here’s what she wrote:

A Simple Wood Chair Wrapped and Embellished

To raise funds for Teddy’s Wish charity auction, nineteen of the UK’s leading designers from the field of architecture, design, fashion and graphics have been invited to customise the iconic Ercol Stacking chair, a simple, elegant wooden chair that invites embellishment. We are smitten with Faye Toogood’s iteration, above, wrapped with what looks like white nylon…

Our FIX for the Flawed Cos Backpack

In July, we posted a compelling backpack we’d bought only to discover that its design was profoundly flawed. So we hacked the backpack to see if we could devise a fix, a lesson in trying ideas out, and flexing our own (untrained) design muscles to make things better or at the very least learn a few things.

Playing with a Mashup of Modernist and Classical

We found ourselves curiously relieved when we came across this very modern space whose design was “broken” by classical antiques, a far cry from many of today’s sterile mid-century-esque interiors. But we weren’t crazy about the fussy chandeliers that festoons the place, so we photoshopped one out TO SEE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN.

Huge Linen Shirt Becomes a TeaTowel

Marella Consolini sent us her inspired transformation of a gorgeous linen shirt bought on eBay for pennies, that turned out to be SO big, it languished in a drawer, waiting for something to be done with it. “Finally it dawned on me: the back was big enough to turn into an oversized linen tea towel”. Here’s how she did it.

Why Not Really WIDE Moldings?

Found on the great Aqqindex, which almost fetishizes design from the 70’s and 80’s: a vew of Ettore Sottsass and Aldo Cibic’s design of the Munari Apartment, from 1983. Dig thos wide, spare moulding around the door, the opposite in moderne uber-minimalist, and very exprensive none-at all moldings. Rather then the usual 2-inch wide compromise,…

Industrial Materials for DIY (Incl Vibration Fixes)

We 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).

Annals of Bad Design: COS Lightweight Backpack + Our FIX

When we looked at images of the COS Lightweight Backpack online and read the product description we thought PERFECT. Just what we’re looking for: Made from a lightweight technical fabric, this cotton-lined backpack has an all-over print and fastens using a magnet and wide drawstring. Multi-functional, it can also be worn as a tote bag…

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.

Apartment Reno Encompasses Old and New

Recently we wrote about a slick renovation that sadly covered over a beautiful aged wall that would have made a wonderful addition. Since then, we found an interesting mix of marriage of old and new details by architect Karin Matz in a cost-conscious renovation of a Stockholm space that had been used as furniture storage for 30 years.…

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